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?