And this is why Gaia Bianca Pasamba captured my heart: Her arrival was 12 years in the making, her parents confidently prepared to bring her up comfortably in an upper middle class home with all the hopes and dreams intact.

Named after a Greek creation goddess, Gaia Bianca was pretty much perfect but what no parent prays, plans, waits for, or expects, is a child with a life-threatening disease. At two-and-a-half months, that’s what Gaia was diagnosed with: Biliary atresia. It’s a congenital bile duct defect that leads to liver failure and eventual death. The only mode of treatment for longterm survival is liver transplant. Which, unfortunately, is still unavailable in the Philippines. The nearest hospital that can do it and at costs “recognizable” to Gaia’s family is in Taiwan (around US$80,000, or 4 million in peso equivalent).

Gaia awaits her turn for a “normal childhood,” and while waiting she thrives thanks to her youth, a superior team of healthcare providers, and the love of everyone around her. But nature is unmoved and unfeeling, and as Gaia’s immunosurveilance system is practically put out of commission by her failing liver, she falls afoul with Cancer, that other dreaded disease division that rears its deadly head whenever our biological defenses are down. Besides her impending liver failure, Gaia is now confronted as well with infantile fibrosarcoma, a “rapidly growing but infrequently metastasizing fibrous tissue cancer that usually appears on the extremities in the first year of life.” At first glance, the Medical Dictionary’s qualifying phrase “infrequently metastasizing” (does not often spread) sounds like a piece of good news, if such a thing could be uttered with cancer in the same breath. But you only have to backtrack two sentences ago to be reminded that Gaia, an infant with a failing liver and a severely compromised immune system, is unfit to wage a battle against cancer of any kind. And her family’s economic power to help her wage this war is rapidly decreasing.

This is why I am pro-Gaia: She didn’t get here by accident or bad judgment. Gaia’s arrival was planned, anticipated, expected, wanted. She is everything I want to have myself when I’m good and ready, a child to love and raise and school and achieve something that will change the world for the better. This is why I want to help her parents raise funds to keep her treatment going, even when I am unemployed. This is why I ask you, wherever it is you’re from, to help keep the medicines and the superior healthcare coming for baby Gaia, who needs from between $75-100,000 for a liver transplant she has to undergo in Taiwan or Hong Kong. It is she who will describe us in the year 2008 and our capacity to nurse and nurture in edifying terms to the children of the mid and late 21st century.