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I woke up early and walked to work in half-light. I could see my breath and my feet in front of me. I had my jacket zipped up to my neck. The Hogar is quiet in the morning. It´s a whisper compared to its daytime bedlam. The boys gathered their bookbags and put on their long white coats that are the uniform in Argentina. I gulped my tea and herded the 9 labcoats out the door. When we got to the schoolhouse doors, I bent down to receive my goodbye-kisses and wish them a good day.
I love back-to-school time. The air is cleaner. Kids are in love with their pencils. They are toting around their backpacks from room to room even though they don´t have homework yet. They are dreaming of having homework. They downright crave school.
In the Hogar, the new season brought many changes. Almost all of the kids are new. We have two new staff people. I´m now a veteran, a knowledgeable person.
Among the new kids are a group of four brothers. Lucas, Matías, Esteban, and Rodrigo range from 11 to 5 years old. When they arrived, they were all in bad shape. The neglect was evident. They looked thin and undernourished. The younger two had open sores on their skin from infections.
Those first few weeks, Lucas cried everyday. Esteban often joined him by lying on the sidewalk with his head on his arms. Rodrigo, a little boy I can only describe as ¨bulldog-beautiful,¨ barely talked those first few weeks. I had to practice with him daily just to get a word or two out of him. And Matías, well, Matías never stops smiling.
Though we´ve welcomed many new boys before, this group of brothers compares to no other group. Their emotions were more raw and visible. They marvelled over the presence of food. They gained weight before my eyes. Their sores went away, and they stopped scratching at lice. For the first time in their lives, they enrolled in school. I watched their lives improve in a matter of weeks.
I often get down about the work that the Hogar does. We do not do everything well. We don´t do all we could. But I have to remind myself that the Hogar is often a world better than where the boys come from.
Two weeks ago, I went to a town far outside the city with an older boy who needed to retrieve his clothes. As he walked around the town´s dirt roads, greeting his friends, visiting his family, I was in tow. I drank super-sweet coffee with his Aunt. I told her her nephew is a big help in the kitchen at the Hogar and she nodded. One little cousin was wearing sunglasses and karate-chopping the air, the other just looked at me, smiled, and giggled. When we went to leave, his grandmother walked over with the aid of a cane so we both could kiss her goodbye.
Sometimes it still strikes me as strange, my intimate intersecting with these lives. For a morning, I saw his whole life as it used to be. His school, his family, the restaurant where he used to cook. The ugliness of his situation. The ties he has to family and friends.
We left empty-handed. His older sister had already taken everything of value from the house. There were no clothes, no furniture, no plates in the cupboards. Mariano just shrugged. ¨There are clothes at the Hogar,¨ I told him. He found a sweater his sister didn´t take, rolled it up, and walked out the front door of his former home. He didn´t bother closing it behind him when he left.
I struggle with not-enoughness. What I do is not enough. What there is is not enough. Not enough meat at dinner for seconds. Not enough staff to care for the kids. Not enough time- just three and a half months left. Not enough faith to actually believe that God, not Andrew, is supposed to fix the world and the Hogar and me.
Today was a good day despite the crying and the throwing of rocks and the hitting. There was studying and hugging and messy eating that leaves a circle of tomato sauce around the mouth. I´m always amazed at how much I can love the Hogar and hate it at the same time. In the midst of my daily frustration, I can lose sight of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is this: Rodrigo speaks in whole sentences now. Lucas is learning to read more rapidly than any boy I´ve ever seen. Esteban still lies down on the sidewalk to cry, but he also plays marbles and does his homework. And Matías smiles. When I see Mariano, he´s often wearing Jorge´s clothes, and I know why. This is all good. All this is enough. It has to be.
Peace,
Andrew
