This is the story of a courageous woman who is helping her people overcome their unimaginable poverty by discovering the roots of it. Trained by the Catholic Church to organize women's groups to combat malnutrition, Alvarado, a woman with a second-grade education, began to question the wretched conditions she saw around her. She became one of her country's leading political activists.

In a subtle sense Medea Benjamin denounces short term mission projects....that we come in to countries like hers and try to put a band-aid on a skull fracture. She urges the facts that if we are to really help the poor; we need to make a long-term commitment to get at the root of the problems.