Bertha Chacón

Houston janitor Bertha Chacón believes in miracles. “Unbelievable things happen all the time,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

After the owner of 10000 Memorial, a prestigious Houston office building, decided to replace the building’s responsible cleaning contractor with a company called Professional Janitorial Services, all the janitors lost their jobs.

Now Bertha, a mother of two young children who was among those fired, needs a miracle.

“My husband works in the air-conditioning business,” she says. “In this economy, sometimes he works, sometimes he doesn’t. We have to pay rent, electricity, all the bills. I have to go to the churches for food because what we’re making now is not enough.”

Along with her job, Bertha and her family lost security and opportunity. “Being a janitor was dignified work for me,” says Bertha. “I always did my work with a lot of love because it was the sustenance for my children, so that they could eat.”

Cleaning is a tough job. But Bertha has had tougher. “I used to work in the fields in California,” Bertha says. “I picked strawberries. The bosses were abusive and they used to knock over the carts we used. I cried a lot. There was no union. What there was was fear. If we didn’t do what they said, they’d fire us. We used to start at five in the morning and by the end of the day our knees would be swollen. Cleaning is hard too but I felt much more secure.”

With the building owner’s decision to replace Bertha, who was paid just $7.75 an hour, with a lower-paid worker, Bertha has lost her sense of security.

“The owner took away my children’s sustenance,” Bertha says. “He’s blind to the needs that people have because he has everything. If he were in my position, he would be doing the exact same thing that I’m doing—speaking from the heart.”

Bertha has been speaking from the heart with building tenants about what has happened to her and her coworkers since the owner’s decision to replace them. Among the building’s illustrious tenants are a former President of the United States and a current United States Representative. For the most part, the building’s tenants—whose offices were always kept sparkling clean by Bertha and her coworkers—have received the janitors warmly.

Encouraged, Bertha hopes another miracle will soon come to pass.

“I hope the owner will see,” she says. “I hope he will see our need,” she says.