You Are Enough
When Sofía Almazán first encountered Covenant House through Casa Alianza Mexico (our program in Mexico City) nearly 30 years ago, she immediately identified with the Covenant House values of unconditional love and absolute respect. “It seemed so natural to me,” she says, “as if I’d always known and embraced that philosophy.”
A clinical psychologist with expertise in child development, Sofía has been the Casa Alianza Mexico national director since 2003, Covenant House’s longest serving national director in Latin America. She puts unconditional love and absolute respect to work every day, mindful of what they mean to her and to the young people in her care. In the context of Women’s History Month, she considers what these values mean particularly for young girls.
“In all these years of working and studying child abandonment, I’ve come to understand that one of the chief consequences of being unloved is the lack of confidence and conviction that you deserve the best in the world simply because you exist,” she says. “This is even more the case for girls because they find it so hard to appreciate themselves apart from someone else.”
Sofía says she would like to create a strategy to help girls everywhere understand and really see the worth that they have just being who they are and that “what they feel, what they think, what they wish matters because they feel it, think it, and wish it and not because of anyone else, or for anyone else.”
Sofía grew up in a family where she, the eldest of five children, was sometimes overlooked by grandparents who preferred her two younger brothers. “I never doubted my own worth, though,” she says, because her mother, a lifelong role model, has always been self-confident and strong, and she transmitted these same characteristics to Sofía and her siblings.
Her mother was a teacher and homemaker. In their corner of sprawling Mexico City, Sofia says, “There was always a story or something that she did that made a difference in someone’s life. And that’s how I gradually created an image of the professional as one who gives of themself, respects others, and takes one hundred percent responsibility for their part in promoting the common good.”
Sofia learned from her mother, in her family, and in her 18 years as the leader of Casa Alianza Mexico that absolute respect and unconditional love are very concrete. “Respect means absolute care for everything around me, taking responsibility for my actions, and understanding that my actions impact everything around me and beyond. It means to act, fully aware and completely present, and that translates to unconditional love,” she says.
