Almost 4 decades after coming to America,
Violeta Veliz will say goodbye to Open Door
and her adopted ‘hometown’ of Sleepy Hollow.
Marcy Gray
In her more than 18 years as a lab technician at the Open Door Family Medical Center in Sleepy Hollow, Violeta Veliz has become a familiar source of comfort to the hundreds of people who have come to her small office. She draws their blood, takes their vitals, listens to their stories and always — always — makes them laugh. Vivi, as everyone knows her, does not toil anonymously, an unsung hero of a small town. On the contrary, she is hailed wherever she goes: shopping at C-Town, on the streets of the village, at the summer fairs where she offers her medical services on behalf of Open Door. Family, friends and colleagues in her adopted hometown celebrate Vivi, and now she is leaving.
Her story is the classic immigrant tale. Vivi and her husband, Oscar, left their native Guatemala in 1969 to come to America for the reason most immigrants share: to make a better life for their family. They left behind all that was familiar, their parents, language, way of life and, most wrenching, their five children to be cared for by Oscar’s mother. Vivi, now 63, trained as a lab technician in Guatemala but needed to start all over again in the Bronx, first by learning English. After years of studying and working tirelessly, in 1987 Vivi and Oscar were able to reunite the family in America. Their oldest two children, now 31 and 29 years old, graduated from White Plains High School. The Velizes moved to Sleepy Hollow in the 1990s, and the next three children, including the twins, now 25, graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School.
Vivi’s four sons and two of her four grandchildren live close by, but her only daughter, Brenda, 25, with two little girls, joined the Army and now lives in Alaska. “What was I to say to my daughter?” Vivi asked, a hint of tears lurking behind her warm brown eyes. “I told her not to go, but she wanted to serve her country, so I said ‘good-bye and God bless.’” Vivi laughed suddenly, something one gets used to quickly in her company. “My brother [in Florida] called me, crying about his child moving out of the house.” When questioned as to how far away her brother’s child was going, she said, still laughing, “Just a few minutes away! And I said to my brother, ‘Can you imagine how our parents suffered when we moved to another country?’ ”