Claudia Zamora of Conway has seen and done more in her 30 years — good and bad — than most people ever will.
She went from being a troubled teenager to being an advocate for abused women and their children at the Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas.
“It was who I was made to be,” she said.
In May, she became the director of Women and Children’s Services for the shelter in Conway. Just two months later, in July, Zamora and her husband, Lucio, also became foster parents and are working to adopt a baby in their care.
It is an emotional combination of roles, but she said both are rewarding.
And it’s a long way from where she could have ended up.
Born in Mexico, her family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, before she was 2, and she was raised primarily there and in Conway.
Zamora’s father had lived in the United States since he was a teenager, but he would go back and forth to Mexico, which is where he met her mother.
“I’m glad my parents made the decision to leave; I don’t know what my life would have been like. Mom comes from a high-poverty area,” she said.
Zamora’s father is a U.S. citizen; her mother is considered a permanent resident, she said. Together, they have 10 children.
Zamora, who is also an American citizen, said she made mistakes along the way while becoming the woman she is today.
Her family moved from Texas to Conway when she was 14 because she was “going through a rough patch. Our environment we were in and my choices I was making weren’t the best. My behavior sort of followed me,” she said.
“I was trying to find my place and who I was. Our dynamic at home was a little rough, and we could have benefited from a little more structure,” she said.
Zamora said she “got kicked out” of school her freshman year in the Conway School District. Although she wasn’t “crazy out of control,” Zamora said, she violated school rules constantly and even got arrested.
“I’d get arrested for stupid things, like having a cigarette at school,” she said.
Zamora spent a year off-campus in the district’s alternative-learning
environment.
“I came back my sophomore year. Things weren’t going as smoothly as I thought they would,” she said. Zamora said that by choice, she spent her sophomore year in the alternative-learning-
environment program with her intention to get a GED.
“I had one of those divine interventions — OK, I’m halfway there. If I want a better life, I have to make better choices,” she said. “I went to youth camp with my uncle’s church, … and I just kind of saw a different atmosphere with the youth. I say divine intervention because it was the moment when I realized God was real, and in fact, there was a purpose for my life.”
She said one Conway teacher in particular, Pattie Randall, served as her mentor.
Randall, now the special-education designee for
Conway Junior High School, was teaching in the alternative-learning environment. She said Zamora is her best success story.
She said Zamora had been kicked out of schools in Texas when she transferred to
Conway schools. She was in junior high when Randall had her as a student.
“She was rough. … She knew the streets very well,” Randall said. “She did all that she could to get things over on teachers. She wanted to hang with the cool kids and do any and everything she could get away with. I even had her arrested for violating school rules.
“When she came back the next year, something happened to Claudia over that summer, and she just decided she wanted to get herself together. That was a huge change with Claudia.”
Zamora asked Randall for help studying for the GED. Randall said Zamora had the math skills, but Randall helped Zamora with English, her second language.
“I was at her GED graduation. Any big event that’s happened to either of us since I had her as a student, we’ve been there for each other,” Randall said.
“I love her; she calls me Mama Pattie. She’s my
Hispanic daughter; that’s what I call her,” said Randall, who is African-American.
Zamora attended the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton for a couple of years and earned a certified nursing assistant degree through the adult-education program one summer.
She worked in a nursing home, and in the meantime, she and Lucio got married.
“We were both 19; I don’t know what we were thinking,” she said, laughing. The couple just celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary in October, and she calls him her best friend.
After her husband got a degree in computer networking and started working, she concentrated on her career.
“I started branching out to see what I wanted to do with my life,” she said.
It turned out that working for a nonprofit organization was what made her feel
rewarded.
Zamora worked at the Community Action Program for Central Arkansas, which she said she loved. The nonprofit administers programs for low-income families, including Head Start. She was a family advocate; then she taught at Head Start.
“Ever since I made it to CAPCA, it felt like I didn’t have a job. I felt it when the bills came in — because I had no money — but I felt like this is where I belong,” she said.
Despite her happiness, she left to work at Choosing to Excel, which encourages teenagers to make healthy choices. Zamora was a family-service worker and went into homes to teach programs to first-time mothers.
“I’ve been all over the place,” Zamora said. “I think I’ve gotten backlash from my family, … but anytime I was given an opportunity that I could take anything from or that would enhance me or teach me, I did it,” she said. “My husband was doing well, so I had an opportunity to say, ‘You know, I love working at CAPCA, but I”m going to see what Choosing to Excel is going to teach me.’”
An advertisement caught her eye for a position at the Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas in Conway. Zamora became a life-skills advocate for the shelter and led a life-skills group, manned the crisis hotline and supervised the shelter overnight two days a week.
“I fell in love with working with women who were surviving or coming out of abusive situations,” Zamora said.
As much as she loved the job, she said, once again, her desire to learn different skills led her to a program-assistant position at the Department of Human Services, Division of Children and Family
Services. She went into homes and taught life skills, and a big part of her job was driving foster children to doctor’s appointments or taking the biological parents or the children to visit each other.
“Some days I would drive three hours to take parents to visit their kids; there was such a big need for foster parents,” she said.
She still filled in from time to time at the women’s shelter in Conway, and she also worked at a Lonoke County women’s shelter on the weekends.
Zamora and her husband had started the process to become foster parents, but they hadn’t finished it. And one more job came calling.
Carrie Curtis, who was director of Women and Children’s Services at the Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas, became the executive director.
Zamora took Curtis’ former job.
“Even though I’d had two or three years of advocacy, I’d never had managerial experience,” Zamora said.
She oversees the daily operations of the shelter, does case management and coordinates with staff and the executive director for community-awareness events and projects, especially in October, which is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
“I still take crisis-hotline calls; we’re just a big team,” she said. “It is sometimes tough. When the women are in a safe place, you kind of know what to say and how to discuss a safe plan.
“If I ever get a call and it’s someone whispering because she’s needing to get out, or it’s one of those dire moments they don’t know what to do — he’s at work, but he’ll be back in 20 minutes — in your gut, you’re like, ‘Did I do the right thing? Did I say the right thing?’
“Some of these women have never been on their own because of the control that’s in the home. But I always tell the girls here, especially when I used to teach life skills, we are so fortunate to be in a country and a state that funds these programs — people to give their time and money for us to have a shelter for you to be safe, … for you and your children.”
As of last week, there were seven women and eight children in the shelter — and one of the women was pregnant, Zamora said.
Zamora said her job is fulfilling because she thinks she’s having an impact.
“If it makes a difference for just one individual, then we were part of all the good things that are to come, because at the end of the day, this is generational,” she said.
She said her hope is that the children of abuse victims will remember something positive they were taught at the shelter.
“Just like me as a teenager, I could have continued the same choice of not doing right, but I chose to remember some of the good stuff that my dad, or my mom or my mentor told me.”
Although Zamora said Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas staff members don’t always see the fruit of their work, she is optimistic.
“I have hopes for a few of the women I have impacted that they will make that decision for their children and them and not go back into that situation. Essentially, my goal is to work myself out of a job, right? That should always be our goal, to raise up enough strong women to inspire them to raise strong, independent children that won’t get into the same situation — not repeat the cycle of abuse.”
Zamora, who speaks Spanish, said her goal is to start a support group for Hispanic women.
“One of my biggest goals here at the women’s shelter is to establish a good, well-rounded support group in Spanish for the Hispanic community and essentially raise more awareness to our Spanish-speaking families. There is a big population of underserved victims of domestic violence — immigrants, and another one is those with disabilities,” she said.
“Carrie’s doing wonderful stuff already for the shelter. I identify with the Hispanic community, and I think with any culture, you kind of identify with your culture. My goal is to build that support and to train some bilingual advocates — not just in Spanish,” Zamora said.
“I am a child of an immigrant, and I’m giving back to my community 100 percent,” she said. “I can happily say that it’s still in my plans to go back to school and finish what I started — that’s one of my goals and dreams.
“But I have experience that no college classroom would ever teach me.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.