The Orphanage

October 2009




White Oprah shamed me into this volunteering commitment. I have liked my morning swims, leisurely breakfasts, gym workouts, Spanish tapes, writing periodically, reading books poolside, dips in the ocean, walks on the beach, happy hours, impromptu parties and dinners. You need to make yourself available for opportunities, and commitments thwart spontaneity. But one day Nunez met Nicole, a twenty something New Zealander who volunteers at an orphanage in the center of the city. Nicole invited us to meet her one Saturday so that she could introduce us to Rafiela, who is in charge during the day.
Finding the orphanage on Zaragoza Avenue which is a one way street slicing diagonally across the thumb nail of the city center took an extra thirty minutes to negotiate. Maps don’t work. Trial by error does, and I made multiple errors. Not enough to find it seamlessly the next two occasions, but I do get there. I just have to leave early.
The orphans live in a freshly painted bright red and white trimmed building. The only daunting aspect is their coiled barbed wire on top of the walls that represent the outer age. The black entrance possesses a door bell but not a door handle. A middle school aged girl opens the door and looks helplessly when she realizes that these gringos hesitate to speak halting Spanish. She shows us in. Rafiela, a fortyish woman, patiently responds to the chaos in her office as five young girls whirl about her wanting one thing or another. Eventually, she shows us into a massive court yard with students huddled up with volunteers or teachers in groups of four or five. Rafiela tells us one rule to abide by. If you bring something for one student, you must bring it for every student.
Rafiela asks us about our background. She invites us to spend an hour on Wednesday mornings with young students who are too young to attend school or are too handicapped to be mainstreamed. She additionally asks us to spend Tuesday afternoons at 4 to work with the older kids after they have returned from classes outside the orphanage. White Oprah keeps nodding her head yes without consultation from her number one fan. Then Rafiela wonders if we would be able to help with Saturday’s field trip to the water park two miles from our condo. You can guess Nunez’s response.
After my spontaneous life has been shredded, Rafiela gives us the grand tour. The orphanage has about twenty elementary aged students. All of them sleep in the same room with the exact same wildly colored bedspreads. The school has only three boys. The oldest is Kevin who is five. Another room hosts six or seven middle school aged to high school aged girls. Boys are farmed out to another orphanage when they are a bit older.
Mexican laws concerning orphans differ from ours. If a child is taken away from a family to reside in an orphanage and the parents sign this child away, the family may never be able to reconnect. If a parent asks the state to care for their child, they may reconnect at a later date. In this particular orphanage most of the children are orphans and will be so until they are adults. Some of the children have been removed from their homes due to physical or substance abuse issues. A few of the children come from such poverty stricken families parents have asked the orphanage to care for them. In one case a father, whose wife deserted him with four children, comes to see his three year old son on his only day off every week.
Tuesday arrives, and a young girl escorts us into the office. Rafiela informs me I have Kevin to play ball with, and that the other boy I should be working with Tino is ill. Kevin greets me, takes my hand, and leads me outside. The court yard has several trees down courtesy of Hurricane Rick and I spy a small basketball court. This I can do. Kevin begins to dribble a small, rubber ball and waits for me to defend him. I feint at him and steal the ball. I put up a shot that wildly bounds away. Kevin snags it and attacks the basket. He can’t shoot well, so I rebound it. I try to show him the mechanics of a shot. He wants no part of that. He just wants to play. What am I to say? I don’t speak enough Spanish to convince him otherwise.
So we played until the ball bounded off into some bushes. Kevin knew immediately that this ball had died. A sticker punctured it. He held it and squeezed it for five minutes until every vestige of air evaporated. What next? I looked around for another ball. A dead basketball lay in one corner of the yard. I did find a smaller rubber ball that would function better as a softball. No bat….no problem, Kevin found a stick. I showed him a batter’s stance. He ignored that and climbed up a plastic playground house with a slide. He straddled the slide, I pitched him the ball, he hit it, and I chased after it. I knew the Spanish word for ready (listo) and could get his focus when I returned from retrieving the ball. I would say it deep throated until he screamed it at me and then I pitched. Wham and off I went again and again and again.
The noise we created inspired a curious Poblano, a seven year old bright eyed pistol of a girl, who joined us. I even knew that lista was appropriate for feminine creatures. They hit, I chased. Forty-five minutes into my hour, Nunez popped her head into the courtyard. I was drenched in sweat. We were both exhausted. My appreciation for Sharon’s thirty years in elementary schools skyrocketed.
The next morning I drove Nicole and Sharon to the school, dropped them off, and took off for an hour and a half. Kevin was in school and Tino was still sick. I wandered around to gawk at the tourists (two cruise ships had arrived in the night). The Pacifico Brewery was a few blocks away, so I checked out all of these gringos walking in and out with their guides. I asked for information and discovered that they have three free tours a day at 9, 11, and 2. But you have to wear long pants and covered shoes. So these pasty white gringos wear an outfit completely and utterly inappropriate for Mexico in late October so they can drink one free beer. Then the rest of their day they will sweat, incur athlete’s foot, and be miserable. It’s an eighty cent beer for Crimenee sakes.
I slip into watch the last fifteen minutes of Nicole’s and Sharon’s work. I am impressed. They have the girls engaged, but they are still relieved to see to escort them home. When we slide into the car and I compliment them, they howl. I caught the only redeeming moment of their efforts. The girls had been utterly chaotic until I had wandered in. We chatted about each of the children and their individual needs and characteristics. We would all learn a great deal more on Saturday.
* * *
No one can prepare a person for eight hours with twenty orphans at a water park. Seven adults (one adult is a 47 year old deaf mute and has lived her entire life in this orphanage), and the children boarded three red trucks that are Toyota trucks with long benches, wood slats for back support and safety, and an open roof. The half hour ride along the malecon elicited shrieks of joy and pointed fingers, ”Playa!!!” (Spanish for Beach) I sat next to Kevin who yelled incessantly at the girls in the other trucks. Just seeing the girls riding in other trucks excited him. The drivers played their music loudly. Now I have ridden in these trucks before and the music has always suited gringo tastes. The music selections now were mixed between Michael Jackson and the Mambo Kings. The older girls danced and rocked in their truck. Kevin pointed at them and every sight that caught his fancy. This experience put a whole new meaning to bouncing off the walls. I did not know that this trip was an annual one, and the only one the orphanage takes each year.
The trucks ran right past our condominium complex, but not Nicole, Sharon or I would bring to their attention that we reside there as the distinction between life styles was either too embarrassing to admit or too surreal to comprehend. We trucked on bouncing and singing. The adults and older children helped put the wrist bands on. Rafiela set up camp at a shaded central location and issued directions for the day. I took Kevin off to the little kids slide area where the water was too deep for him and way too shallow for me. Since he hesitated to ride down any slides, I put a reluctant wide eyed lad on my lap and shot down the chutes to a wet conclusion. Since Kevin sat in front, he took the brunt of the splash. I just continued to bruise my ass and heels. Early in the morning I had a revelation to let him ride all the slides on his own. His trepidation was acute, but he loved to chase the girls, walk up the slides backwards, but he wouldn’t go down any slides. He finally found a couple wuzzy slides that he could negotiate without splashing too much upon landing.
Lunch arrived none too soon for the adults. Massive amounts of cerviche, macaroni salad, and a tuna cake (tuna spread on thick, white bread) constituted what served as our lunch and dinner meals. A variety of sugary soda pop options provided an attractive venue for what proved to be by late afternoon massive amounts of yellow jackets.
Nicole and Sharon took their somewhat older girls to my same section of the park. Their girls raced about and terrorized every slide and kept looking for more adventure. This adventure turned out to be a mad dash to a pool some significant distance away where the teenagers held court. Nicole and Sharon took off after them and had to go into the water to retrieve two extremely unhappy girls. Rafiela put them in a time out, and they sobbed in Nicole’s and Sharon’s arms. In the mean time Kevin started to take greater risks in his slide selection. He started to enjoy the water more and many of the children acted as alligators as the water level encouraged it. Nicole must have spent two or three hours doing the same. Sharon and I refrained.
Kevin finally lost steam and sought out the refuge of the eating area. Rafiela told me not to let him back in the water as he was fighting a cough. This suited me as I now could hang out in the shade and sit. The one distraction for me proved to be Kevin’s next source of entertainment. Yellow jackets fought each other off on every discarded plastic cup that had contained sugary soda. Kevin grabbed fresh plastic cups and imprisoned yellow jackets. He must have put over fifty cups over single yellow jackets. Being allergic to bee stings, watching this activity created a creepy trepidation for me. I tried not to be a scaredy-cat.
At some point I wandered over to talk to Sharon at the pool. On the way a bee flew into my eye and my eye lid pressed it against my eye. I freaked. I swatted away. I whisked a bottle of water from Sharon’s hand and washed my eye out feverishly. I did not have my epheneferine with me to inject so I sped over to Rafiela and told her we were going home to get the medicine from our condo. I gave Nicole my car key so she could drive home. Sharon and I walked out into the street seeking a cab that we waved down. On the elevator ride I looked into the mirror and told Sharon that I wasn’t sure if I had been stung because I no longer could feel any swelling or pain. I iced it. I was fine. Visions of an exploding eye started to slowly disappear. What do we do now?
So I got on the internet to see how Oregon State fared against UCLA, and like most of Beaver Nation I exhaled a sense of relief that they had prevailed 26-19. The Oregon-USC game would begin in thirty minutes. A cocktail party invite rested on the kitchen table. A Halloween party beckoned. We had escaped. So how come I felt so crummy? After ten minutes we walked back down to the street, hailed a red truck, and walked back into the water park.
At closing time everyone gathered up the gear, put away the trash through a maze of bees, and boarded three red trucks. These kids should be exhausted. But no. They dance around just as much on the way back to the orphanage as they did on the way to the park. We carried the gear back inside, said our goodbyes, and revved up the Toyota. On the way home we talked about our experiences. We were impressed how the older children do such a great job of taking care of the younger ones. We laughed at how spoiled our children were at this age, as these kids don’t ask people to take care of them. They just take care of themselves, no questions asked. Rafiela handles all disputes with a calming presence that is saint like. Some of the volunteers for this trip were former students who brought their own children. Rafiela says that most of the former students check in to visit. Rafiela told us the first day that she thought it was important for us to model a husband and wife. That it would be good for the kids. What Rafiela didn’t tell us was how much the way the kids acted would be good for us as well. I remembered the embrace and kiss each child received and shared with the woman in charge of their evenings upon their return. This is a unique family, but it is a family. These kids are loved and love each other.