A New Way to Honor Compassion in Action

These caregiver awards are inspired by Maxima Martinez English, a San Francisco nurse who grew up in rural Nicaragua, Central America. Maxima was forced by poverty to leave her family as a young teen to work as a maid in Managua, the country's capital city. In her twenties, while there, she married and had a child. War came to Nicaragua in the late 1970s, and Maxima had the opportunity to come to the US in 1979, along with her 5 year old daughter (her now ex-husband decided to stay in Nicaragua).

She arrived in Houston, and subsequently in California's Central Valley, without any knowledge of the English language, and without a high school degree. During the time of her childhood, children from poor families were granted public education through 6th grade only, and were then expected to find work. She was able to find small jobs to support her daughter and herself, and enrolled in a program for learning English, which then led to a GED. Following this, Maxima learned there was a community college nursing program available in town, and emerged with a degree within a couple of years. She had always been drawn toward healing; as a child, she would be sent to sit with people in her village who were approaching death, and she speaks of those opportunities as the foundation for the nurse she became.