I am a retired schoolteacher. As I collected my magazines, scissors, pipe cleaners and Elmer’s glue from my II Nivel students at the end of the class period on Friday—my last official day in my volunteer teaching position— I was both saddened and relieved that I wouldn’t be hearing the shrill “TEACHER, VEN!!!” (“teacher, come!”) screamed at me across the classroom anymore, or hear the groans and “ay, no teacher!” when I pass out a worksheet. But I’m retiring from teaching with a definite satisfaction that it’s been a reciprocal relationship of understanding and enjoyment, not matter how difficult some of the students could be. Angel, for example, one of the more erratic and fickle boys of the younger classes, summed up perfectly in one sentence to me the tough love that was often revealed in interactions in my classroom: No tienes que irte, he said, looking at me with a half-scowl and half-concern (“you don’t have to leave”). I am taking that as an indication that maybe he enjoyed English class with Daniela, just a little.
There are clear moments when I only just grasp the full significance of what it is to be leaving. Mostly, though, July 31st is a date on the calendar that I am rattling off unthinking to coworkers and kids. I’ve already had my “despedida” celebration with my hogar, the formal planned goodbye that is customary (and I’ll be wearing my corny teal blue Honduras tourist t-shirt they gave me when I step off the plane in mid-August). What lies ahead of me still are those tasks that I want to avoid because they mean that the end is really here: cleaning out my room and packing, cancelling my residency, snapping final pictures, and of course, saying goodbye.
I’ve heard that reintegration is hard, and that it hits you sometimes weeks or months later when something small reminds you of one of your kids or of living in Honduras. There are some things that I am really going to miss, like the slow pace of life, the hilarious and innocent observations that the kids make every day, and the fluidness of sliding between Spanish and English in a matter of minutes. Then there are things that I am really, really going to miss: days like last Tuesday, for instance, where school was cancelled in a Ranch-wide effort to combat the dengue crisis by chopping threatening grass with machetes for five long hours. I just won’t get blisters or aches in my back quite like this in the Unites States.
I imagine that one of the most frustrating things for me in the reintegration process will be the inability to explain my experience to others. It’s not enough to simply say, “It was great. Hard, but great,” although this is precisely the nicely-wrapped answer that I think many will expect. Working on the ground level of a large institution like Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos—with all of its expected institutional flaws—definitely has had me furious and doubtful at times. Exasperation with the attitude of waste that I see sometimes among the kids; frustration that they are spoiled far beyond their ability to give thanks; their obliviousness to the privilege that is education, clothes, food, and time to play; and all of this feeding my own occasional doubts in the management of a well-meaning organization that sustains nine children’s homes throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. I think every volunteer goes through this period of despondency and disagreement, but eventually comes out of it to see the greater merits of NPH and, most importantly, what the alternative would be. At the end of the day, these children still don’t have mothers or a stable nuclear blood family and have come through hardships that, if they don’t excuse their behavior, certainly explain it.
This moment of realization that a life of poverty and insecurity is the alternative to growing up in a large children’s home like NPH only became truly real to me about a month and a half ago when I visited a site thirty minutes from the Ranch in Talanga, a typical Honduran town of dusty uneven streets, stumbling afternoon drunks, loud Reggaeton music streaming from the doors of the one grocery store, and unending numbers of shoeless, dirty children running around trying to sell gum and chips. I went with a few other volunteers to the Comedor Infantil, a children’s soup kitchen of sorts that some American Passionist volunteers opened in November in barrio San Diego, a neighborhood in Talanga notorious for crime and drugs. Each day about thirty-five to forty children aged 3 to 9 flock to this small cement-walled building before noontime to receive what is, for most of them, their one substantial meal of the day. The children are barefoot except for a few; they haven’t bathed for several days; their hair is thin and lice-ridden, their stomachs puffed, and their eyes are hungry and eager for the traditional rice and beans soup to come. But, they are smiling. Some come in school uniforms because their mothers or older siblings were able to find them shoes and several Lempiras to buy a snack at school. One boy, four years old, has gained five pounds since starting to come to the Comedor in January.
After spending several hours with these kids playing jump rope and make-believe with the donation of toys that had come two weeks before, we were invited back to the house of one brother/sister pair. The decrepit wooden home was the size of a small hotel room. The front room and the back bedroom were separated by a sheet strung from some twine. A television and three plastic lawn chairs set up on the dirt floor took up most of the space in the front room. A six month old baby was laying on one of the plastic chairs, naked and incredibly dirty, and was being cared for that day by a thirteen-year old cousin while the mother was out working, a normal situation in both small towns like Talanga and big cities like Tegucigalpa. One of the Passionist volunteers cleaned the baby off, fed her, and put a diaper on her while I went around back to play soccer with the boys in the hot afternoon sun. Later, as we waved goodbye to the kids and walked back towards the town center, passing shacks and more dirty-faced children walking through the streets, a strong sense of thanks and pride came over me for the work that NPH does. My girls in hogar or my students at school could be spending their days barefoot, out of school, hungry, or walking around dangerous neighborhoods. Nothing can ever fully replace losing a mother or make up for being abandoned and taken to the state children’s home; nothing can erase seriously abused sexually, emotionally, or physically. But opportunity, security, love, and a home where all of your siblings live, too, changes lives.
Last night was the Second Annual “Festival de la Canción,” a much-anticipated grandiose four-hour karaoke competition where our boys and girls from ten years old to twenty got up on stage one by one and displayed their sheer courage (and tone-deafness), crooning to such Latin hits as Te Amo and translations of The Backstreet Boys. I sat and cringed as Natalia, a rather new addition to our family, belt out something awful with the microphone too close to her lips. But I was thinking the whole time that any parent sits through these moments in their children’s lives, the necessary moments when they grow and discover themselves and feel what it is to be supported and loved. In contributing to the growth and personal development of the Natalias and Angels, in his or her right to communicate and be understood, we fulfill God’s ultimate goal for each one of us: to love others.
Thank you to all of my incredibly supportive family members and friends for contributing to the growth of these children through sending your support in care packages, letters, emails with kind words, in-person visits, and monetary donations to NPH, and of course by reading my story this year. We are all more interconnected than we can realize, and in showing love to one person, we really reach a dozen more.
