Si, Estoy Viva!

October 30, 2009

After several short but thoroughly busy weeks, finally I’ve found a few moments to write. Contrary to what you might have been fearing, I haven’t been kidnapped and ransomed by the anti-“golpistas” (the coup-haters), nor fatally bitten by venomous cobra snakes (which we do have slithering around on the Ranch, by the way). In fact, I have been buried under mountains of teacher-ish kinds of work, the direct descendent of a politically-imposed premature end to the school year. Thank you, Mel Zelaya.

I’ve a patchwork of thoughts and stories, so your reading may feel a little unorganized, but all the better to feel yourself here in Honduras experiencing life on the Ranch with me.

Part One: The Eye of the Callus

A few nights ago in hogar I had one of the stranger and more hilarious experiences I’ve had with my girls (ages 8-10; remember I changed to the chicas). I was sitting on the floormat taking a breather after dancing to “Billy Jean” for the third time already that night when Paola (pictured above right, with her eyelids turned inside out) came over and sat down next to me. She studied my feet in my worn-down flip flops and asked me why I don’t get rid of the calluses on my two big toes. I explained that since I run nearly every day, it wouldn’t make sense to try to get rid of them, because they’d just come back; also, my pumice stone somehow didn’t make the cut on my list of what to bring to Honduras for a year. “But Daniela,” she lectured me, “you have to take care of your feet. If you don’t get rid of your calluses, they’ll grow so big that you’re feet will get disfigured and you won’t be able to walk.” Paola jumped up and ran into the other room. When she came back, she had a shiny, sharp, small metal file. “I know just what you need. I’ll cut off your calluses for you.” ¿¡Cómo!? Excuse me? Cut off my calluses for me? Not only do I find the concept of other people’s feet disgusting and so expect the same reaction from them, but there was NO WAY I was about to let a 10 year old with a sharp metal file anyway near my feet.

Paola, of course, insisted, grabbing my foot and securing it in her small lap. It won’t hurt, she promised me. Somehow I mentally pushed my “I’m in Honduras, just go with it” button and agreed to let her try. Two other girls, Emy and Belkis, came over to watch. Paola expertly wielded the file, scraping off the dead skin layer by layer as Emy and Belkis peered over. “You have to get rid of calluses and blisters,” explained Paola. “I heard about a woman who didn’t cut them off and her feet got all twisted and she couldn’t walk and she died.” Emy’s eyes grew wide as she gaped at my big toe between Paola’s fingers. “Really, she died?” I asked, eyebrows raised. “Yes,” said Paola solemnly. Trying not to laugh, I volunteered the story of my great aunt Marjorie, who for years squeezed her feet into fashionable heels a few sizes too small for her until one day in her old age (as my own 10 year old memory remembers), she had to sacrifice a couple toes to perpetually pestering bunions. Paola accepted my story as more evidence to her argument.

After a few minutes of filing, we reached the white part of the callus. “There it is!” exclaimed Paola excitedly as she dug deeper. “This is the eye of the callus,” she explained to the girls. Belkis looked mortified. “There’s an eye in there?!” she squeaked. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing; the fact that the immediate fate of my big toe was literally in the hands of a 10 year old with a sharpened file was overshadowed by the hilarious reality I found myself in. Paola, with the file in one hand and her other pointing to her eye, tried to explain that it wasn’t a real eye in there (duh Belkis), but the source of the “badness.” She ushered a few other girls over to inspect the situation, and soon I had a small crowd of fascinated chicas gathered around my poor surrendered foot in Paola’s lap to examine the eye of the callus.

When I bent down to say goodnight to Paola in her bunk before leaving hogar that night, she was keen to lecture me to not go running for a week and to soak my feet in warm water at night to make sure that the callus wouldn’t come back. “Sí, claro, Paola.” And she turned over in her bunk, satisfied with her night’s work.

Part Two: Family Matters

Volunteering at an orphanage obviously raises many questions and discussions about family and what life was like for the kids before coming to live at the Ranch. Some kids here still have both parents living, whether it be separated or married, who are financially unable to take care of their children. In some cases, state programs identify these children and contact the Ranch; in other cases, there may be a parent who works on our farm while his son attends school and gets three meals a day. The majority of the children, though, have lost their mother (many to HIV/AIDS), and their father fled the scene at the beginning (among the poorer population in Honduras, men often start families, but then leave it up to the women to figure out how to sustain a family.)

While the parents in most cases are out of the picture, family still exists: aunts and uncles, cousins, older siblings working in the city, and even grandparents are welcome to come to the Ranch three times a year for the much-anticipated Visitor’s Day. The evening before Visitor’s Day, the children lay out their special outfit for the next day, wash their hair (and get de-liced in the case of my girls), and go to bed early in Christmas-like expectancy, dreaming of what goodies their family members will bring for them. On the other side of the Ranch, all of the volunteers go to bed early, too, knowing they will need every ounce of energy for the full day of work ahead.

On Sunday—my first Visitor’s Day experience—volunteers dispersed at 7 am to all of the dorms to collect the children whose families would not be coming to visit; the rest of the children went down to the school to wait for aunts and siblings to arrive. Volunteers plan and lead an entire day of games, food, and prizes to overly satisfy any family-lacking child, and indeed the kids who would be spending the day with us had plenty of excited energy bright and early on Sunday morning.

The scavenger hunt, games and face-painting, movie, hot-dog feed, lunch, piñatas, cake and candy bags all went well enough, one of the only causalities being myself (I got whacked in the head by a kid swinging the piñata stick trying to get the older kids away from the toddler’s piñata). What was especially interesting to me was the half an hour I spent at the school among all the picnicking families. Halfway through the day, we were radioed that the family of two of the kids we had in our group had arrived. I volunteered to walk Juan and his sister Maria down to the school to meet their family. 11 year old Juan was so excited that he made me sprint with him until we were both out of breath and until we realized Maria, 15, was way behind us. We waited for her to catch up.

“Maria, hurry up! Our family is here! Maybe our brother came, too!” Juan tried to pull Maria down the path to the school, but she sullenly continued dragging her feet. “Aren’t you excited to see our family, Maria?” Juan looked at her expectantly. It had been two years since their family had last been able to come to a Visitor’s Day. Maria just shrugged her shoulders. “They’re probably not really here,” she said. Juan was crushed, and we continued walking in silence until we reached the school. Multitudes of families were sprawled out on blankets on the grass sharing fried chicken, special rice, Pepsi, and cake. I spied several girls from my hogar all dressed up in pink frilly dresses and sitting in the laps of their much older sisters and aunts. They looked so happy, and I couldn’t help but think how unfair it was that these kids had family who either cared enough to come for the day or who could afford to come to the Ranch to see them, when there were lots of children up with the volunteers who had no one.

It took us a while to find Juan and Maria’s family. When we did, Juan rushed up to hug his two aunts, but Maria hung back next to me. “Is that your family?” I asked her. “Yeah.” She stood and watched them, a hard look on her face. Her aunts motioned over to us and finally she trudged over to them, unsure and restrained, then hugged one of her aunts. I could see Maria’s coldness melt in her aunt’s arms, and they both started crying. I watched them for a minute, goose bumps filling my arms and spine, and thought about how odd and probably difficult it must be to have no contact with your family for two years and then to see them—suddenly—for six hours. I also couldn’t help but play over in my mind Maria’s reticence; perhaps for some of the children, seeing their families could bring back pre-Ranch emotions and fears that were carefully folded up and put away in the closets of their minds.

That evening I went to hogar to get my girls in bed and say goodnight before the week. They were all chattering about the food they shared with their families and excitedly displaying their special treasures: new socks and underwear (big hits), cheap plastic sandals, neon hair bands, chips and candy, and for a couple girls, a few Lempiras. Paola was the winner, with a Honduras soccer jersey and two new pairs of earrings. As soon as they got into their bunks, the girls quickly fell asleep clutching their new goodies to their chests, exhausted from the day. I walked home nursing the giant goose-egg on my head, but thankful for a loving, stable family that is just a phone call or an email away.

Part Three: The Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Heard

I’m sorry to end my novella with a downer, but there are some tragic stories that I have to share—if only because they attest to God’s amazing grace and love that creates such resiliency in children and gives some of them another chance in life after unbelievable circumstances.

This week Stephanie, another volunteer, and I had “proyeceto” with a Maria, Juan, and Oscar, their cousin. In “proyecto” (project), a family comes to the volunteer house to cook dinner and play games with one or two volunteers. It’s a chance for siblings to connect and spend time outside of their hogars and get special treatment for a night. I already knew Maria and Juan, but it was my first experience with Oscar, and I question how I ever was able to babysit more than two children at a time by myself after the night with these kids. Maria was fine, engrossed in a cheesy teen magazine for most of the time; and Juan wasn’t too bad to keep track of; Oscar, though, rivaled any monster child you’ve ever babysat.

Oscar is adorable: hardly over three feet tall with big, dark eyes, he is extremely skinny and his un-proportionally large head looks as if it’s about to tip his whole body over. You would be shocked to learn that he is actually 10 or 11 years old; he doesn’t really speak except little indistinguishable shouts and is close to being deaf. He has the energy of about three six-year olds put together; just as soon as he picked out the Legos to play with, he saw a basketball and decided to play with that; but then, oh, how shiny Daniela’s laptop is, and—oh, wait—the microwave is low enough to reach! After about an hour chasing Oscar all over the volunteer house and trying to explain through gestures that putting metal cups in the microwave is a VERY bad idea, I asked Stephanie if she had heard anything about Oscar’s background.

She had heard, as it turns out. Oscar was found in a garbage landfill at a little over one year old, severely malnourished, with rats chewing his hands. The scars on his forehead and the general misshapenness of his head were caused by vultures picking at him until someone found him and somehow contacted the Ranch. They suppose that his near deafness and inability to talk has something to do with being so malnourished, though they are still trying to find treatments for him. It was hard to imagine that this energetic little child sitting at my table with pizza sauce all over his face, obsessed with microwaves and shiny objects, had survived something so awful, so unimaginably horrible. Almost harder to imagine was the person who could ever abandon a child like that.

What is sad, too, is that this is not the only completely terrible story I have heard since being here about some of the backgrounds these children come from. Learning the history of a Ranch child never fails to blow me away, to see the child behaving more or less normally and functioning as well as he or she does. And then to see some of the students I have in Talleres learning a trade and preparing for high school—what some of them must have come from, I wonder; and now they are learning English, math and science, and soon will be graduating. That is not to say that there are not still massive, unresolved problems with these children—because believe me, there are many—but the hope that there is for Oscar one day is reflected in 7^th grader Luis Miguel’s pride after he scored a 49 out of 50 on his English exam and in the tight, sure stitches of the leather boots that Suyapa makes in the shoe shop.

So, I let Oscar put his pizza in the microwave for the fifth time (and his cake; he insisted), and after they all left I finished up the last dishes. I put away the legos and retrieved the basketball from the hammock, all the while thinking of Oscar and the miracle that he is. And maybe it is not the saddest thing I have ever heard—because Oscar is here, and he is running around and playing with toys and eating pizza and cake. And that is something to be happy about.