Today I am overcome by the poverty around me. Before, I knew that the kids I worked with lived in poverty, in unsanitary conditions, with scarce resources and sometimes not enough food. But it was an abstract idea, something I could push out of my head because I hadn’t seen the concrete reality. Today I saw it.
I’ve known Gladys for the last two years. Gladys is a beautiful, giving person. She takes time away from selling bread (her livelihood) to help the practicum students here make home visits. Gladys takes time when I can’t understand to explain the concept in different (Spanish) words so that I will understand. Gladys chooses to work with disabled and handicapped children (teaching art), even though it can’t pay enough to make a living. Gladys lives in conditions that would be condemned in the U.S. Until the All Saints group built her a bathroom this summer, she didn’t have one. The floors are mostly dirt, and she showered under a faucet, outside, surrounded by black plastic rigged up to provide the smallest amount of privacy. Gladys’ oldest daughter went to the hospital for a minor illness, contracted meningitis, and was the only one of the four patients in her room to survive. She survived as a disabled, mentally retarded child. Gladys, her three children, her sister Teresa and Teresa’s children all live with their parents. Her dad abuses the children, but Gladys has nowhere else to live. She can’t afford to move out on her own, and she can’t trust anyone else to watch her handicapped daughter. And so she makes the best with what she has, and she smiles. It’s heart wrenching. How could I complain because I thought that my kitchen was mismatched??? Her kitchen isn’t even indoors.
Yadira, whose home I wrote about in a previous entry, smiles, has a crush on a schoolmate, and runs around playing with her siblings. Their bedroom was barely even indoors before the group rebuilt and fortified it this summer. The whole family (mom, dad, 3 children) sleeps in two beds in the same room.
Franklin is not only deaf, but has serious learning disabilities. Franklin and his family (mom, dad, and older twin brothers) live in a tiny shack in the backyard of their extended family. They don’t even have a mattress on their bed – just the frame. Franklin’s mom just bought a new stove to cook for the family on credit. It’s inside the bedroom, with everything else they own. Outside, she cooks in a huge stone oven for the local bakery. Hopefully she earns enough money to make the payments for the stove. She gave us gifts for visiting – a family who can barely survive and make enough money to eat, gave the Americans each a little bag of sweets that she had made that morning.
Freddy’s mom may or may not live with him. You have to walk a winding path just to get to the house that they share with their extended family. His family says that he can hardly wait all day just to go to school. I gave him the sweets that I had not eaten, and he just held them. Freddy’s aunt offered her new baby to us – she honestly would have just given him up if we could take him back to the U.S.
I don’t know how to express the heartbreak I see all around me. I could hardly keep from sobbing as we toured these houses. How could I care so much about the ugly shade of yellow in my bathroom? These people don’t have the luxury of paint – they are trying to keep their walls from falling down as the rain soaks the cardboard holding up the roof. To have a house made of wood and cement is something they simply can’t afford on their own.
How do I reconcile this? How do I come back to the States and live my cushy American life, knowing that conditions won’t get any better down here? How does life go on while these innocents continue to suffer?
Listen to The Innocent’s Corner on Share the Well by Caedmon’s Call if you can. There is hope somehow, in all of this. As hard as it is to see, I’m glad that I could see it all. Even if it was just to snap me out of my selfishness and greedy list of needs. Hopefully I will resist the selfish tendencies that usually encompass my life and instead focus on helping these children and families to achieve at least a decent standard of living and an education.
|  | 
|
