Maria Full of Grace Paper


We watched a movie entitled Maria Full of Grace. It is about a young girl who is living in a small town in Colombia. She first works as a rose cutter. Maria live with her sister, her mother and her sister’s baby. Maria starts off with a boyfriend, they are having un-protected sex and Maria ends up getting pregnant. One of her fears is she doesn’t want to end up like her sister, living with just the baby and her family. No father. So she try’s to talk to her boyfriend about staying with her and her baby. He doesn’t like this idea. Then at her job she kept requesting to go to the bathroom because she was sick and her boss granted permission the first few times then started saying no. So she got sick on the flowers and he got mad. Maria didn’t like the way he treated her so she quit. Maria was the only source of income for her small broken family. And then with her being pregnant she needed to find work. She went to a dance with some of her friends one night and met a guy, he treated her much better than her own boyfriend. He was the one who introduced her to this job.
He told her the job paid very well so she agreed to check it out because she needed money so desperately. He takes her to this bar and she sees a women about her age walking out of this mans office. Maria was next so she stepping in and the man started asking her questions about her age, family and the condition her stomach is in. She told him she was eighteen but really she is seventeen but she feared her would turn her down because she may have been too young. She also tells the man that her stomach is in perfect condition which is not true because she was pregnant. Her best friend finds out that Maria got this job so she decided to be a mule as well for whatever reason. When they arrived in New York a women they were with was caught and so was Maria but they had no proof because they couldn’t give her an x-ray because of her pregnancy. It turns out she is working with the women she saw walk out of the office and her name is Lucy. On their trip to New York (where Lucy’s sister lives) a pellet bursts in Lucy’s stomach and she dies. Maria and her friend go and stay with Lucy’s sister. In the end her friend goes back to Mexico but Maria decides last minute to stay and raise her son in the United States.
These types of stories happen in real life more than you may expect. I found a story about a women named “Porota”. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/779728.stm) This is not her real name, the article said they couldn’t release it for fear of her safety. She has three children who live in Columbia with a very strict uncle. Porota was caught because the man she was traveling with was caught lying about never being to the UK. He was asking for places to stay and when they searched him they found an address so they knew he was not here on vacation. Since Porota was with him she was searched too, not only did she have pellets in her stomach but had hidden some in her vagina, this is how she was discovered.
She is now serving eight years in prison and as of Thursday June eighth in year 2000 she was serving her fifth year. So now she is out and back in Colombia with her children. But in this interview she said that if she could turn back the clock she would and make the decision to find money some other way. She hated not being able to speak to her children, she said that she only spoke to them three times in four years and fears they think she abandoned them. They already did not have a father so Porota was playing the roll of mother and father. Her children thought she was working in England. But now they know the truth because she told them as soon as she arrived home. The reason she carried the drugs was because she wanted her children to have a better life than she did, she didn’t want them to suffer as much hardship as she did. They never asked for that life it was just the life she wanted for them.
Porota’s story is a lot like Maria’s. Porota wanted a better life for her kids and Maria wanted to provide that kind of life for the family she had and then the child she was going to have. Maria was not caught unlike Porota but she would have been if she wasn’t pregnant. Also Porota was traveling with other people who were also mules and so was Maria. She was with three other women, one of which got caught and the other died and the remaining one was her best friend. Porota said that she regretted the decision she made about becoming a drug mule and if she could go back in time she wouldn’t have made the same choice. Because of what it put her children through. I think Maria regretted her decision as well because she decided to stay in the United States. I imagine that she planned to have and raise her baby there. She made an appointment at a doctor’s office there to get a sonar thing. So obviously she wasn’t going back to Colombia so therefore she wasn’t going to travel with drugs again.
One thing that Porota and Maria have in common is the people they were working with both promised that they wouldn’t get caught and they were ready to do this. They made the girls feel confident nothing would go wrong and were very comforting. Of corse they were going to be though. If they weren’t the girls would probably just quit right then because if the employee doesn’t feel confident in the job then they would not act confident and most likely get caught. Porota said that the person she was working for made her practice by swallowing grapes and things as big as that. In the movie we saw Maria try and swallow grapes as well. She had great difficulty with it, she kept on gagging and spitting it back out. I didn’t think she was going to be able to do it. But then when it came to actually having to swallow fifty or sixty pills she did it. They guys also helped her like they soaked the pellets in wax (as a coat for it to go down smoother and so their stomach acids wouldn’t tear it up) and they sprayed her throat with something to numb it I think. Overall Maria regretted her decision and stayed in America and Porota definitely regretted it because she spent eight years in prison and couldn’t see her kids.

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