Orphans

I look at this picture sometimes when I am feeling sorry for myself. This is a group of little girls living in a Muslim orphanage about an hour east of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I spent a very nice afternoon there a few years ago while working with a American philanthropist who was helping poor schools throughout East Africa and Asia. I was doing a site visit, checking on the school that had received educational resources through the foundation and was afforded a tour. I stopped here in their dorm room for about twenty minutes. The young ladies introduced themselves, and then sang me three songs: one in English, one in Swahili, and one in Arabic at my request (translated - We love you Allah). It was hard to leave, but one of them walked me to the gate, holding my hand making sure I found my way back to the Landrover. I think of her and her friends often, not only in my pitiful moods.
All in all, I lived and worked with and in orphanages for more than five years of my life, and I have visited scores more. A funny thing happens when you visit an orphanage, you leave feeling better than you entered. They who have so little can do that for you. However, there is always a hangover.
I don't know if you have ever been in a refugee camp or an orphanage in the third world, but they are far from attractive places. They are stark and bare, often smell of urine and worse things, and are as far away from the comfort you would afford yourself as you could possibly imagine. And as unfriendly as the concrete walls,thread-worn linen, and tattered mattresses can be, the lack of a mother's arms, a father's stern, soft strength makes the place worse than dead, worse than a nightmare populated with cruelties - a place where life ceases or never even begins. Yet these children survive, and become testaments to all that is good and holy in the human spirit, at a terrible, terrible cost. I have been "blessed" with this lesson over and over again, and I loathe the fact I forget it, no matter how temporarily.
I stumbled on my first job in an orphanage in Jamaica as a Peace Corps Volunteer. My primary assignment didn't work out so I was sent to Montego Bay to find something. After talking to several service agencies, I learned about a boy's home on the edge of town, inhabiting an old tourist hotel overlooking the airport. I have chronicled my fortuitous job interview elsewhere, and I did end up working there for a year as the full-time teacher, and another year as a PE instructor and occasional field trip supervisor. I don't remember what I taught them or where I took them, but I remember their faces twenty five years later, and am saddled with the loss that I didn't hug or hold them as I should have. No one did, the matrons were decent women, but were overworked and underpaid, and struggled with their own survival issues. The occasional slap or spanking, or knuckle sandwich provided by an older peer were what passed for physical intimacy at the Fairmont Boy's Home. The boys were friendly and good-natured, but I knew there was a toll for this deficit of love. And in two years, I saw some beautiful smiles fade gradually, and I could do nothing to resurrect that bit of their humanity, nothing.
After a year's sabbatical back in the states, I returned to the Peace Corps and spent two years living and working in an Eritrean refugee camp on the shores of the Red Sea in Yemen. In training, I learned of the camp and did everything I could, lobbying to be assigned in the nearby village of Khawkha. It was in the Tihama, the narrow coastal region of North Yemen: hot, harsh, and humid. The Ministry of Education balked at first, not wanting to send any westerners into that climate, least of all to a small village with poor electric and other basic services. Though, with the help of a few wonderful Peace Corp Yemeni staff, we eventually secured permission and I was off to one of the hottest, remote places in the Arabian gulf.
The refugees were Muslims from the southern tip of Eritrea, a small minority of Afar speaking tribes. I helped another volunteer build a school in the camp, and was allowed to move into one of the small shacks previously occupied by the camp doctor (another story - see "Where There is no Doctor"). I stayed there the first year, and lived in an eight foot by eight foot tent the second year. I had the benefit of a year's reflection on my first experience in Jamaica, and was resolved to do things differently on this trip. I did do things differently, had a wonderful and heartbreaking time, contracted malaria three times, and left the camp with jaundiced eyes and a mild case of hepatitis.
I knew from the beginning that hygiene was going to be a problem. There was no running water in the camp, no toilet paper, not even a bathroom facility - there were trees a half-mile away in the day time, and a sandy, rocky plain next door at night. The kids played all day in dirt, and as there was no washroom let alone the sign admonishing us to wash our hands afterwards, things were sometimes messy. When the children came into my shack each night to hear music or play with my long (then brown) hair, I knew what was on their hands, knew where they had been. I played with them, taught them, laughed with them, cried sometimes, and gave more of myself to these children than anyone previously in my life. We sang songs at night, drawing pictures in the sand, and they all learned how to spell M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i in the dirt (I had a fairly stunted musical repertoire). They laughed until they cried when I showed them how to jump rope in my Tihama skirt, and they astounded me with their patience as they shared the few pieces of chalk I could spirit away from the village school. I made the girls earrings from seashells and a generous donation of components from a sweet young woman at the Claire's Boutique in South Bend, Indiana who thought I was cute (another story).
I know I was a queer spectacle for the adults who were pretty much split down the middle in their regard for me. Half thought I was crazy but kind, the other half despised me for breaching the established distance of adulthood. I didn't care, I was determined to make sure that these children had access to me, and that I learned to hug and love in the process. It was a good lesson for me, and I wish I could have retained it better, longer. There are times I wonder if I have made my own daughters half-orphans at least, doing a much worse job loving them than those children a lifetime ago, but I am working on it now. As for the kids in the camp, I try not to think of their faces now at night, for the warm smile produced is inevitably defeated by the cold cruel prospect of their eventual fate.
I travelled thousands of miles to find my concept of dignity in the desert dirt. These people, orphans, children and parents, showed me what was human - having been stripped of most everything the rest of us regard and lust after. Their simple sense of truth, endless compassion, and ability to face each day with strength and humor taught me what is valuable. I sorrows me that this wealth is assailed daily by neglect, disease, and apathy in thousands of such places every day, even today. How many children still face the day without a hug, without a smile, without a pair of pardoning arms to forgive or fix anything? Too many for me to feel very good for too long.
I still work with refugees and orphans, largely through teacher training initiatives. I don't often get into camps, and I never get to jump rope or spell funny sounding state names in the dirt anymore. But there is a legacy - I work a lot on the concept of student engagement, helping teachers help students find their voices. I talk a great deal about praise and acknowledgment, much more than classroom management and discipline. I know the difference these teachers can have with a kind word, a gentle pat on a shoulder. I try to do the same for them, these wonderful professionals who labor day in and day out in these places I find so dehumanizing, giving their students and children love and hope in the guise of a simple education. I envy them, and wish my five years had been fifty.