Terminally Ill Children Get Day to Dream at Disneyland

When four terminally ill children left their homes in Mexico on Monday, it was as if a magic carpet had carried them away. Away from the hospitals that could not cure and the poverty that would not end.

Neither they nor their parents had ever flown in an airplane. Most had never seen the ocean. This week they did both in a single day. Faces pushing against airplane windows, they marvelled at how tall clouds were when you looked at them from the top.

And when the ride ended, they were, appropriately, in the City of Angels.

The four children are cancer patients brought to Los Angeles from Guadalajara as part of a program called Ninos de Diciembre, a 3-year-old tradition established by the Hollenbeck Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which covers the city’s east side.

For most of one magical week, the children are brought here, each with a parent, and given a peek at a world which, paradoxically, they might never have been able to see if they had been well.

This year, for the first time, they were joined by four Los Angeles-area children who also have terminal cancer.

On Tuesday, the eight children, their parents and a small contingent of police entered Disneyland. Some of the American children had seen the Anaheim park before--which made the prospects more realistic, though no less exciting. But for the Mexican children and their parents, it was indeed a Magic Kingdom.

“Que padre !” said Rocio Romero, 14, who used the teen-age slang term for “neat” or “cool” after every new sight on Tuesday. “It looks like a book. It looks so beautiful!”

As they walked down Main Street U.S.A., Rocio leaned heavily on her mother, Elisa Olivares. Four months ago, the child began complaining of pains in her legs and stomach. A doctor diagnosed cancerous tumors in her breasts, stomach and legs.

Before she could be operated on in the general hospital, the pain was so strong in her legs that she could not lie down, and had to sit up for 18 days and nights, her mother said. Surgery took away the pain. But when she woke up in a 12-person ward, the grief-stricken mother of another patient told the girl she had cancer and that cancer could not be cured.

Rocio kept the words to herself. When she finally talked about her illness with her mother, who had hoped to spare her child the knowledge, the most she could do was to say that everyone dies at sometime. And only God can tell you when that will be.

The hardest part for Rocio, she said, was when her hair began to fall out from the chemotherapy. The third child in a family of eight girls and two boys, she usually wore her long, thick hair in French braids.

Rocio said she still fixes her sisters’ hair in that fashion every day. And the mother of another child on the trip, Juana Torres, who has eight sons and two daughters, wore elaborate French braids done for her by the teen-ager.

Finally, the young girl said, she had to cut off what was left of her own long braid. On Tuesday, she wore a wig--her mother’s present to her daughter for the trip.

As the group entered Disneyland, even the parents seemed to stop thinking about the last things their children might do and let themselves be enchanted by the firsts.

There were fairy-tale scenes of trees with not a branch out of line and houses with pointed roofs. There were two-story omnibuses. There were ghosts.

And there was Michael Jackson, a favorite of Rocio’s, reaching his hands right out to her as she watched a movie through 3-D glasses.

Even her mother was excited, trying to touch a 3-D bird hovering, seemingly, right before her eyes during the film, and later tugging at Pluto’s tail as she posed for a picture snapped by Rocio with a borrowed camera.

Salvador, a frail little boy in a stocking cap who almost never speaks, screamed his way through Space Mountain, obviously delighted at the thrill, while his father, who had obviously never before seen anything like the indoor roller coaster, finally just closed his eyes and held on.

The program began on Monday evening, where they were celebrities at a dinner at Lawry’s California Center. They were given presents and sung to by mariachis.

But for Rocio, one of the biggest surprises was getting there.

“The limousine,” she said, trying out a new word, “had a video and air conditioning and a cantina !”

Ninos de Diciembre started in 1987, when Sgt. Al Gomez, head of Hollenbeck’s community relations department, got a call from a friend of a friend in Guadalajara about a mother who desperately needed help for her cancer-stricken child.

Gomez, who was born in Guadalajara, began soliciting $50 donations from detectives and other police officers to bring four cancer patients, including that child, to Los Angeles.

As the program grew, the six-person community relations bureau began donating beds, hospital equipment and other necessities to public hospitals in Guadalajara. The program is now coordinated by Women Against Cancer, a Guadalajara charitable group that works closely with two local public hospitals there, and Fathers Against Cancer, an organization associated with the East Los Angeles Jaycees, of which Gomez is a member.