Updated on April 27, 2023
Stephano Sanchez is fascinated with the magic of Santa Claus. Whenever he has written or spoken to Santa, he never asks for toys; he asks only for a new heart.
Stephano was born with a congenital heart defect that prevented the left side of his heart from fully developing. Now 14 years old, he has undergone 20 open-heart surgeries and is on a waiting list for a lifesaving heart transplant.
In medical terms, Stephano’s condition is called hypoplastic left heart syndrome with pulmonary hypertension. He has experienced some growth and developmental delays as a result of a lack of oxygen, and even though he is 14, he is about the same size as a 7-year-old.
His mother, Zoila Sanchez, said it’s heartbreaking to hear his request for Santa Claus.
“It’s not like I can go to Walmart and buy him what he wants,” she said.
Struggling to make ends meet as Stephano fought for his life
Zoila was a stay-at-home mom during his infancy and much of his childhood because he needed constant medical care. At one point due to lack of income and medical bills, the family was three years behind in their mortgage payments on their home in Panama City, Florida.
“Life was going down the hill,” Zoila said. “We were living in a room at a Ronald McDonald’s House and sharing the bathroom with another family for almost four and a half years, traveling from Panama City to Miami because all the medical care was in Miami.”
In desperate need of income, Zoila accepted an offer to start cleaning newly constructed houses for a builder in the area known as 30A (named for County Road 30A), a collection of small beach towns along the Florida Panhandle coast.
Helping Hands by Z, a vacation rental cleaning service
During a new construction cleaning job, a neighbor asked if she would be interested in cleaning his vacation rental.
“I said, yes, but I really don’t know anything about vacation rentals,” Zoila recounted. “But he said, ‘That’s fine. I can teach you whatever needs to be done.’”
That vacation rental led to another, and after a few months, Zoila was making a decent income. The work came with a flexible schedule that allowed Zoila to continue to be there for Stephano when he needed care or medical attention. She could even take him to work with her.
In 2015, she founded Helping Hands by Z in Panama City to provide cleaning services to the many vacation rentals in the 30A area.
Zoila has done little to market Helping Hands by Z. Word of mouth and demand for housekeepers in the area have helped to grow the business to 110 vacation rentals and 42 employees during the high season. This year, she started using Breezeway to assign cleaning tasks to her housekeepers, add cleaning checklists, and document cleanings with photographs and timestamps. The service has helped her to professionalize and better manage her business and its many moving parts.
Paying it forward in the vacation rental industry
Managing her business and cleaning vacation rentals give Zoila a sense of satisfaction and control, especially in moments when Stephano’s health condition seems out of control.
It’s particularly distressing when she thinks about statistics showing that an average of 17 people die per day in the U.S. from a lack of available organs for transplant.
Stephano is one of almost 107,000 people in the U.S. who are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant, according to the American Transplant Foundation.
Stephano’s illness was the driving motivation to start Helping Hands by Z, Zoila said. But thanks to her own experiences in the workforce, she has strived to create a business culture that is friendly and accommodating toward working mothers.
“Unfortunately, I can’t solve my son’s health issue; I can’t change what we’re going through,” Zoila said. “But here I can beautify these vacation rentals. I can make a difference in my cleaners’ lives.”
Sometimes that means adjusting a schedule to work around child care. At other times, it means allowing employees to bring their children to work.
Her long-term goal is to offer on-site child care at the company. Housekeepers could drop off their children at the main office, pick up their supplies at the same location and then head out to their cleaning job at a vacation rental.
Many of Zoila’s employees are immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with almost nothing. The company tries to help them find an apartment, teaches them some basic English, and sometimes provides them with furniture discarded by vacation rental owners who were remodeling.
She also focuses on hiring employees who are in need of a second chance. It’s particularly rewarding when she hears from former employees who thank her for giving them a new start. She said she still gets goosebumps when she remembers giving a job to a woman who was rehabilitating from drug addiction. The job at Helping Hands helped the woman rebuild her life and regain custody of her children. She now lives in Alabama and runs her own cleaning business.
“It’s a wonderful thing to change somebody’s life through work in this business,” Zoila said. “It’s very rewarding.”
Finding Santa
Most importantly, the flexibility of her business has allowed her to make all of Stephano’s medical appointments and to quickly change direction when a health crisis strikes.
In addition, she is able to spend more quality time with her son. She even got to accompany him on his quest to find Santa.
The Make-A-Wish Foundation paid for Zoila and Stephano to travel to the Arctic Circle in Finland in February 2020 to look for him.
Little did they know, Santa would actually find them at the cabin where they were staying and invite them to see his home and workshop and to meet his reindeer.
The best moment was seeing Stephano’s face, Zoila said.
“It was priceless,” she said. “He was so, so, so happy, excited, giggling to meet his idol.”
Recently, someone that Zoila was working with told Stephano that Santa doesn’t exist.
“Santa Claus does exist,” Zoila replied. “Santa Claus exists in each one of us. We are Santa Claus.”
To make a difference in the lives of Stephano and others like him waiting for organ donations, consider becoming an organ donor. One donor can save up to eight lives with their organs and save or improve the lives of up to 75 others with their tissue, according to the American Transplant Foundation. Sign up here to become an organ donor in your state.
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