Better Angels: After seeing homeless woman nurse baby, attorney donates her breastmilk to save lives

Charlotte Emerson Chavez-Baltodano is not quite half a year old and she is even prettier than her name. Raven-haired. Raven-eyed. Her mom and dad call her "Charlie."

A few months after she was born, Charlie went to Paris. Her mom, Alexa, and her dad, Rafael, tagged along.

One evening, while walking through a park near the Arc de Triomphe, Alexa saw a woman seated on a mattress, her back resting against a wall. The woman warmed herself with a worn blanket and a tattered coat. Her hair was matted, her face smudged.

Paris may be the City of Lights, but people living on mattresses, unsheltered on its streets, have become a common sight, assuming you allow your eyes to see them.

It's almost possible not to.

Their particular suffering, so ubiquitous, can seem redundant. Their collective condition, so vast, can seem hopeless. What difference can anyone make? 

Alexa almost succeeded not seeing this woman, but something brought her up short: The woman was nursing a little boy.

"His eyes were red," Alexa says.

"He clearly had been crying, and that was all she could give him — her breastmilk — to comfort him, keep him warm, nourish him. It was something so natural and beautiful."

Alexa and Rafael emptied their pockets into a battered cup the woman had placed in front of her mattress. They returned the next day with a new blanket and some food, but she was gone.

Back in Milwaukee, Alexa was unable to forget the woman.

Though she and the woman hadn't spoken, Alexa imagined that the woman was a Syrian refugee, a woman who had fled her war-torn country, a refugee without refuge, a mother without anything to give her crying son except everything she had.

"I felt guilty," she says.

But why?

"I felt it just wasn't fair," she says. "It just wasn't fair."

"How is it that I can have so much and she has nothing? Why did the world turn in such a way?"

Alexa, who is an attorney, had been storing breastmilk in her freezer, creating a supply for the day she would return to work and Charlie would need it at day care.

But Charlie didn't care for the taste of Alexa's milk after it had been frozen. With high levels of the enzyme lipase, it had a metallic, soapy taste.

Alexa opened her freezer and saw an opportunity.

She searched the internet for some way to donate her milk to refugee relief efforts but found nothing. What she did discover, however, was Mothers' Milk Bank of the Western Great Lakes.

The organization, with depots throughout Wisconsin and Illinois, collects human milk, which, in turn, it distributes to neonatal intensive care units throughout the region.

For preterm and sick babies, human milk — fortified with anti-infective and anti-inflammatory nutrients not found in formula — is an elixir. It saves lives.

Alexa thought of the woman in Paris.

"I am able to provide this nourishment, this warmth, this comfort for more than my own baby," she says.

"I thought: 'Oh, I am going to do this. I've got to do this."

Alexa dropped off 100 ounces of milk around Thanksgiving. She hopes to drop off another 150 ounces before the end of the month.

Will these donations change the world?

Absolutely.