It was an abnormally hot day in Monterrey, Mexico and Spanish teacher Alicia Gomez sat in a classroom with 20 other sixth graders to listen to the female doctor who came to speak to their class. Gomez was originally reluctant to listen with an open mind, but when the doctor started talking about medical missions, it sparked Gomez’s interest. The doctor helped Gomez realize her own passion of helping people and inspired Gomez to pursue a career in the medical field.

“Even though I was just in the 6th grade I still remember this moment very clearly, I remember hearing these stories of her helping people and thinking that this is something that I wanted to do,” Gomez said. “It was in this moment that she helped me realize truly how passionate I was about helping people and that this is what I wanted to do with my life.”

Gomez thought she wanted to be a missionary doctor because of her passion of serving others, but after marriage, her plans slightly shifted and Gomez ended up getting a job at Issstelon Clinic working as the family doctor.

“I went to an all-girls Catholic elementary school and we always gave a lot of money to missions and I thought it was really cool so I decided I wanted to do that because I wanted to serve people,” Gomez said.  

Gomez worked in the clinic in the mornings and ran her own independent practice in the afternoons, which was the perfect combination of medical mission and doctor-like practices for her, according to Gomez. In the mornings at the clinic, Gomez served people who worked in the government by offering consultations to families. She spent her afternoons working at her own practice offering free consultations and medicine to people who couldn’t afford it.

“My dad built a little office behind our house for my practice,” Gomez said. “So I would go to my parents and leave my daughter Chandy there and then I would go and help the people that came to my practice by offering them free consultations and treatment.”

After 10 years of working at the clinic and running her own practice, Gomez and her family moved to the United States with hopes of providing their daughter with better opportunities.

“The main reason we moved was because my husband was American so the only reason I came to the United States was to give a better opportunity to my daughter,” Gomez said. “I never planned on being a doctor here in the United States because the medicine here wasn’t as interesting to me as the medicine in Mexico.”

Three years after Gomez’s daughter Chandy started at Saint Regis Catholic School, the school offered Gomez a job as a Spanish teacher, and after careful consideration, Gomez accepted the offer. Little did she know, this would only be the beginning of another path of serving others.

“I remember being really happy when my mom got the job to teach Spanish because I knew she wanted to continue to help others even after we moved,” Chandy said.

Teaching Spanish to elementary school students, Gomez worked at Saint Regis Catholic School for three years before teaching high school Spanish. Gomez started teaching high school level Spanish in 2000 and has loved every minute of it since. Since Gomez had no family in the United States, she was initially anxious about the move but as soon as she accepted the job teaching Spanish, she immediately was overwhelmed with kind and welcoming people and felt at home, according to Gomez.   

“I feel like I found my family here at Sion and I wouldn’t trade my experiences here for anything,” Gomez said.

Gomez has now been teaching here for 17 years and teaches Spanish II, both academic and honors, academic Spanish III, Spanish IV, and medical Spanish and sponsors the medical club and Spanish club. Gomez thoroughly enjoys sharing her passion of Spanish and medicine with her students and is impacting them just like she was impacted by the doctor that visited their school, according to senior Maria Kindred.

“Senora Gomez is one of my favorite people in the entire world, she is always willing to listen and talk to me regardless of the subject,” Kindred said. “I strive to be a person like senora, someone that loves what she does and is passionate about sharing her love of Spanish and medicine with her students.”