YAMILA Irizarry-Gerould and Marlena Fontes have known each other all their lives.
They met at Baystate Medical Center in 1989, when Yamila was hours old and Marlena was all of 4 months. Yamila had just come into the world, and Marlena was being checked out for a fever she'd developed.
Their mothers, Kimberly Gerould of Northampton and Lisa Fontes of Shutesbury, were already acquainted, and Fontes had sought out Gerould at the hospital to say hello.
The two girls and their families have been close ever since, sharing birthday parties, potluck suppers, movie nights and summer vacations.
'I consider Marlena my sister,' said Yamila, 17.
On Sunday, they will be together again, when they are honored by the Sojourner Truth Committee in Florence, at the site of the statue of the former slave and writer who became a well-known advocate for the causes of abolition, pacifism and equality.
'I'm just really honored to get an award in her name,' Marlena said.
In recognition of what the committee calls 'their commitment to social justice,' Yamila and Marlena each will receive a $500 award.
Marlena, 18, a senior at Amherst Regional High School, will enter Cornell University in the fall.
Yamila, who graduates from Northampton High School next month, was accepted by Tufts University in Medford, but is taking a year off first. In September, she begins work for CityYear in New York, where she'll work with low-income, inner-city children.
The chosen two
This is the second year the Sojourner Truth awards have been given. Last year's winner was Amy Kane of Northampton, now a student at Oberlin College in Ohio.
After the nine-year effort to finance and erect the statue, dedicated in 2002, the committee members say, they established the award as a way to ensure that Truth's local legacy endures. Truth moved to this area in 1843, and lived in Florence.
Yamila and Marlena applied for the awards through their schools, though neither knew the other was interested. The application involved writing an essay describing the significance of activism in their lives.
The two have been involved with many progressive causes: Amnesty International, Students Opposing Sweatshops, Oxfam America, the American Friends Service Committee. The list goes on.
In her essay, Yamila wrote of boarding a bus with her mother on a freezing-cold night in January 2003, to go to a march in Washington against the invasion of Iraq.
'Despite that day's frigid weather, peace and unity reigned in the air,' she wrote. 'That was the first day social equality really penetrated my everyday life.'
Marlena's began: 'For me, community service is not just a temporary way to enrich my community and give myself a sense of accomplishment; it is the way I wish to live my life.'
What came through in both essays, says committee member Reynolds Winslow of Amherst, was 'their attitude toward helping other people in their own communities, and in wanting to change the world.'
As he read their essays, Winslow says, he couldn't help but think that Yamila and Marlena 'will be forces to be reckoned with as they become adults.'
Family ties
Yamila and Marlena are full of energy, eager to talk, curious about the world around them, and passionate about the issues they care about.
And in case that sounds too heavy, Yamila interjects one more point: 'We're fun girls!'
Yamila says they balance each other. 'We're both really emotional, but I'm a little more hot-tempered and stubborn than Marlena,' she said.
Marlena describes herself as the shyer one, not a natural leader like her friend. 'Leadership was something I had to learn,' she said.
Both credit their parents with sparking their interests.
Activism 'is in the fabric of my family,' said Marlena. Her maternal grandmother helped found the National Organization for Women. Her father, Carlos Fontes, who teaches communication at Worcester State College, is of Portuguese descent, and Marlena grew up hearing about family members who had struggled against the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Her parents encouraged her to read, she says, as another way of deepening her exposure to the wider world. 'Books open up everything,' she said. 'I know that sounds a little dorky, but that's the way it is.'
Yamila also grew up in a multicultural household. Her father, Roberto Irizarry, a professor of psychology at Tufts, is from Puerto Rico, and Yamila has grown up speaking Spanish and aware of Puerto Rican culture.
Her mother, a third-gradeteacher at Jackson Street School in Northampton, has been a huge influence, she says. 'She's an amazing teacher,' Yamila said, 'and she's been an activist her whole life.'
In bringing up their children, both sets of parents made a conscious effort to forge friendships with several other area families of mixed backgrounds. What started as a network of acquaintances has evolved over the years into close ties. 'We're family,' said Yamila.
Seasoned veterans
Though still teens, Marlena and Yamila are veteran activists. They've marched in anti-war demonstrations; written letters on behalf of political prisoners; circulated petitions at school; and campaigned for John Kerry - which Marlena, deeply disappointed in his waffling position on the Iraq war, says she now regrets.
They've both experienced moments of feeling discouraged by the apathy or hostility of others. 'At school, there are people who are so closed off to everything, ' said Yamila.
Asked for her take on her contemporaries, Marlena said that 'people dis my generation a lot. I don't think it's that we're less passionate, it's that a lot of people are less educated about issues. We're a very distracted generation.'
They're disarmingly candid about their early political efforts in middle school.
Marlena launched her first petition drive when she was in the seventh grade. It was aimed at companies that used sweatshop labor, an issue she says she'd started reading about because her Portuguese grandmother had talked to her about what it was like to work under harsh factory conditions.
'I didn't really know what I was doing,' she recalled. 'I didn't even know how to write a petition, but it seemed like a good idea.' And when other students or teachers turned down her requests to sign, she says, it hurt.
'I learned from that that I needed more guidance,' she said. 'I needed to learn more.'
In 2004, she traveled with a group of teachers and students to Matamoros, Mexico, where she talked to factory workers who produce car parts, clothing and electronics for U.S. consumers.
Though the seven-day trip deepened her understanding and anger about working conditions there, she says she also realizes that low-income Americans benefit from cheap prices.
'It's frustrating. It's so hard to escape that system as a consumer,' she said. Though she tries to be an educated consumer herself, she knows the pitfalls. 'Sometimes, you just want something. It's hard to be perfect.'
In recent years, Marlena's activism has taken an artistic turn. She has been part of Conjunto de Boma, a dance and performance group that puts on shows that teach about Puerto Rican culture. She is also a member of Project 2050, a theater group of high school students that presents hip-hop-based performances about local and international concerns.
At Northampton High, Yamila has served as co-president of Amnesty International and Students Opposing Sweatshops. She has helped organize fundraisers and other special events - experiences that have not been stress-free.
'I was freaking out,' she said, recalling the myriad details involved in helping pull together Jamnesty, a musical fundraiser involving local schools and colleges. The event, held earlier this year, raised more than $1,000 for Amnesty International's programs to stop violence against women.
Yamila has also been part of the occasional tension over the Iraq war and gay rights that has broken out between liberal and conservative students at school.
'Looking back, it's kind of silly,' she said of the dueling wall posters and T-shirt slogans those debates have spawned. But it's all been worth it, she says. 'I've learned that other people have different opinions and I've learned not to let my temper get the best of me.' Constructive debate, she said, 'is better than trying to hammer my ideas in.'
Like Marlena, she has also discovered that problems that look easy to solve at a distance get more complicated close up.
It was easy, for example, for her to support the idea of urging NHS to buy its sport equipment and uniforms from companies that don't use sweatshop labor. But then you find out, she says, that that means higher costs for an already bare-bones school budget, and dealing with companies that don't offer the choices that bigger ones do. 'It's such a complex issue,' she said.
Yamila loves being around children, and does a lot of baby-sitting. For the past year, she has baby-sat one afternoon a week for a group of women in Northampton who have left abusive relationships. She watches the children, giving the women a chance to talk among themselves.
The experience has taught her, she says, that she doesn't need to travel the globe to find people who need help. 'There's suffering right down the road.'
Next step
With graduations coming soon, Yamila and Marlena are looking ahead to life after high school.
First, there will be a big party for the two of them and a third friend, Duran Fernandez-O'Brien of Shutesbury. A close friend, he is the son of Bert Fernandez and Elizabeth O'Brien, and part of their extended family.
Fall will come soon enough. Asked what she planned to study at Cornell, Marlena reeled off a long list of subjects she'd like to delve into: anthropology, languages, literature, economics, labor relations, maybe law ...
Yamila says she can't wait to experience New York, with all its diversity - even if it does mean scraping by financially and sharing a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with two friends.
'I'm so excited,' she said.
Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com.

Who was Sojourner Truth?

Sojourner Truth came to Northampton in 1843 to live at the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in Florence. Born a slave in upstate New York in approximately 1797, she labored for a succession of five masters until the Fourth of July, 1827, when slavery was finally abolished in New York State. Then Isabella - as she had been named at birth - became legally free. Sojourner's house as it appears today


After prevailing in a courageous court action demanding the return of her youngest son Peter, who had been illegally sold away from her to a slave owner in Alabama, Isabella moved to New York City. There she worked as a housekeeper and became deeply involved in religion. Isabella had always been very spiritual, and soon after being emancipated, had a vision which affected her profoundly, leading her - as she later described it - to develop a “perfect trust in God and prayer.

1899 photo of Abbott family house mentioned by Arthur G. Hill in 1912 as previously the home of Sojourner Truth (photo courtesy of Historic Northampton).


After fifteen years in New York, Isabella felt a call to become a travelling preacher. She took her new name - Sojourner Truth - and with little more than the clothes on her back, began walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people in the countryside about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence.Audiences were melted into tears by her touching stories. Picture of rafters from a previous story-and-a-half house inside the current structure. The 1879 "birds-eye view" map of Florence shows the house as a story-and-a-half structure

After several months of traveling, Truth was encouraged by friends to go to the Northampton Association, which had been founded in 1841 as a cooperative community dedicated to abolitionism, pacifism, equality and the betterment of human life. There, she met progressive thinkers like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles, and the local abolitionists Samuel Hill, George Benson and Olive Gilbert. Douglass described her at the time as “a strange compound of wit and w