We’d like to show the side of the world you don’t normally see on television.

Inauguration of Barack Obama

My wife Lily grew up living on a dirt floor in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Her father, Alfredo, crossed the border daily to attend classes at the University of Texas, El Paso, and excelled in his education—soon after he was awarded the opportunity to leave Mexico and pursue a PhD. in the United States, eventually completing his engineering degree at the University of Colorado in Denver. During elementary school, Lily dreamed of one day becoming a doctor and being able to return to Mexico to provide medical care for the Tarahumara Indians she met on church missions at a young age. As she dreamed, her family barely scraped by, with her father working on his degree while cleaning dormitories, her mother home with the children. Still, books were something Lily's parents always managed to provide for their children, encouraging them to read and study hard. Lily remembers occasionally entering the enormous and cozy Tattered Cover Book Store, then in the upscale Cherry Creek district of Denver, and her father promising to buy her any book she wanted to read.

My wife eventually went on to complete both high school and college, and was then accepted to medical school. Lily is now a physician at Denver Health Hospital, and the only Latina physician at a medical center serving the state’s poorest and most desperate patients, some of whom also have roots in the slums of Mexico, others who simply fell from comfortable lives into homelessness. Statistics would have predicted a much different fate for my wife: a little girl living in an impoverished and crime-ridden town at the Mexican border. There was hardly a chance at escape.
This inauguration, to me, means the beginning of something extraordinary for those living lives most ordinary. It means our nation, led by Barack Obama, is on the road to inspiring--from within itself--opportunity in those who called it quits long ago. Though as president-elect Barack Obama recently suggested, it's not about him, it's about you. This inauguration is about the American people having dreams that don't stop when the alarm clock goes off in the morning. The inauguration is about the re-building of a nation of people who wake up to pursue a different course--one that starts at the kitchen table and shows up in the world through the lifting up of those less fortunate. It's the beginning of a movement of unity that shows the world, and ourselves, that we do treasure our freedom, our democracy, and our opportunities in America.