Mothers Day with Orphans

I get such a kick out of watching the new volunteers, usually one or two float in per week, as they make their first walk across the orphanage. Every few feet a new child steps forward and says, Como te llamas? Como te llamas? What´s your name? Again and again, day after day where ever you go, really for the first couple of weeks, and so quickly they learn your name, yelling it out from all over the place and immediately making you feel somehow special.

Of course there´s no way to pick up 250 of their names that fast, and now as Heather and I enter into our third month, I get looks of you must be kidding when I ask them, Como te llamas? (The writer just had a moment here in the internet café – a juggernaut cockroach just ran across his bare foot.) I am beginning to know many of them, for sure, names, faces and personalities.
My personal favorites are the Varones Pequenos, a group of rough and tumble 6 to 9 year old boys, that can have you laughing your ass off and pulling your hair out at the same time. On top of your regular job at the orphanage, which for me is half the day in the clinic and the other teaching agriculture with Heather, all the volunteers are responsible for evening and weekend activities. For whatever reason, be it that others are scared to work with them, they like me, I like them, I usually get these little guys. And some of them have wormed their way into my heart already.

David comes to mind first, a nine year old with an angular body and piercing eyes. His story is not totally clear to me, but I do know that his left arm was broken in an accident here at the orphanage and never healed properly because they didn´t take him to the hospital. It´s partially fixed at the elbow and gives him the look that he might always be making a bicycle hand signal. And it windmills in perfect circles when he runs, otherwise this a beautiful normal looking kid. Smart too, learning more English from me than I Spanish from him. In time, you will all see much of him in the pictures I´ve collected. Heather is crazy about him too, and of course, we have asked the powers whether he is adoptable or not, so many kids here are not, and we have not had any news there.

Last Sunday morning I had the Varones for an hour in the art classroom. It might have been a real challenge, as they´d much rather be fishing, pescando, or playing futbol, but I was ready for them, Heather too, with music and a fistful of surgical masks I stole from the clinic. We painted the masks crazy colors, and then armed with my sutures in my leg, I faked multiple enfermades and let them operate on me repeatedly. A good fast time was had by all.

The other thing that kids yell at you all the time here is, Mira me. Mira me. Mira me. Look at me. Look at me. Young and old, they all want attention here. It´s a hard place to feel special and we all want attention, and the kids is where we focus our energies. This week, in a bizarre sense of reality, the powers decided we should celebrate Mothers Day with orphans. Far out man. The volunteers put up a collective stink, and as usual with anything that doesn´t make sense, something that college educated people with good ideas and solutions might want to contribute to, that we´d like to make a change to, we are quickly reminded that there are always more volunteers coming and the whole lot of us can leave right now, and those new 180 dollar donations are eagerly awaited for.

So we had a festival to celebrate mothers with kids, who for reasons that might be abandonment or death by firing squad in front of their impressionable eyes, do not have mothers. Strange days in deed. I tried to watch one my Varones closely. Oscar is an 8 year old, new to the orphanage just four months prior, after being plucked off the streets of Guatemala City where he had lived on his own for two years. Oscar is beginning to settle down. He doesn´t get into half as many fights as when Heather I first arrived, but he´s still a little bit nuts, and the powers dressed him in a tiger suit and had him parading around in the front of the forty or so mothers that did show up. He was so innocent and sweet that day, dancing and doing cartwheels, and probably happy to know that the tortillas would be made out of harina, flour, instead of corn that special day, instead watching the bizarre skits by Guatemalteco teachers displaying odd scenes of domestic violence, and later, men, drunk with bottles of real rum on the table, shouting out happy thoughts to their mothers. Man I wish my Spanish was better, so maybe I could actually get the symbolism they were working at, or I could maybe better articulate to them, What the Fuck were you thinking?

Yo duermo con los chichitos

Yo duermo con los chichitos (I sleep with the little ones), at least once or twice a week, packing my bag on those nights with a bedsheet (to prevent my likeliness of picking up lice or scabies from the foursome), my toothbrush, a water bottle, bug spray, my headlamp and a book with the accompanied candle to see me through the night. Lately, the nights have been long, the energy different, the heat has picked up to a point where the body just can´t stop dripping. The chichitos are like little cook-boxes sweating through their clothes, turning their hair into mops, inviting all sorts of nightmares into their slumber that make them cry out in the night or fall out of their beds. It´s never a restful night, especially when you´re thrown into the crash course on being a mother to four, 4-year olds, something I´ve never wanted for but have grown to both love and dread.

Some nights are better than others, but there are always the precious hours between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., when for some reason the earth gives us the slightess lull in moisture, giving our skin a break, allowing our entire being to relax. You can feel it in the air, its like the whole big world just takes a deep big breathe in and sighs out, and we all perfectly sleep.

The chichitos are my motley crew of sweetness, sass, and will. They are fickle. They are the only kids at Casa that do not have to awaken at 4:30 a.m. to begin their chores and continue forward with school and other work into 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In fact, really, they are the only children here that are consistently treated like kids back home - nutured, given plenty of time to play, learn, love, run. They will love you up one minute and the next tell you that they don´t like you, to go away, to never, ever spend the night with them again. Sometimes, I take it all to personally, but then my rationale kicks in, realizing that this is one of their means of control, of protecting themselves. Everyone eventually leaves them - their parents, volunteers, Guatemaltecan workers. All 4 of them remember their parents, their mama. Some get to see them twice a year, others visit them in their dreams and shake them awake at night, while others hide deep in their being having last been seen shot down in front of their ocean big wholesome eyes. Everything here, just tears you open wide.

Last week one of the chichitos returned from Guatemala City where 5 months prior she had surgery to correct a cleft palate, one of the many reasons that had driven her parents to abandon her. She is 4, back at the orphanage in Rio Dulce, where now all of the the volunteers are different from when she left. She can talk now and people understand what she wants or needs, which is a huge empowerment for her, but the welling of her grief and struggle are immense. It just flies out of her, some nights kicking her legs, flailing her arms, banging her head hard on the floor as if some other being possessed the child body. Sometimes in my broken spanish I can talk her through it, find her way back, other times she just rages and wears herself out.

But then there are those moments where language and rationalization mean nothing. No one needs words, only instinct, only nature, and it becomes completely clear to me why I must be here, at this moment. As I make my way to her bed in the jungle-thick night, my head grogy, my feet being pulled foward by her cries, body reaching over to lug up the heavy wet weight that now clings tight to my neck, whose legs wrap to my spine, whose head-top nuzzles deep under my chin. I ease into the bathroom, so as not to wake the others, where tile floor in the jungle can still bring a bit of coolness to the bottom of the footpads, reminding you where you are, what you are doing. She shakes and pulls me tight with each sob, her being is so close to mine that I can´t tell what is hers and what is mine, a slow deep wail for mama rises up through the pit of her being and I tremble, something inside shifts, creaks, moves up and out of me. Tears stream down my face, falling heavy, falling deep on her wet head, mixing with hers, down her face, into her skin. Both beings sobbing, both needing each other at that exact moment.