Pure brotherly love
Waleska Guevara plants a big kiss on her older brother Pedro, Friday Dec. 31, 2010. The Dominican University soccer star is helping his sister cope with agenisis corpus callosum a disorder in which the fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain is partially or completely absent. This rarity affects Waleska's ability to learn. Even though she is 11, she has the learning capacity of a sIX-year-old
KENT PORTER / PDPublished: Friday, December 31, 2010 at 8:42 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, December 31, 2010 at 8:42 p.m.
When it comes to looking to the future, the typical 18-year old many times will look all the way to next weekend. Life is immediate because it is so complex, complicated, confusing, filled with so much uncertainty. The future for an 18-year old? Let him get through the next weekend. Anything else, well, you might as well ask him how he is planning for retirement.
Pedro Guevara did not have that luxury. At 18 his mother, Claudia, sat down with her son and told him the facts of life, his life to be exact. Guevara had just graduated from Montgomery High. He was headed to Dominican University in San Rafael to continue his education and his love for soccer. Guevara would become, just as he had been for Montgomery, an all-star for Dominican. But soccer had nothing to do with this conversation.
Pedro had no idea what was coming.
“Your parents,” said Claudia, “aren't always going to be around. You are going to have to be the one to take care of your sister.”
Forever, son. Not just through the next weekend.
Pedro's sister Waleska, 9 at the time, was born with agenesis of corpus callosum, a rare disorder in which the fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain are partially or completely absent. The absence of those connective tissues affects the ability to learn at the same rate as other children. Now 11, Waleska has the learning capacity of a six-year old, Guevara estimates.
“I was shocked,” Guevara said when his mother told him of his responsibility. “Forever” is a wildly expansive, nearly unfathomable concept for someone who is still a teenager. Of course Guevara loved his sister; that wasn't the issue. And sure, he already had been thinking about majoring in occupational therapy at Dominican; that wasn't the issue either. But Guevara had a hard time getting his mind around the concept of forever.
And then, a few months later, early in his freshman year at Dominican, came The Slide.
Guevara, who frequently comes home to Santa Rosa every weekend, was at a park with Waleska. Waleska was climbing up a slide and her brother was anticipating the usual result. Waleska would walk away, saying she was too scared to go down the slide. This time Waleska didn't walk away.
As she came down the slide, Waleska shouted to her brother, “Look, I can do this!”
The light bulb went off inside Pedro.
“OK, OK, that's when I got it,” said Guevara, a 2008 Montgomery graduate, now a Dominican junior. “I saw how it really worked. She had been working with the occupational therapists and now I saw the benefits of that. I saw how happy it made my sister. And I saw how happy it made my mother.”
That was then that Guevara made the connection that will bind, a lifetime commitment to Waleska, not just in theory but in spirit, in enthusiasm. In special education as a fifth grader at Proctor Terrace Elementary School, Waleska couldn't ask for a better lifelong companion.
“Pedro has that rare ability at his age to see the entire picture,” said Jon Delano, Dominican's men's soccer coach and former Maria Carrillo star. “It's what sets him apart from 90 percent of the kids his age. Spend a little time with him and you'll come away with this unmistakable impression: This kid is going to be successful at whatever he chooses to do.”
The mature kid takes his sister everywhere he goes with him, as if she was an angel on his shoulder, illuminating whatever darkness may come his way.
“I think about how hard Waleska has worked to get where she is today,” said Guevara, named Dominican's 2009 Male Athlete of the Year. “She now can take a shower by herself. She now can go to the bathroom by herself. So when I get down sometimes because the class work at Dominican is hard, I think to myself, ‘This is nothing compared to what Waleska has gone through'.”
For Guevara, 5-foot-5, 140 pounds, he is living a dream. He is carrying a cumulative 3.63 GPA through his first 2½ years at Dominican. He scored his team's first seven goals of the season. He has 25 goals in 53 career games for Dominican, having led the team in scoring three consecutive seasons. He recently was named Third-Team All-West Region in Division II. So much of that, feeling so completely satisfying now because it's in the moment, will become interesting footnotes in the life Guevara will lead as an adult.
“To be able to help people,” he said, “that is so satisfying.”
That's not just theory for Guevara. Whereas so many careers are just abstract renderings for college kids preoccupied with the wading through academia, Guevara doesn't have to wait to see if he'll use his college degree. In some ways, in a most rudimentary form, Guevara has been an occupational therapist for years. It started back in the day, when a big brother first became aware of his little sister.
“It's just the right thing to do,” said Pedro Guevara, shaking his head, when asked if he ever had entertained other options. Resentment? What's to dislike?
For more North Bay sports go to Bob Padecky's blog at padecky.blog.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.
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