Parish Presentation!

Hi there!!

Okay so this really is the last one. I am giving a presentation at my parish this Monday night about my time in Honduras! I spoke at St. Stephen's parish in Pennsauken, NJ before going to Honduras and the generosity of the parishioners there really made the year possible, in addition to the generosity shown by so many of you who are following this blog. To give back, I wanted to share a little of what I learned and the pastor, Fr. Rocco, who has been amazingly supportive from the beginning, said, of course!

So here is the write-up that was published in the bulletin. If you're in the South Jersey area and free that night I would love to see you there!

Lots of love, and thank you all so much, once again, for all of the support.

Time: 7 p.m.
Date: Monday, Nov. 17
Place: Parish Center of St. Stephen Parish
6300 Browning Rd, 
Pennsauken Township, NJ 08109

What I Learned from a Year in Honduras 

In August I came back to the U.S. after living and working for a year at an orphanage in Honduras. For twelve months I ate more corn tortillas and beans than I care to remember, cohabited with scorpions, attempted to keep four of the world's cutest special-needs second graders from taking the last of my sanity, and learned to like hugs that were dusty, sweaty, and long at waist height. The experience was life-changing, and this parish made it possible. 

About a year and a half ago I spoke at Masses about the volunteer year I was beginning at Amigos de Jesus orphanage. I was inspired and humbled by the outpouring of generosity and support I received. Throughout the year I heard about so many of you who continued to support me in prayer. 

Now that I'm home, I would like to share some of my experiences with you: of the children's heart-wrenching stories and incredible resilience; of daily life in the third-world country I called home for twelve months; and of the work being done by this home, started by a Philadelphia priest, to get at the heart of the problems that forced hundreds of Honduran children to flee their country for the U.S. this summer. 

Join me on Monday, November 17th at 7 p.m. in the parish center for stories and conversation about my year at Amigos. Thank you once again for your incredible support. I'm really looking forward to sharing some of the things I learned with you.

A Message from Home

One of my last nights at our despedida, goodbye party.

I promised this last post a long time ago. There have been a lot of times when I've almost written it or written it all out in my head, then haven't actually done it. I can't say exactly why. Laziness probably. Busyness. Tiredness. There's probably a little subconscious stuff going on too, but there you have it.

Levin, the time he decided, totally on his own,
to dress up as a king for the day.

So an update! I am happy to say that I have a job back here in the States. I am extremely fortunate. My Mom heard about the job and I applied and interviewed via Skype while I was still in Honduras. I came back to the states on August 12 and I started work on September 2. I am the "social ministries communicator" for Catholic Charities and the Diocese of Camden. I basically have two people I report to, one the executive director of Catholic Charities Camden, and the other the communications director for the diocese. For the latter I get to write news stories about social ministry going on in the diocese -- out of parishes, out of Catholic Charities, from parishioners -- for the diocesan website and newspaper, the Catholic Star Herald. For Catholic Charities my job is a little broader, doing general communications and a little bit of marketing. I manage their website news content and a few other pages, work with social media, and write press releases and stories. I hope to do some more newsletter-type things in the future too. It's nice when both responsibilities overlap, which they often do. Really it's an amazingly ideal situation. I'm writing, and about things I care about, good work people are doing, and I'm meeting inspiring, incredible people.

The three boys who came to the home around Christmas
and became my students in January.

And I work about ten minutes away from my house where I've moved back in and taken over the third floor guest bedroom. It was a major dream come true the day I took out all of my books from their boxes in storage and arranged them on the bookshelves up here. Fiction, non-fiction, religion, philosophy. I felt a little like I was back in my library in Honduras while I was doing it. I love just looking at them. Once an English major, always an English major. It's nice living at home again. I'm wrapped once again in that blanket of love I grew up with, and I get to be part of my younger siblings' lives. And I'm surrounded, still, by children. The noisiness of our dinner table is a little like the craziness of the comedor, but don't tell my mom that. She's seen the comedor.

My special needs one-on-one student, Rana.

One of the best parts of my job are my Spanish-speaking co-workers. There are a lot of them in the office and a few who will only speak to me in Spanish. It's been so great. One of my worst fears was losing my Spanish, but I don't think it's gotten too much worse. My job also has me covering Spanish stories once in a while, too. I recently went to our Diocese's Hispanic family celebration, a day that was entirely in Spanish, and I got to even interview people in Spanish! It was amazing.

Another strange development has been the Amigos kids' use of Facebook, and even Skype! After we left some of the older boys figured out how to download Skype on their phones and I've skyped several times with them! It's crazy to see them on my computer screen, to speak in Spanish with them. I really can't describe it. In September, four of the kids came to the States for the annual fundraising visit Amigos has. Our executive offices are right in Malvern, P.A., so I was close enough to go to a lot of events, even to meet them in the airport. There was a magnetism to their visit. I couldn't stay a way, even though I felt them scratching away the scabs I had made. It was so beyond wonderful to be with them, to laugh with them, play with them, remember inside jokes we had. I felt again that belonging and was reassured that I still have my place with them. But each night when I went home, and especially when I had left, the reality of our apartness had to be faced.

Levin and his little brother Wilbur.

The pictures you see are the ones I've been using as the desktop backgrounds on my computer (and the really good ones are courtesy of my amazing fellow volunteer, Emily Pettinger). Every time I open my computer I see their faces and I smile. I miss them so much. I think of them so often. Being at work is usually my saving grace. When I'm there, I become consumed by the work at hand and I've been pushing myself there like a crazy person, which is entirely characteristic anyways, but also sort of a necessity now. But even there I'll see their faces suddenly in something someone says. Some location will stir up a memory. The slightest thing takes me back there, to the road to San Pedro Sula, to the school, to Buen Samaritano and the wheelchair-bound people there, to the soccer field and a child telling me he used to eat dirt, to our porch and boy saying he wishes he knew where his mother was, to our kitchen where I once spent hours with a teenager scanning google maps of Honduras searching for some kind of needle in a haystack that only he understood. And to happy moments too. The way the sun would set behind the hills, the warmth of a summer night, the stars, listening to Spanish romantic songs from the 70's with my friend Jacob, sitting with Levin on my lap one night after dinner, feeling the bone-crush of little Edgar barreling into me one morning before school. I'm back there in an instant, so many times a day.

Getting asked to be my student's godmother at his Baptism.

In one of my favorite novels of all time The Brothers Karamazov (I'm really not trying to be pretentious -- if you've read it you know it's great stuff!) the brother Ivan makes his case that freedom is not worth the suffering of innocent children, that the world order set down by God in the form of free will, and atonement, is not worth the blood and tears of one abused child. "Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind, God.'"

Dostoevsky had an answer for that, and it's all somewhere in the God who didn't remain just God but became man and died, and somewhere deep in my own personal culpability, which I am to spend my life atoning for. But the logic of Ivan sometimes is clearer, more seductive, more plain. Then again, it's no way to live.

That personal culpability sometimes takes more concrete and immediate terms. I left them after a year of getting to love them, I needed to leave, and I went into it knowing I would. I took so much from them, then I left. I might have given a little, too, but ultimately I'm gone. That's an incredible responsibility. The story doesn't have to end there, unless I let it. But distance and forgetfulness are funny things; I feel them creeping up on me already.

Really all this wrestling is something everyone does anyway, I've just given it my own twist. The truth is, when I think back on my time there now, what I remember most is being happy.

And when I think on my life now, the proper response is gratefulness.

Thanks again for reading this blog. Many of you supported me financially too, which I am so very grateful for. I may post just one more time to let you know when I'll be giving a presentation on my time in Honduras at my parish, St. Stephen's in Pennsauken, N.J. I've been working with the pastor there to set a date and when it's all settled I'll let you know. Most of all, I know many of you were with me in prayer this year, and that was such a blessing. I can't thank you all enough for your love and support on this journey!

There's a beautiful prayer, written to commemorate the martyrdom of Msgr. Oscar Romero in El Salvador, that tells how all work like this must necessarily be incomplete. I was reminded of it recently by my boss at Catholic Charities. So I won't try to wrap this blog up too neatly either, but will instead use those words.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. 

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church's mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Mom's Published!

Hi all!

My mom wrote a beautiful reflection on her time here at Amigos in May. Click the link to see it on the Amigos blog!

http://amigosdejesusblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-trip-to-amigos.html

She's pretty great, huh?

The Surreal Countdown and Lots of Good Times

Let me tell you about my day.

I let myself sleep in this morning, skipping Saturday's pancake breakfast. Funny, when I got here it was my favorite breakfast of the week! Real almost-gringo pancakes, and even though there wasn't syrup, my sugar-deprived body quickly learned to like honey. Now the sugary sweetness of an all carb breakfast makes me nauseous and weak the whole morning. Give me a hearty plate of beans and rice, with salty cheese and tortillas, the usual fare the other days of the week.

We do chores on Saturdays. While I was cleaning the bathroom I heard Levin's voice calling from the gate. The kids know they can't come in without permission so high pitched endlessly repeated versions of "Laura!!" "Emma!!" "Emilia!!" "Joanna!!" are a common occurrence, drawing either a groan or a smile from whoever's being summoned depending on the kid. This time for me it was the latter. He had brought me two deep red "moras," a raspberry-like berry that grows nearby. He's done this for the last three mornings now. I told him the first time I really liked them and he hasn't forgotten yet.

My project for the morning was to continue organizing and labeling the new books that came for the library when the annual container shipment arrived about two weeks ago. I grabbed my computer for tunes and set out to round up some willing boys. After about fifteen minutes I had my crew, seven helpers, and we set off for the school. Listening to my by now impressive selection of super cool Spanish music they worked, sticking on different colored labels to storybooks in English, not a single complaint, not one slack worker. They ranged in age from 8 to 15. They didn't have to go, but our kids like helping, simple as that. I never stop being surprised at how willing they are to pitch in. It's something to do, and this is their home, their family. They want to be part of it. Also they got to hang out in the library and read books afterwards, which they love.

After lunch the plan was to take a hike to the phone company tower that sits in the highest mountain near us. We're out in hilly farm country so the hike starts when you exit our gate, turn right, and continue going up on the dirt road that leads to the hogar. And up and up and up! It was 2 in the afternoon, the sun was intense, and I was sweating about three minutes in. Everyone but the youngest children were in on the hike. I walked most of the way with three of the youngest guys. They were troopers! We climbed steep hill after steep hill, and it was oh so very very hot. One guy kept repeating over and over how un-thirsty he was. He would say something suddenly like, "I'm tired," *pause* "but I'm not thirsty," and trudge stoically on. We walked passed pineapple fields blanketing rolling hills and through pine forests interspersed with broad-leafed shiny tropical plants and brilliant orange and red flowers. We reached the peak and the tower at about 3:30 and the view was spectacular. We looked out over miles of flat farmland, the shape of the vast valley we live in suddenly apparent: far in the distance was a wall of blue mountains mirroring the ones we stood upon. The wispy clouds brushed their peaks. "From those mountains you could touch the clouds, huh," one of my little guys said.

Getting Closer to Goodbye

My four original students, all demonstrating pretty accurately

their individual personalities. All photo credits go to the amazing
Emily Pettinger.

Once again, far too much time has elapsed between posts. The last time I posted it was just about May and we had all begun to think in earnest about the approach of going home. Now, just a few days away from the two month mark, the thought of leaving occupies more and more of our thoughts. We're planning our goodbyes, setting goals and making to-do lists.

My thoughts and feelings about leaving are, as always, a mix. The last month was harder than I expected. I had hoped, starting out in May, that the last three months would be easy ones, filled with great parting moments with the kids and finally a sense of deep-rooted security in my place here. The month started with our final retreat as a volunteer community. We went to the beach and spent a long weekend in a beautiful practically-beach-front house donated to us by friends of friends. It had air conditioning, hot running water and cable TV, so basically paradise. I spent my 23rd birthday on May 8 floating in the  Caribbean Sea and chowing on spaghetti with meat sauce and red wine. It was a wonderful retreat. We all enjoyed one another's company more than we ever had before and had plenty of down-time to be in it. The retreat consisted mostly of looking back at our time at Amigos. We shared stories, laughed and cried together. And we ate amazing, ultra-gringo food, like bagels and cream cheese and cold-cut sandwiches. (As Amy, our director, observed oh so aptly, Hondurans never eat cold food! Even the milk in breakfast cereal gets heated up).

Over those four days I missed the kids a lot. I wrote down stories of things that had happened and spent a lot of time thinking about the kids who were important to me, the things they had shared with me, their terrible suffering, the ways they had made me laugh so hard, and the intenseness of my love for them.

I came back from retreat ready for the last three months to be one big high culminating in a heart-wrenching goodbye. I still haven't learned that there will always be good and bad, that there has to be. That life here, and everywhere, is always a mix of ups and downs. We aren't, after all, really in paradise yet. The bads make the goods real.

The boys and I present our science fair experiment,
"The Amazing Egg," another good moment in May.

A week after coming back from retreat I got sick. The insidious thing about it was that I was only really bed-ridden, not-able-to-move sick for maybe a day. The rest of the two weeks the darn thing held on I was okay enough to walk around and work, but feeling like I had a giant sack of potatoes on my back. I was tired all the time, always felt nauseous, and never had an appetite. I watched as my clothes got looser as day after day of practically no eating went by and still I wasn't hungry. I finally was able to start taking in earnest the antibiotic I had brought with me in the second week and after about four days I started to feel better. I'll never be quite sure what I had.

The week before I got sick, four new children came to the hogar, a four-year-old boy, two girls aged 8 and 10, and a 10-year-old boy. My main teaching job during the day is working in our transitional classroom, which is theoretically supposed to be just for new kids who come to the hogar, assessing their levels and placing them in appropriate classrooms. The thing is, since our bilingual program can't take new kids after Christmas, kids who might be a fit for one of those classrooms have to stay in transitional. We had gotten three new kids right before Christmas so those three were in my class, plus a fourth with such severe behavioral issues that there was no other place for him. I had had those four boys since starting with the classroom after my vacation in January. It had been tough. Three of the four have learning disabilities, all are at different academic levels, and all have behavior problems. But the four had gelled. I had English goals for them and was working through a science curriculum. In math I worked with just the most advanced two and it was enough because even with two the levels were completely different. Even though behavior was a constant battle, I felt like I had finally begun to get a handle on it and had a system that they at least understood, if they didn't always respect it.

A Spring Shower

The heat has been oppressive the last few days. It's like a blanket, as my fellow volunteer Emma described it. A big heavy blanket that clings to your skin, weighs down on you head, makes it hard to breath. You start sweating as early as 7 a.m. and lie in bed at night without sheets to the sound of the fan pushing warm air around. The water in the big bucket in our shower feels warm after a day of sitting in the super heated air.

The only thing that brings relief is the rain. It's rained about four times now since the start of the dry season in late February. The heat and heavy humidity are worst just before the rain. This week the pressure built and built unable to find release. In school I felt sapped of energy and just as cranky as the kids. The fans are too loud to have on during class so we bake under the tin roofs of the classrooms, continually wiping the sweat off our faces.

Finally last night we began to see the tell-tale signs of coming rain. The general haziness of the sky had collected itself into a broad grey sheet. The wind picked up and began to set the papaya tree in front of the comedor waving. The kids stood in their lines in front of the comedor for prayer, but were allowed to run off quickly before eating to move their laundry indoors from the laundry lines. Almost all of the young boys and teenagers broke from their lines, whooping and running towards their dorms, caught in the exuberance of the promise of rain and the break of routine. They ran towards and past me as I watched behind the roof of the comedor the wind pick up a cascade of dry leaves and heave them into the air in front of an ever-darkening, billowing sky.

As we finished dinner, the drops started on the roof. Rain here is always loud, filling the rooms with its echo on the metal roofs. The prayer was scarcely audible over the din. When it was over, the kids poured outside, the teenagers standing coolly watching the rain from under the overhanging roof, the little ones screaming and running out into the water. Before long a soccer game had begun, of course, the littlest ones running around the older ones' feet and darting back again under the cover of the roof.

Two of the teenagers leaned jauntily against one of the dorms as the rain fell, watching the general hilarity in the yard in front of the comedor, the pequeños especially relishing the mud, rolling around on the ground, soaking themselves to the skin. "It's as if they've never seen rain before," one remarked disdainfully to the other.

I sat watching the rain come down, loving the feel of the cool wind and the cold rain that blew onto my face. Little Levin, my Levin, came and sat down beside me. "Let's tell stories," he suggested. So we did. He went first, a story about a group of good lions unjustly killed, but in the end somehow they had all come back to life again. He knows I like happy endings. I told one I recycled from a book I had read in the library. In front and around us, the yelling and playing of the other kids made the air noisy. Nearby on the porch where we were sitting were groups of jovenes, teenagers, laughing and talking. But I felt like it was just the two of us, sitting there, enjoying the coolness of the air, the smell of the rain, the freshness of the water and the rapt attention of each other.

I don't often realize how much moments like these mean to me until later when I can't stop thinking about them. There is such richness to my life here. Part of that richness is the sadness of knowing how soon my time will come to an end. C.S. Lewis defined joy as inseparable from a kind of sadness. Joy is all at once a great happiness mixed with the great sorrow of knowing it cannot be grasped or held in place, that it cannot be totally fulfilled here and now. It has a necessary element of loss and longing.

When I say these moments are full of joy for me, I mean it in that sense. The beautiful moments I sometimes share with the kids - of their vulnerability, of my learning to love them, of mutual trust - fill me with joy, a joy that always implies the sadness of the brokenness of their pasts, of their families, of the country they will grow up in and one day need to survive in on their own; the more selfish sadness of my own impermanence.

But joy is joy. Like rain that falls like tears bringing release and relief.

The Apodo Effect

"He's calling me a nickname!" says Victor, his arm fully extended as he points at Joel his classmate. He's looking at me with an intensely hurt expression that's a warning I understand well: "I'm telling the teacher now, but in about a second I'm gonna hit him." I'm glad Victor, a short 12-year-old built of pure muscle, has chosen this more diplomatic option for now, but I know it's basically inevitable that Joel will get hit, go on using nicknames, and go on being called them by Victor (who's just as guilty truth be told).

The word here for nickname is apodo. It's a useful term; kids use it to talk about the nicknames they have here at the hogar or the ones they use for other people. It's also a negative thing, as it was for Victor that day (every day to be honest). "He's calling me a nickname" in this sense of the word really would translate to English as "He's calling me names." But there's a sense of ownership in it, too; he's not just calling me names, he's calling me my name, the one assigned to me, the one that hurts because it's just mine, and it's kind of true.

Nicknames are an incredibly common part of life for the kids here, and for anyone who comes to live here. Everyone, no exceptions, has a nickname, or seven. It's one of the first of the many idiosyncrasies of the kids' lives here an outsider notices. In some cases a nickname has morphed into the person's everyday name. In others, the apodo is a hated kind of insult, but sticks just the same.

Apodos are, very often, hilarious because they are so accurate. I am always impressed when a new nickname emerges (I've been here to see a few) by the kids' perceptiveness, eye for detail, and crushing accuracy. For example there's a 9-year-old here, a short little ball of a boy. He can be sweet, but he's mostly infamous for picking on the other kids and causing trouble. His nickname is Shrek, the character from the Dream Works movie. I would never have had the ingenuity to invent the name, but with his perpetually shaved head and especially the ears that stick out from its sides, there is something unmistakably Shrek-like about him that's hard to forget once you've heard the name and that draws an immediate laugh of recognition. He hates his nickname. The other pequeños, our younger boys, love to get a rise out of him by calling him his apodo. It always works.

As much as the kids might hate them, I can't help but feel like there's also something to them that means belonging. Being given a nickname means you've been taken in as part of the family. One of the first things that happens to a new kid who arrives is the bestowal of a nickname. Give it a few weeks and the boys will find some oddity of appearance or personality and assign it the perfect name. One of the boys I teach arrived to the hogar in December. He was here for less than a month when the kids found it: zombie. Once again, I never would have found such a fitting word for that whatever-it-is about him. But zombie sort of nails it. He loathes the name. "Don't put apodos" is a constant in my school day.

The Ups and Downs

Walking back from school today, the cloud of acrid grey smoke followed me. The pit where we burn our trash is all the way on the other side of the school, up a hill, set behind the buildings, but today the wind was not on my side and the cloud had drifted over the three tin-topped buildings of our school to follow me home. There isn't a trash collection infrastructure in Honduras. Everyone burns their own trash. Our school pit has everything in it from scraps of paper, to plastics, to brush and leaves, to (yes it's gross) the papers we toss in the wastebasket after using the toilet (you can't flush paper here, or in most parts of Central/South America). 

Burning trash - the bitter smell of it, the grey smoke - is a common feature of life. We have our own pit behind the volunteer house, and others dot the Amigos property's obscure corners. The smoke drifts over the campus at various points throughout the day. Walking to the nearby village, small fires will be going on the side of the road. While Hondurans keep their own yards and properties meticulously clean and swept, the lack of easy trash disposal means that it's more or less culturally acceptable to throw trash in public places (there are almost never public trashcans to be found anywhere). People commonly leave trash in the road when they walk or throw it out of the windows of cars and buses.

As I continued my walk home from school, gradually the smoke dissipated. I took the back way home, a secluded, tree-draped path through a bit of forest. The path is bounded on one side by a wall of earth, the side of a high hill, and a descent down to a small creek on the other. The walk only takes about 3 minutes, but in that short time I feel like I'm in another place. It's not quiet, but it's not the usual kind of noisy. There are no children to be heard, but the forest hums with insects and strange bird calls and the groaning of the cows in the pasture just past the stream. The trees are covered with tropical oxygen-feeding plants and moss. Today as I walked a new scent filled my nose, a beautiful, intense scent I've only ever experienced here. As I looked down the hill I saw that the usual tangle of green foliage had exploded in tiny white flowers: coffee plants. In the space of a day the flowers had opened, pouring out their sweet perfume. I stood their drinking it in, thinking how beautiful this country is.

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 piñatas. 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.

Kisses Goodnight

Hello friends and family!

Sorry it's been such a long time. I was shocked to see that my last post was about two months ago. It certainly doesn't feel that, but time here flies faster than I've ever known it to fly. Especially these last eight weeks.

They were probably some of the toughest I've had here in Honduras. During the first four, we were in the midst of the Christmas, New Year's, and Epiphany festivities. The kids were still off from school and I was feeling weird. Without my days filled with teaching, I had too much time to think about home and to over-think my relationships with the kids. I began to compare myself to other volunteers, entered the deathly spiral of believing everyone else was more liked, needed, loved than me. It was a deeply selfish time, but it taught me a lot about myself. Everyone says how much this year teaches them about themselves; now I think I see why. It's an incredibly humbling thing, self-discovery. But so very valuable.

The weeks were'nt all bad at all. They were typical of all the other weeks I've spent here in the way they were shaped as the cliché emotional roller-coaster, only the dips were lower than they had been in the past. But the peaks were still amazing. During our time off from school we volunteers were assigned shifts to work as madrinas and padrinos, the children's full-time caregivers. The staff shrinks during the holidays because half of the padrinos get to spend Christmas at home and the other half gets New Year's. Being a padrino is a hard job. As the kids' full time caregivers, they are on duty constantly, keeping track of where all the kids are and getting them to do their chores, not break the rules, and participate in the activities. They wake them up in the morning and get them into bed at night and spend the whole day with them in between. And when there's no school, they get very little time off. As hard as teaching is, I wouldn't trade jobs.

One of the things I discovered as a madrina was the joy and heartbreak of saying goodnight to the kids. On Christmas Eve I was assigned to the younger boys' dorm. I moved from bunk to bunk doing tuck-ins and kisses goodnight. At some point it struck me that if I wasn't the one doing it, no one would. It also struck me, with a great deal of force, that I wouldn't be the one doing it next year. One of the toughest things to come to terms with here is that as a volunteer I'm just another impermanent, transitory person in the kids' lives. 

The boys, aged anywhere from 7 to 13, are at their best when they're being tucked in goodnight.  Those normally with a chilly teenager attitude were smiling young kids again. Kids who loved to be disrespectful were cute and smiley. Boys too cool to spend too much time talking didn't want me to leave.There is something so intimate about sitting on the edge of a child's bed and talking to them as they lie there on the verge of sleep. I loved the kids so much at those moments, and I hurt for them so much too. "Tomorrow is Christmas!" I whispered and they would break out in big smiles. The boys who have come since I've been here and who would be spending their first Christmas at Amigos were especially fun to talk to. They were full of questions. "Will there be presents?" "There will be new clothes! Presents on the Epiphany." "And a fiesta?" "We'll dance till midnight." We whispered conspiratorially as the boys at their most innocent and vulnerable let me be part of the moment with them. 

Home

Through the comedor window, the multi-colored lights on the Christmas tree twinkle. There's something about seeing Christmas lights through windows that has always made me feel nostalgic for home. From the outside, you can imagine the warmth within. Garland hangs around the outside of the building and on the slope of the hill is a display of nativity scenes set in a large box draped with lights. Farther up the hill, there is a sign of lights bearing the Amigos crest, a cross in the center of a heart circumscribed in a circle. At the crest of the hill, much farther up, the huge white cross gazes down serenely as always.

Chrsitmas is a beautiful time at Amigos. For the 15 or so new kids that have come to Amigos since I've been here it must be overwhelming. Kids come to Amigos for all different reasons; some were living on the streets because their parents could not afford to support them; some were abused at home; some have parents who have died or been killed. Some come directly from their family's homes, others have been living in other children's homes from an early age. It's hard to know what their Christmases have been like in the past. For the new kids here, the only certainty is that they've never experienced one quite like this.

If I let myself think too much about the holiday I'm afraid of the terrible homesickness that could overcome me, so I've kept it at bay somewhat, not letting myself imagine home. But we'll see how long I hold out. Since coming here I've never felt the absence of home so much, the warmth and comfort of it, the rightness and belonging of it. It's made me think about what home means, what family means, in a totally new way. More than anything else it's made my heart break for the kids. Each one left some sort of home once at some point to come to this new place. Some came with siblings, others with friends from other homes, others were left to face a new home all alone. For the 15 kids I've watched arrive, this is all new. And those are just those children who have arrived since I've been here. I learned a few days ago that since Amigos has been growing so quickly, this year just under 40 children will be experiencing Christmas here for the first time.

These past two nights we've had our first of many posadas. Posada is a tradition celebrated in many parts of Latin America. The way it's done here is  a group of family members or friends comes to the door of a house. There is another group inside and alternating back and forth the two groups sing a traditional song. The people outside represent Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay for the night so that Mary can give birth to Jesus. The people inside are the innkeepers of Bethlehem. At first those inside tell those on the outside to go away; there's no room. But by the end of the song, realizing that the savior is at their doorstep, those on the inside sing for the "holy pilgrims" to enter, and then everyone eats and celebrates together. 

We'll have a posada at Amigos every night now leading up to Christmas, one at each of the major houses and dormitories of the campus. Last night's was at the school and we did it outside, on either side of the gate leading up to the school grounds. All of the school children and the teachers were on the "inside" and the teenaged boys walked across the long soccer field towards us as the pilgrims. In the darkness, their candles shed a beautiful glow, and on our side colored lanterns illuminated our song lyrics. The teenagers sang at the top of their voices. I was holding one of our little chiquitos who stared wide-eyed at the flame for all eight verses. Tonight's was held at the chiquitos' dormitory. We volunteers and several of the older boys were on the inside to boost the singing while the whole rest of the hogar came to the door. On both nights after the ritual, there was food and laughing. On both nights I watched the older boys scoop up the little ones in their arms for the singing and tumble around with them afterwards as everyone hung out eating snacks. And it felt so much like a family, it felt so much like a home, albeit one with more than 100 siblings.

All of these kids came to the door of Amigos once for the first time, a time that had to have been a type of lonely and scary and foreign that I can't even begin  to comprehend; that took a type of courage I don't know if I have. What each one of them has found, God willing, is a warm inner room of home and family, joy and love. It's not the same thing as the mom and dad that every one of these kids deserve, but my prayer for these kids at Christmas is that on nights like tonight it feels like family, it feels truly like home.

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Check out Amigos' countdown to Christmas on the Christmas fund facebook page! The pictures are adorable. Many of you reading this have already supported my year of service and Amigos. If you are interested, this is a great time of the year to continue supporting Amigos' mission. At Christmas time all the children get new clothes, their only new clothes for the year, and a toy. Donations to the Christmas fund make their Christmas special. Thank you all so much for all of your support!! Feliz Navidad y hasta pronto.

The Reunion

I was riding in the back of one of the pick-up trucks (one of my favorite things about living in Honduras) with the other volunteers returning from our vacation weekend when Levin spotted us. He sprinted up to the side of the car with his giant smile on his face. "My hermanito (little brother) is coming!" he squealed. My heart was bursting. "I know!" I laughed with him, and we collided in a hug as I jumped out of the truck.

Levin is the eight-year-old boy who ran away from the hogar on his very first day (you can read about it here). He was trying to go to the city where he had been living a state-run temporary children's home to get back to his little brother. He agreed to stay at the hogar on the condition that we would bring his brother. The team here had been working on bringing his brother even before Levin arrived at the end of August. Levin had adjusted to living at Amigos and seemed happy, but he never stopped asking about his brother. Now finally, at the beginning of November, he was coming. 

I had gotten the news before we left for our vacation and thank goodness we left. I wasn't allowed to tell Levin, just in case it didn't work out, and I don't think I would have been able to contain my excitement all weekend if we had been here at the hogar. When one of the volunteers told me the news, I surprised myself by instantly beginning to cry. I hadn't realized how much I, like Levin, had been hanging on to the promise of his brother coming to the hogar, how I had been storing up in my heart all the times Levin said something like, "He's very very little, my little brother. Much younger than me; he's 6. When is he coming?"

                

That Sunday night after dinner, I learned that I had been given the day off from teaching so that I could go into the city with Levin to pick up his brother from the court. I was elated. The next morning we were on the road by 6 a.m. I've never seen Levin sit so erect and still for so long in his life, but for the first half hour of the car ride, he barely budged. Sitting in the middle of the back seat, his eyes were glued out the window as though he could hardly believe we were going, only moving to throw grins back at me over his shoulder every few minutes. Levin is a challenging child in a lot of ways. He doesn't like to listen when he's told to do something, he whines for what he wants when he's not given it, and he throws terrible fits over absolutely nothing, things like not getting his way immediately. He's gotten a reputation among the other boys his age as a cry baby. As I've gotten to know him better over the last three months, it's been hard to see the unpleasant side of him come out, even as he continues to adjust to life here in this safe, stable environment. But I'm still crazy about him. As we drove, I thought about how having his little brother around might help him grow up a little bit. I could see being a good role model as a powerful force in improving his behavior.

Falling in love

"'It has done me good,' said the fox, 'because of the color of the wheat fields.'"

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This week I fell in love with Rana. It took me by surprise one day, like noticing the lateness of the hour; like the proverbial arrow in the heart. I was looking around the comedor for a place to sit at dinner, and I saw her slightly oblong head sitting with the other chiquitos at their little table. I went over and sat down beside her and her eyes lit up. “Rana!” she said, which is what she does when she’s happy. “Sapo no, rana sí!” she said, and I knew I was welcome at her table. She leaned up next to me, and stuck her tongue out. When I mimed her, she burst into giggles and I just hugged her. I felt at that moment like I could have hugged her forever and it wouldn’t have been enough. She was so happy sitting beside me, and I was so happy sitting beside her. We were both so happy. Our presence was a blessing, one to the other.

Rana means frog in Spanish, and it's the name I'm using here to refer to the special needs student I work with one-on-one each day. Her behavior is still very difficult, sometimes heart breaking. Just when I think we're making progress, we'll have a morning where she refuses to do any of the activities, like this morning for instance where I had to end by carrying her as she pounded my back with her little fists and cried, to her dormitory. But no matter how challenging she is in class, or how rewarding, I'm not going to be able to stop loving her. The moments like yesterday morning when I walked into class and her face lit up and she called out my name fill me with too much joy. Where does that come from? What has Rana done to elicit that love from me? And what have I done to elicit it from her? Forced her to sit still in class for two hours a day? Taught her how to trace? The answer is nothing, I've done nothing to deserve her loving me. The quote from my favorite musical of all times hangs on the cabinet in our bathroom: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Maybe that's the only way to understand.

Rana will not remember me for very long after I leave in a year from now. Her mind alights on concepts like a bee does on a flower, pausing for a moment, then moving on to the next bright blossom, sometimes slowly, lazily, sometimes with frenetic activity. If I visit, she may be glad to see me, for the first couple of months after I leave. But I’ll fade from her life. She is different from the other children, of course, but she helps puts my time here in perspective. The others may remember a little longer, but for all of them the reality is that I will leave and our lives will go on apart from one another. We’ll have this year to love each other, and then our love will need to take on a very different form, one I haven’t yet learned to recognize. So has it done us any good?

All of us volunteers talk about how we don't know how we'll be able to leave, but I mostly just don't let myself think about it. I did, though, this past weekend with one of my wonderful fellow volunteers, Emma. I said at one point how I couldn't stand the thought of us coming here and working our way into the life of this place for a year and then just going. "To these kids, we're going to be just one more person who left," I said. She corrected me: "One more person who loved."

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I re-read one of my favorite books of all times this past weekend on our vacation while I was doing a lot of processing on this topic. The quote above is from the book but it doesn't make a lot of sense without the context. Here's the chapter if you want to check it out.

Harvest Day

The corn was thick in the air as we walked up to Amigos' maize field. Like a display of fireworks, the ears hit their peak and gradually descended, each at a different moment.

It was harvesting day for Amigos' maize (corn) and all the jovenes, or teenaged, boys at the hogar had been enlisted to help. The 20 of them worked their way in a pack up and down the field, a row at a time. The dried out ears had to be pulled off and then catapulted to the nearest of several large piles that had been cleared out in the midst of the stalks. In nearly two acres of corn there were five or six piles, and that's why the corn flew through the sky at such a great height. It's also why, despite the heat, several of the boys seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Maize is what we gringos know as yellow corn, several months later. At the point where sweet corn would be ready to harvest, the stalks are doubled over and allowed to dry out for several more weeks. Once harvested, the hard, dry maize kernels are ready to be ground into the flour that constitutes the tortillas eaten at every meal - two tortillas a person, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The maize we harvested that day, in grains, weighed 4,500 pounds, enough for six months worth of tortillas here at the hogar.

Beginning at 8 a.m., the boys and other employees of Amigos' agricultural program, Agro as it's referred to here, were at work pulling the brown, crinkly maize cobbs off of doubled-over, waist-high stalks. The sun was fiercely strong by 9 a.m. and the work is best done in long pants and sleeves, since the dried stalks are prickly and scratchy, sometimes dangerously sharp, and lots of creatures (read snakes) like to live in the field. 

It's unsurprising that among the-high schoolers, there were those who didn't relish the hard work. What's more surprising is that some of them did. When I asked one of them why, he said throwing the ears the distance to the piles was fun, and that he liked seeing how far he could throw. Then he gave a reason I didn't expect. He said he also liked walking from plant to plant, pulling the corn off the stalks. To me, a first-time maize harvester, this seemed like the least fun part of the job. My legs and arms were scratched and itchy and I was constantly worried about what insect I would see next crawling out of a corn ear. Sweat was pouring down my face and I had a bloody gash on one hand from an especially sharp stalk. Harvesting maize is brutally hard work and that's the daily reality for many Honduran farmers, one that really struck me in the field. But this kid also saw the beauty in the process. He was able, even in a long-sleeved shirt drenched in sweat, to appreciate the kind of satisfaction harvesting your own food can bring.

Amigos uses about eight acres of farmland. Currently the hogar produces all its own milk, chicken, maize, and beans. Beans will be planted next in the same field as the maize. There are two harvests a year for both crops and each plant replenishes the soil for the next in a beautiful, ageless cycle. The boys at the hogar who work in the agro program are learning about a crop and a cycle that has been a staple in the lives of Hondurans for generations. I learned a saying in my first week here that is catchy in Spanish: Sin maíz, no hay país, which basically translates to, the country falls apart without maize.

We walked back from the field dehydrated and exhausted, at least I was, but also on a strange sort of high, the kind that comes from doing a hard job through to the end. The boys were making whooping noises for no reason, giddily laughing. The tortillas at lunch that day didn't taste quite the same.

A Day in the Life (Part 2)

We left off at 2:10, the end of the school day. Usually I need a rest after the end of a school day so I try to come home for awhile to take a break. I go back to the volunteer house and drink some coca-cola (I've become a total addict here; I think I crave the sugar), and to prevent myself from never moving from the sofa, I try to wash clothes.

Here, as in most of Honduras, clothes are washed by hand. Every house I've seen has what's called a pila, a waist-high, rectangular concrete basin that fills with water. Imagine a lid on the basin and a large square cut into the top of it. The two remaining sides have washboards and a drain built in and that's where clothes are washed. We have bars of clothes-washing soap that we rub on to the clothes, you scrub them, and then you dip b uckets into the basin for water to rinse. For the kids, washing clothes is a daily chore, and I try to once a day as well or else it really piles up. Even when I have to skim the floaties off the top of the pila water; even when I can never ring all the soap out of my jeans; even though all my clothes are now hopelessly stretched out; even when I find bird poo on the clothes hanging on the line (okay, that one is a stretch), there's something I love about washing my own clothes. Maybe it's the feeling each day that I've accomplished something, or the peacefulness of standing at the pila after a long day, or the camaraderie I feel with the other volunteers when we wash clothes together, or the mindless productivity that allows me to think and process the day's events, or the feeling that by washing my own clothes by hand each day I'm a little closer to the daily experience lived by a vast majority of the world's population.

After taking an hour or two at home to rest and wash clothes and do some lesson planning or internet work in the office, I try to spend the rest of my afternoon with the kids. Every afternoon is different. Sometimes I've made plans in advance with a kid; someone in one of my classes who wants help with the homework I've given or needs to get caught up on a lesson; someone I promised to study English with; one kid in particular who likes to go up to the big white cross on the hill and have me tell him a story. When the kids have birthdays, the volunteers take them into the closest neighboring village, a 20-minute walk down the road, with a few friends to buy soda and snacks, so those "birthday parties" are usually afternoon activities planned in advance. A lot of other times, there's nothing planned. I'll wander out to see what's going on in the rest of the hogar and if there's someone I can play with or talk to.

A Day in the Life (Part 1)

I have to apologize again for the long delay! This time my excuse is a broken computer keyboard, and things are not easy to get fixed here. The cliché is actually super true - we really do take a ton for granted. The ability to hop in a car and drive a computer somewhere it can be fixed, maybe even be left over night with confidence, and come back to get it the next day, for example, is not something I or anyone has here.

There is so much going on here all the time, I thought it might be good to bring everyone up to speed on what a typical school day is like here, at least for me. It should help to give a little context.

The day starts at either 6 or 5:30 a.m. when I get up to go to breakfast and do whatever internet chores or class prep I have to do (since we don't have internet in our house). Breakfast varies, but during the week it invariably includes beans and the signature corn tortillas. My favorite breakfast is hole beans (verses mashed) with steamed plantains and a delicious sauce they call mantequilla, which is kind of a liquidy, cheesy, sour cream. We have it every Monday with banana licuado, hot milk with some sort of add-in, a lot of times rice or oats.

The jóvenes, or teenagers, here get up at 5:30 every morning so that they can leave for high school by 6:15ish. It's a half hour walk and school starts at 7. So breakfast is a casual affair in the comedor, with kids, teachers, madrinas and padrinos filing in at different times depending on their schedules. At a little before 7, the metal bell outside the comedor that serves as the signal for the beginning of every activity here, rings for all the elementary school kids to line up outside to walk to our school, which sits behind the big soccer field at the back end of the campus. They all wear light blue button down shirts and brown pants. Their uniforms usually look really nice during this time each day (they get taken off and washed immediately after school); after a couple hours, it's amazing how un-bonito they look.

Visiting a Different Hogar

Sorry it's been  awhile since my last post. I sprained an ankle last weekend and it's really thrown me off. I'm still hobbling around like a viejita as the kids say but getting better!

This is a post I wrote several weeks ago. It's a sort of retrospective part 2 to the post "The Prodigal," and I have to warn from the beginning that's it's pretty depressing. I want to take a few steps back and tell a little bit about what it was like to pick up the three new boys from the state-run children's home. The experience has definitely been one of the most impactful of my time here so far, and I know I'll be feeling it's repercussions for a long time. By this time, this is an old story, but it's amazing how vividly and how often my experiences there recur in my memory.

The home is part a network of state-run institutions throughout Honduras. It's meant to be an impermanent home for children who have been removed from their families or picked up from the streets until they can go to more permanent homes like Amigos. Of course, this doesn't always happen and children can end up staying in one of these institutions for much longer. One of the boys we picked up had been there for three years.

Driving up to the home was exactly like driving up to a prison. That's not an exaggeration; it's located right next door to a prison and they share the same high solid concrete wall. At first we actually drove up to the wrong door, a massive solid metal entrance that could open to let a car through. Through a small square window (the Wizard of Oz absurdly comes to mind) a guard told us that this was the prison entrance and directed us to an identical doorway a bit further down the wall. 

We drove into the compound toward a large concrete building sitting in a field of dust and pale grass. It was about three-stories high and structured around a courtyard in the center. The prison feel didn't completely go away (especially since with it's stairways to the upper levels and concrete flooring, the courtyard looked a lot like a recreation area you might see in a jail), but the inside was painted with pale greens and purples and yellows which broke up the tedium a bit and reminded me that this was a home for children. As we entered, children stared down at us from the upper levels surrounding the courtyard and called out to us. Here, the children address each other as well as adults as tío and tía so that's what we heard: a chorus of high voices shouting sharply "tía! tía!" for our attention.

A Prayer for Peace

To walk in to the Amigos de Jesús chapel yesterday between 11 and 12, it would have been difficult to believe it was full of some 25 teenaged boys and two girls, anywhere from 13 to 22 years old. You would have found the capilla in reverent silence, save for the church music serving as a background to the kids' meditations. The Amigos de Jesús family was answering Pope Francis' request for prayers for peace.

The capilla at Amigos is the second floor of the office building and it is open air. All four sides have a concrete rail and through it you can see the mountains in the distance and overlook the rest of the Amigos campus. The service began with Amy, our co-director, explaining what was happening in Syria; that it is locked in a civil war, that there is destruction everywhere, that the government used chemical weapons against its own people, that those who suffer the most are the children. She showed a short news clip with some images of the fighting in the streets. All the kids were rapt with attention.

Then two of the boys took turns reading the text of the Pope's message delivered last Sunday calling for peace (you can find the text in English here). It was a profound moment. As I listened to the words in Spanish, sitting in this open-air chapel overlooking the beauty of the Honduran countryside, I felt the force of the Church's universality in a way I never had before. Those words redounded around the world in every type of setting, in every language.

Before the time for prayer, Amy called attention to the Pope's call for peace not only in Syria, but also around the world. Honduras, though not at war, is also not at peace, she said. We must pray for the people of Syria, and for peace in our own nation, and in our own hearts.