He Lost His Words, Then Found a Way to Give Them to Others
Ernesto Rivadeneira remembers the exact moment his voice started to disappear. A parathyroid disorder had taken hold of him, and with it went the words. English went first. Then Spanish, the language he grew up speaking in Ecuador, slipped away too. He spent months sounding out sentences like a child learning to read, relearning two languages at once while doctors around him treated his condition as a matter of the mind rather than the body.
It was a strange turn for a man who had spent most of his life helping other people find their footing. In Ecuador, he ran a small hospital and trained as a firefighter, always the one people called when something needed saving. After an earthquake leveled his home region of Manabí, he started a foundation and named it Manabí Camella, borrowing a word his community uses as a badge of honor for anyone who works hard enough to carry a heavy load. He spent years helping neighbors rebuild through small business.
He arrived in the United States after surviving gender-based violence, a kind of harm that reaches anyone and carries no single face, and one he learned to carry quietly, the same instinct that would later tell him to hide his illness too. Giving people a way forward was second nature to him. Losing his own way forward, through the illness, was new.
A human resources officer once pulled him aside and told him to keep quiet about the illness. Employers, she said, steer clear of candidates who mention conditions like his. So he did what she suggested. He carried the diagnosis privately, through job interviews, through a boot camp in data analytics at General Assembly, through a surgery that arrived in the same stretch of months as his coursework. That program, run in partnership with St. Nicks Alliance, led him to The City Tutors and to Jesper Chou, a mentor from Microsoft. They met twice in person, but kept talking long after. Jesper reframed the illness for him: instead of a secret to protect, it was a story that could spare other patients the same years of being misdiagnosed and unheard.
Ernesto ran with it. He already had the tools, an honors degree from ESPOL, Ecuador's top-ranked university, in a STEM field that trains a person to turn raw data into a working system. Columbia University granted him access to fellow patients who carried his same diagnosis, and he sat across from them one by one, listening past the symptoms to the years each one lost chasing the wrong doctor. A pattern surfaced fast: nine out of ten had spent years, sometimes a decade, misdiagnosed and mistreated, their physical illness written off as something happening in their heads. He built that pattern into a diagnostic tool, engineered to catch in months what took him years to name in himself. A doctor who reviewed the work wrote him a letter of recommendation, calling it meaningful enough to change outcomes for patients he would never meet. Ernesto published it as his graduation project. Jesper was the first to congratulate him.
This year brought a promotion, moving him from New York City to Freehold, New Jersey, to run a training store built to shape the next generation of managers. There, surrounded by a staff of strangers, he does what Jesper once did for him: watches for the ones going quiet under a weight no one else can see, and tells them it's safe to talk about what they're carrying.
His long-term plan is to reopen the foundation in Ecuador, convinced that steady work does more to end violence than anything else Latin America has tried. When Manabí Camella reopens, he intends to do exactly what Jesper did for him: sit with someone still carrying a struggle alone, reframe it as something that could help others, and give them the courage to act on it.