Sunday, March 16, 2014

Trying to Take a Picture with Jose - A Photo Essay

On a lighter note, this also happened on family day...

 Spotted.





Success!

Family Visit Day

Hi friends and family! Needless to say my resolution to post more often has fallen through. But better late than never!

A few weekends ago was family visit day. Like so many aspects of life at the hogar it was a day of both happiness and heartbreak. Many of the kids here have family members that are able to come visit them - aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, grandparents, sometimes even a parent - for various reasons. Many have none of these.

Amigos did a great job of finding visitors for the kids without family members. Several of our youngest kids were visited by the nuns who had cared for them in another home. Volunteers who had been regular visitors at the state-run children home were invited to visit our kids who had lived there. Teachers from other schools where some of our children had previously attended were invited. The teachers from our school came to be part of the festivities; neighbors from the nearby town, former madrinas, all were there to be the family a lot of kids don't have.

Everyone congregated for the day up at the school, with its picnic tables and open green lawn. There weren't planned activities so that the children and their family members could have time to just visit. There was a little store where visitors could buy soda, food, and snacks and the children without visitors were given an "allowance" to spend there. Lunch was brought up to the school and in the afternoon there were piƱatas. With all the people milling around, all the children playing and all the food and snacks, the whole day had a festival feel, like a summer barbecue.

One little boy had sat with me crying on New Year's Eve because he missed his grandmother. I got to meet her, a sweet and worn old woman. He sat close beside her all day, doing most of the talking. When I went up to meet her he said, "do you want to see a picture of me when I was a baby?" And he took out of his grandmother's purse a worn picture of the two of them when he was probably three. Tucked behind it was a postcard, one of those "Your donation makes a difference in the life of a child" cards, written in English, with empty fields for name, address, donation amount, and a tragic-looking picture of him probably around age 5. Holding it in my hands I was struck by the bizarreness of it all. Now, at age 11, the usually silly, frenetic boy, while standing at his grandmother's side, was glowing with a mature kind of happiness I had never seen in him before.