Little Albeiro, just 8 years old, was teaching an older adult to read and write when French journalist Tony Comitti saw him for the first time in his native Bucaramanga, in northern Colombia.
Comiti had been covering the tumultuous Colombia of the late 80s for one of the main channels in France for years, when, almost by chance, he came across the story of a child who lived in poverty and who, instead of going out to play after After finishing classes, he would go around the houses in his neighborhood and look for elderly people who needed help.
“I was at the hairdresser. “Is that what they say?” Comiti tells BBC Mundo after apologizing for his “rusty Spanish.” “I saw his story in the newspaper El Tiempo, I thought it would be a positive story, something that would help motivate people.”
What Tony didn’t know at that time, more than 30 years ago, was that His meeting with Albeiro was going to promote an entire movement of international support and recognition that is currently reflected in a foundation that helps almost 500 elderly people in a state of vulnerability. from the department of Santander.
But the story of Albeiro Vargas, that boy that the media in Colombia once called “The Angel of the North,” does not begin in Bucaramanga.
It begins, like many others in the country, in the countryside, with the drama of forced displacement.
Escape from violence
Before Albeiro was born, his parents lived in the north of the department of Santander, near the urban center of Puerto Wilches.
They were working in the fields with their four children when threats began to arrive from both left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries.
“Together with my father, my mother decides to flee and run to protect my older brothers in order to take care of their lives, so that they would not go to armed groups. And so they arrive at an invasion zone in the north of Bucaramanga,” Albeiro, who at 45 years old still maintains intact the childish mischief of the boy who shocked international journalists more than 30 years ago, tells BBC Mundo.
“There were mountains of garbage dumps and there my mother and many other families came to invade with cardboard.”
“My mother manages to build her little ranch, she manages to start selling things in the neighborhood, making arepas. She empirically became a nurse because of the experience she had injecting cows and curing chickens and pigs, when the animals got sick in the field.
Albeiro came to that life in 1978, one full of shortcomings but, above all, full of love and values, according to what he tells BBC Mundo.
“It was a difficult childhood, in a difficult area: every day you could hear screams of abuse from parents to their children and husbands to their wives.”remember.
“But we were also able to see in my house a protective mother, a mother who every day gave us a loaf of bread each, and who taught us to have to say ‘thank you.’
“Those important values that are instilled in the family and that are not a question of money: within wealth or poverty, they are a question of attitude.”
old age
Albeiro reached his sixth birthday with news: his grandfather, his father’s father, would come to live with them on the ranch on the slopes in the north of Bucaramanga.
He had also had to leave the field, but in his case for health reasons.
“He worked until he was diagnosed with cancer. At that time there was no possibility of going to a hospital. Social security was very difficult,” recalls Albeiro.
“So, My mother took care of him with the home remedies of the time, his father-in-law, and with what love she did it, with what compassion she bathed him, dressed him, gave him a cup of coffee while I watched“.
Albeiro began by simply bringing coffee to his grandfather, but little by little, the relationship between the two began to germinate.
“I taught him the numbers from one to ten, and the vowels. I became his teacher, because everything they taught me in school when I was 7 years old, I taught my grandfather.. And he demanded of him as a student and scolded him when he didn’t do his homework! “
Albeiro says that given how dangerous the neighborhood was – exposed to prostitution, drugs and, above all, illegal armed groups -, his mother was overprotective, which is why his 87-year-old grandfather became his best friend. .
“He was the one who told everything and who listened to all his stories,” he recalls.
A few months later, cancer left Albeiro without his grandfather, and with a great dilemma that he had to resolve somehow.
playing seriously
With the recent death of his grandfather, Albeiro focused his attention on finding who could be his new playmate.
“As soon as my grandfather died, I went to a neighboring grandmother and told her: ‘Grandma, I want to play with you.’ And she told me: ‘No, what you want is to rob me and make fun of me.’”
The difficult security circumstances in the neighborhood made anyone be alert to the arrival of a stranger, especially if the person receiving the visit is elderly and in a vulnerable situation.
Therefore, Albeiro designed a plan: He would approach one of the elderly women with the request to “want to play, but also learn to pray the rosary,” an irresistible offer for a traditional Santander grandmother.
Furthermore, the trick came with added value: “I became the best prayer person in the entire neighborhood,” Albeiro proudly recalls.
“Every time someone died, they hired me to pray the rosary and that’s how I became known in the neighborhood.”
This opened the doors to the homes of the elderly in his neighborhood, and the dramatic stories that accompanied them.
“I arrived at the house of a hundred-something-year-old grandmother. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. And I came to greet her, to seek her friendship, and I realized that grandma had her mouth full of cigarette butts,” says Albeiro, with the freshness of the memory as if it had happened yesterday.
“I remember that I scolded her and told her: ‘Grandma, don’t be a pig! That’s going to hurt him.’ And the grandmother with a tear on her face tells me: ‘I’m very hungry, I haven’t eaten anything.’”
“Believe me, at that moment I felt helplessness. I felt like I really wanted to run, to do something and yes, I ran to steal some bread from my mother, to steal from her because I knew that my mother had a lot of difficulty feeding 8 children. She took it to her grandmother and she told me: ‘But I don’t have teeth to chew.’”
“I grabbed a little water, and gave him the bread with water. I have the moment recorded. And I think that has been the success of my life: if there is an idea in my mind, I come up with it.”
“The Angel of the North” in action
When Albeiro’s mother found out who had been stealing the bread from the kitchen, she gave her little one a thermos, which he could fill with coffee and hand out to his grandparents in the mornings, before going to study. He repeated the visit to some in the afternoon.
“It was so that by the time I was 8 years old, I already had about 20 friends between 70, 80 and 90 years old,” Albeiro recalls, recognizing that it had become a very big responsibility for him alone.
“Sometimes the grandparents would complain to me: ‘Let’s see, Albeiro boy, he didn’t come yesterday and I was left waiting for him.’ And he became too much for me. That was when I decided to form my first board of directors.”
Albeiro explains that his solution consisted of going to other children at school to help him in his work with the elderly, and that this group was formed as it had been explained to him at school..
“In a subject called Social Sciences they taught you about the executive, the legislative, the board of directors, the work of the president, the secretary,” he explains.
“Precisely here I have the notebooks,” he tells BBC Mundo from his office in Bucaramanga, “where we wrote the minutes of the meeting, the commitments, the menus of what we brought for food to the grandparents, the accounting when people He gave away 100 pesos and so on.”
The story of the “angel of the north” continued to grow until it reached the ears of journalist Euclides Ardila, who published his story in the local newspaper Vanguardia Liberal. With that the story became national and then crossed borders.
angel sighting
From the “hair salon” chair where he first read the story, journalist Tony Comitti says he began planning how he would do the report.
“I thought about spending 3 or 4 days with the child. At that time there was no internet or cell phones, so the only way to contact the child was to go look for him,” he told BBC Mundo.
“I arrived in Bucaramanga with my cameras, with my equipment and I got in the taxi. When I told the taxi driver where I was going he told me that he was crazy and that they were going to rob me, but I told him to keep going.”
When he arrived at the place where Albeiro lived, Comitti says he only had to ask one person: “The angel? Sure, come on, I’ll take it.”
The first time he saw Albeiro, he says, the 8-year-old was teaching an older adult how to read and write.
“It was very shocking to see him and he told me I could follow him, so I did and for the next three days I watched him do absolutely incredible things.”
The report that Comitti had initially planned to be 3 or 4 minutes became a documentary of almost half an hour in which it showed Albeiro doing what had made him famous.: the boy appears urgently going to the bank to pay the rent of a grandmother who is going to be evicted from her house; He is also seen collecting food from local businesses to take to the “old people.”
In a shocking scene, Albeiro enters the house where an old woman is locked up with a padlock and takes her out to bathe her. The woman suffered from an advanced state of dementia and her daughter had to leave her locked in the house to prevent anything from happening to her.
Albeiro, along with the other children who helped him, realized that the temperatures in the improvised house became unbearable during the day, and used the key that his daughter left hidden to bathe her in his absence.
With the images in hand, Tony said goodbye to Albeiro and his mother and headed to Paris to begin editing the documentary.
The excitement in France
Comitti remembers that he showed the images of Albeiro to at least two of his colleagues, and that as soon as they saw them, they started crying.
“And we were expecting a strong reaction from our audience, but what happened was unusual,” recalls the journalist.
The chain received the m More than 200 calls from people who wanted to provide help to the little “angel of the north”, the “boy who had changed toys to help the elderly”.
One of the largest donations came from a woman who, as Comitti recalls, “decided to give what she had, because she was a widow and had no children or anyone else to give it to.”
The program also generated a furor among the audience, who wanted to personally meet this child who experienced so many difficulties and did so much good for his community.
Comitti remembers that moment bitterly, and assures that he rejected the channel’s idea of taking the boy and his mother to France to do the usual media tour of fashionable phenomena:
“I told them no, that was not my job. “I am a journalist and that seemed terrible to me.”
The trip happened the same without Comitti’s participation, and what he feared would happen, happened, as Albeiro remembers: “People called me Alberro, Alberrito, Albergo. And people wanted to touch me and I didn’t understand what was happening.”
“I remember that they changed my hotel, they changed my name because many journalists wanted to present the scoop. They wanted to see the Angel of Colombia and this television channel had me in a bubble. “That was an impressive thing.”
The Albeiro Vargas Foundation and Guardian Angels
Some time after his return to Colombia, Albeiro received an invitation from the French embassy to give him a symbolic check with the funds that the French had donated after watching the documentary.
Symbolic because Albeiro could only access the funds when he reached the age of majority.
“I asked a friend: ‘Hey, in Bogotá they are going to give me a symbolic check.’ And he told me: ‘Bobo, they’re going to steal it, it’s symbolic, it’s lies, it’s false,’” recalls Albeiro.
“There was the director of the television channel who came from France. The wife of the president of Colombia was there and everyone there tells me: ‘Albeiro, smile for the cameras, we are going to give you a check.’ And I told them: ‘No, gentlemen, you give me the cash, you are not going to rob me.’”
When they explained to him that he could access the money when he turned 18, Albeiro responded: “Well then, I don’t care nor am I interested because when I’m 18, the old people will already have died of cold and hunger.”.
The response left everyone silent.
Through an agreement according to which both his mother and the ambassador were the guardians of the money, Albeiro was able to continue carrying out his work, and begin to think about expanding.
One of the first projects – at the age of 14 – was the purchase of an abandoned house near Bucaramanga, which has been expanding and today houses almost 500 elderly men and women from the surrounding areas in poverty.
The Albeiro Vargas and Ángeles Custodios Foundation has also partnered with the 56 nursing homes in Santander to train caregivers of 5,500 unprotected elderly people in the region.
Not only that, even though many children from the Albeiro neighborhood were lost in the dangers of the time, some of those who originally started the project still work with it.
“There is a working group of 90 employees and there are not enough of us,” says Albeiro, emphasizing that it is people’s donations that help keep the foundation running.
Journalist Comitti says he has a photo of little Albeiro at the entrance to his production company in France, since the company exists thanks to the “angel of the north” documentary.
“It’s incredible sometimes how one person can impact so many lives,” says Comitti, analyzing Albeiro’s case.
But for Albeiro it is not incredible.
“If there is anything to say about me, it is that I am stubborn, but it is a fair stubbornness, for defending the rights of the elderly. I think that is what keeps me today, 39 years later, saying yes it is possible, yes you can change the world.”
“Yes, you can do different things, because wanting is definitely power.”
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