Women

by Rachel Berets

MARRAKESH, MOROCCO—While her own newborn baby slept soundly inside, Nora Fitzgerald found a baby girl, wrapped only in a blanket, abandoned on her doorstep. She brought the baby inside and called the authorities, who took the child away a few hours later. But the next day, Fitzgerald wondered if she had made the right decision. “What if I was supposed to take her?” she asked herself.

“I spent the next day looking in all the orphanages and I couldn’t find her,” Fitzgerald said. “I don’t know what happened to her, I just prayed that she was OK.”

This innate sense of personal responsibility would ultimately lead Fitzgerald to found Amal, a nonprofit restaurant that teaches single mothers and other disadvantaged women practical skills so they can find jobs and provide for themselves, their children and their families.