ROSA

                                                    Rosa

Rosa, an undocumented home health aide from Honduras, is being interviewed by a little neighbor girl for a school project.  Rosa picks through her life for the less sordid details she thinks appropriate for the child, an excellent student and daughter of the local Mexican grocer.  The interview is ongoing, over cups of coffee in Rosa’s kitchen.  In the meantime Rosa goes about her rounds with her steady clients, who alternately move her and try her patience.  One of them, Wolfie, an aphasic lawyer whom Rosa loves, has been assigned another aide, causing her great pain and anxiety for him.  She doesn’t question the decision fearing she has done something wrong.  As always her illegal status makes her timid.  During her long walks to work she mulls some of the parts of her life she doesn’t dare tell little Esmeralda.

     Some new elements come into her life: She begins to pick up a certain pride in her origins from little Esmeralda’s sharing of her third grade studies of the Aztecs, whom Rosa has never heard of.  A new client, who speaks only Italian, finds Rosa and she can communicate in a droll mixture of Latin cognates.  This is such a benefit to the lonely Italian lady that she treats Rosa like an honored guest, serves her pastries and lattes and doesn’t allow her to even wash up the cups.

      A strike of health workers is carried out and Rosa marches in the streets and learns something of the union movement.  Her fears for Wolfie grow as the shortage of workers cause many clients to be moved to nursing homes.  Finally she speaks up, finds him in a nursing home, goes to him.  When he was whole he helped people of her sort.  Their love which had been expressed through caresses that thrilled and shamed Rosa, will now be spoken by her, and perhaps by him too through the wonders of a new speaking machine installed on his wheelchair.