"Once there was a way to get back homeward..."

I left the site that hosted the single-most well-rounded feeling of contentment I've experienced in I'm not sure how long sobbing almost silently into my left-hand, and with an extremely poorly executed goodbye.  I forgot to tell Sirikeow, the 8 year-old girl I had befriended by slipping her mango from our dinner under the table, that I was leaving, and the primary memory I have of leaving Baan Dada is her standing behind the truck, hunched over and looking at me with complete confusion and anger.  The last few days at Baan Dada she and I were scarcely apart.  Despite having a mother, who albeit can't take care of her at this junction, she says "You motha for me" and points at her self with her thumb in her shockingly deep voice.  She calls me mommy which I discourage by insisting that she is MY mommy, but this does not work.  One of my favorite moments of the trip was finding her asleep outside the door of my hut after I woke up for a nap.  She had come up wanting to hang out and Amit and I had pretended to be asleep because we did actually want to be asleep.  We thought she'd left but she never did.  I spent this whole experience grappling with the complications of having short-term volunteers coming in and out of these kids lives and the appropriate dynamic for having relationships with the children, yet I made the cruelest and most poorly planned departure imaginable.  I have no idea if I am overvaluing or undervaluing the weight of my departure on these kids' lives, but needless to say I feel like crap.  I miss Baan Dada unspeakably, and can't stop thinking of myself as just another white face that has come and gone.  All that aside, I can't overstate how much fun I had, how much I want to go back, and how inspired I was by Dada to maybe one day do something similar.

I don't feel like I'm travelling anymore.  It feels like my trip ended when I left Amit in Bangkok because at every step this trip was something that we were doing together and at the point where that ceased to be true, this turns into something else.  I am in Hong Kong now in this very awkward space between 'the trip' and whatever it is my life will be in New York, unsure if this kindof suspension between a new reality and an old one is good for cooling off or just cooking up anxiety.  The trip is over though it doesn't feel premature, or as if it flew by, but I did forget that there was anything in the world outside of Amit and I trying to figure out what we were going to do that day or the next. And now that he is not here, I am ready to go home.  I hate the last blog because I always would rather be descriptive than reflective but that should do it for now; all that is left is to reflect on when the next posted date will be, and contemplate my return.

Here is something a little unusual...

The Story of My Feet:
The day after a group of Canadian volunteers from a women's college came to Baan Dada, reminding all too much of a somehow less offensive version of the IHPer's special brand of cultural insensitivity abroad, the remaining four volunteers (myself, amit, erin, and martin) decided we needed beer.  The rule is that being a Margi institution and all, if you want to drink you can do so in town but you can't come back to Baan Dada that night.  So we stayed at a guest house in town just to have a little time off and a little Singha.  Anyhow to make an already long story short, when walking back to the room, I tripped and the entire weight of my body came down on the side of my foot, and my right palm leaving a compact puddle of crying Andie on the floor for Amit to find on his way back from the bathroom.  No broken bones but residual pain, bruising, stiffness and trouble walking.

Earlier that week: While walking through the goat pen to collect compost buckets and stare fondly and lovingly at the baby goats, I stepped on a piece of wood pointing up out of the ground leaving me with a puncture wound in the big toe on the same foot that would soon be all but broken.  I found Amit who was still planting Tamarind trees nearby and strolled up with a flip flop full of blood.

Next injury.  While back in Bangkok, and walking around Jatu Jak (biggest market in world) with Amit who could only manage to do so by keeping his cheeks clenched to prevent the explosive bowel issues he was having from forcing us to by him new clothes, a little old Thai lady in a woven fisherman's hat pushed an extremely heavy cart full of god knows what over the same foot.  More bruising.  More pain.  Extreme distaste for old people.

Blisters: Second to last night, Erin, the wonderful Evergreen student from Olympia, Washington who I had so much fun with at Baan Dada and who gave me my first ever layered hair cut and I went on a walk up the hill to watch the sunset in some Nike hiking shoes left by the Canadians.  The rather mild blister aquired has turned into an infected, puss-oozing, cesspool, providing the foundation for another blister I acquired from borrowing Meg's brown boots so that I could look good for an dim sum luncheon with her married, blond, British friends that was so exorbitantly expensive that it would have made Amit crap his pants even AFTER he got over the traveler's diarrhea thing he had.

Adding insult to injury: My flip flops were "borrowed" by an unidentified child at Baan Dada never to be returned so all I had for shoes was a pair of purple Thai house shoes also left by the Canadians after two days of use that were two sizes too big, and are really wanting for arch support.  Couple days on my feet, often toting my pack, and I've got shooting pains in my angles to compliment the shooting pains in my tarsals, metatarsals, heels and big toes.  The foot injury I was nursing in Kansas City late last year, has also decided to resurface with some purple bruising. I don't even think I need to go into detail about the state of my toenails.

The End.

Sawadee Kha and Until soon,

Andie

The New Great Wall of China (a firewall that prevents the chinese people from accessing video sharing websites and other forms of email and online information networks like wikipedia) has determined that my blog is innappropriate content for the eyes of chinese readers so it blocked it.  Now that I am in Hong Kong, though I've been here for a week, I can finally publish something of what I've been up to the last couple weeks.

In a surprsising turn of events, our flight out of Japan to Shanghai had been canceled due to maintenance, an advantageous position in the airline perks world that had Amit salivating at the mouth.  We quickly browsed through all the other places that we could've gotten a free flight for then and there and settled on Beijing because we didn't drop $130 dollars on Chinese Visas just to decorate the passport.  So off we went to Beijing with an airport provided hotel and breakfast that they didnt technically have to provide awaiting us on the other end.  We knew we were really someplace quite different when amit decided to steal a small hand towel from the hotel room to wrap up a donut he borrowed from the all-you-can-eat-here buffet, and seconds later the desk agent at check out inquired, "where small towel?" and amit had to go run and "locate" the small towel that had somehow made its way "under the bed."  No more stealing in China.

In Beijing I was visited by three very dear old friends:  food poisoning,  culture shock, and seasonal depression.  Since everybody loves diarrhea/vomit stories I'll start there first.  A liter bottle of Tsingtao in China costs approximately 40 to 60 cents even with restaurant markup, so after pouring two of those on top of a steamed sweet potato I got off a bucket on rolling street cart and a pizza from a questionable travellers cafe, and getting blatantly and bluntly hit on by the only Mexican dude in China, I had an all night vomit fest that left a ring of splatter around around every possible recepticle within puking distance from my hostel bed.  Amit's sleep was more or less undisturbed and I was mostly better the next day.

Then came culture shock. Hadn't seen this one in a while.  We're talking irrational contempt for your surroundings, feelings of wanting to escape, putting familiar things on pedastals and asserting their superiority...all that jazz.  I think most of it was rooted in the fact that people in China just do NOT speak english with any consistency so never have I felt so totally and completely inept.  The best english speakers we found in China were very well-educated chinese university students running what foreigners call "tea scams" in Tiananmen Square, where they approach you and talk to you, invite you to a few pots of tea which you find cost around $70 each and next thing you know your smacked with a 250 dollar bill they get a comission off of and an urgent need to pee.  We avoided this like pros but did get caught up in buying a 13 dollar painting of a pig somehow from some "art students" who brought us to their art exhibition.  Aside from the frustration, we found ourselves excited by China, the hustle and bustle, the street culture, how cheap everything is.  It was quite a contrast to block after block of trendy people, vending machines, and places that look like time square.  Though in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics, China has issued 7 changes that the people of Beijing should make to become more agreeable to Westerners like me.  They have to stop spitting in the streets, tucking their shirts up into their armpits on hot days, littering, cursing loudly and profanely in the streets and they have to start lining up more for subways and buses like in Japan.  Based on my short experience in Beijing, the Chinese government will never be successful in accomplishing these tasks, and most certainly not by September.  It amazes me that the Olympic committee was impressed enough with Beijing to select it for the summer games as it was offered up by the people of  China but now has to undergo a good thorough cultural cleansing.

Amit mysteriously appeared at my side as I was asking a Northwest ticketing representative if the 9:00 from Asheville had arrived.  It had and there he was...exhausted, because turns out he DID need the passport of his that I had in my purse to get on that leg of the flight, and he had also left his wallet at home, thus holding up the entire flight as his mom scrambled home to retrieve the wallet and higher authorities were consulted on the passport issue.  He had to leave almost immediately to go recheck his bag as I waited amid desperate calls of "Passenger Amit Dorf, Please report to gate 34A immediately!"  Just in case I forgot for a minute WHO I was travelling with, I was granted a very blunt reminder.

The flight was long and boring despite 90 minutes of Ratatouille, and the excitement of being glared at by a Japanese girl ahead of me who's seat I kept kicking inadvertantly, who I would be willing to bet even surprised herself by how hatefilled her eyes could be.  Amit's fried Maddie was there at the gate waiting for us. THank you sweet lord!  I love her because she makes fun of Amit in the ways I wish I could but would undoubtedly piss him off.  Due to some poor calculations on my part, I completely forgot about the whole international date line thing, and told the guy we were staying with we'd be arriving a day earlier, so we were left up to our own devices last night.  Amit's friend Nao made us a reservation at a hostel in a part of Tokyo that looks like a peculiar mix of Brooklyn and Brookline, where our hotel was vended to us in a vending machine that also sold bath towels, toothbrushes, shaving equipment and shampoo.  Boys and girls were accomadated only in separate rooms on separate floors that are password protected so Amit and I had to stay apart which must make you happy Dad! haha.

Maddy and Nao took us to dinner at a Japanese-style Western dinner where it looked as though they were selling caricatures of American favorites like salisbury steaks and ice cream.  Amit and I had pizza, instead of a more traditional Japanese noodle dish for the sake of irony and the sake of Meg (no pineapple, boo), though we are committed to hitting Japanese cuisine hard and fast today.

Here are some stats on our first impressions of Tokyo:

-Best thing about Japan: There are BEER VENDING MACHINES.  Pretty much everywhere.  We were made aware of this by a Temple University student here on exchange whose primary mission was to break into the Japanese soft gay porn industry.  Turns out the weirdest thing about Japanese culture are the weird-ass Americans who come here.

-Myth-busted: Everyone speaks English in Tokyo.  False False False.

-Myths-certifiable: Subways are virtually silent.  People queue up in an orderly fashion to get in them unless there is a rush and then people push each other.  All billboards are cartoons.  Asian porn is plentiful, accessible and grrrrrossssss.

Today we are going to go find the dude we are staying with for the rest of the time.  It is extremely expensive to get around this city, and just as confusing for a first timer.  So this should be an expensive adventure.

In other news Amit just realized that this is the fatherland of Ninja Warrior and Most Xtreme Elimination Challenge. He is happiest I've seen him so far.

Hasta luego,
Andie

Vamos vamos vamos vamos adelante

Para que salgamos en la lucha avante

Porque nuestra patria grita y necessita

De todos los esfuerzos de los Zapatistas

 -Zapatista Hymn

San Cristóbal de las Casas for one week consisted of going to the market everyday for the food Katie and I cooked each night, and going to whatever bar every night to make up for those silly Zapatistas banning alcohol from the autonomous zones. We discovered how very small the community of patronage is for nightlife in small, colonial, tourist paradises with revolutionary undercurrents. We spent the week feeding the different people we met from the encuentro as one by one the spanish mullet/wrapped dred clad encuentro attendees would filter back to their respective collectives in New York City, Mexico City, Spain etc. Last Sunday Katie and I went to Oventic, one of the Zapatista communities where we would be taking classes in Spanish and Tsotsil respectively. We showed up and again, at the entrance, the masked gate keepers and vigilance committee had NO idea why we were there or what the hell we meant by the fact that we would be there for 2 weeks to learn the languages they speak (though for most spanish cannot be counted amongst them). Fortunately we´d been through this process before so we weren´t as flustered by the other spanish students who were tackling the Zapatista bureaucracy for the first time only without the assistance of speaking spanish given that they are there to LEARN it. So once the Good Government Board stamps a little peice of paper with your name mispelled on it, you hoble down the hill to the BEAUTIFULLY painted Autonomous Rebellious Secondary School, and to the dormitory where we are living. 4 wooden bunks with beds composed of 4 wooden planks surrounded by wooden plank walls (covered in revolutionary murals) with strips of tape keeping the wind from coming in through the cracks.

Oventic is exceptional. It is high up in the mountains and when you walk down past all the cooperative artisan stores and good government boards you see enormous jungle covered hills for miles, and sunsets that are as diverse and as breathtaking as the Zapatistas that inhabit those hills. Every evening after a few hours of sunshine, the clouds roll in and by roll in I mean a cloud rolls over the caracol and we spend the afternoon and evening IN cloud, which prompts the same constant stream of observations. "Man is it cloud today." "Gee it´s hard to know if it is raining when you are IN the thing that precipitates. The nights are extremely cold, but I fixed the zipper on my sleeping bag so its not too bad.

We have a pretty good cast of characters that are students at the school. A 30 year-old alternative school history teacher from Wisconsin with an arsenal of tank tops, tons of rainbow accessories who likes women, but more than that he loves pot, and talks about it constantly; a 22 year-old Wobly organizer who salts at Starbucks, who we affectionately call Growth Spurt because despite having the circumfrence of a broom handle, eats like a maniac. Then there is Xanex (aka Nicolas), my personal fav, a Northwestern Law School student who almost never eats and is never hungry due perhaps to his rather large stockpile of the aforementioned drug. He is hellbent on increasing the appreciation for english in one of our teachers, Inés, by quoting Shakespeare and Keats to her everytime he sees her despite her only english language knowledge being "no english." I told him he should just learn spanish instead. Then there is a Swiss family of 4. Andrea and Andreus the parents, and their two kids who only speak (i mean YELL) in German all the time, and whose names I don´t remember becuase why bother if we have no real way to communicate. Another unimposing Swiss lady named Corrine, and finally a trio from Temple University, who are seemingly more interested in being in America because they constantly talk about how much they miss REAL food and REAL beds somewhere else. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THIS PLACE IS? FAKE? They don´t like anything, and the girl, Dolores, which means pains in spanish and is hence quite appropriate is made sick by the smell of corn tortillas which makes me wonder WHY THE FUCK SHE CAME TO THE PLACE WHERE CORN WAS DOMESTICATED FIRST IN THE WORLD AND ON WHICH THE PEOPLE HAVE SURVIVED AND THRIVED FOR ABOUT NINE MILLENIA. I have little patience for this. She and Mike the teacher hooked up Friday night once we got back to alcohol. Quite a crew. We should be getting a couple new people this week. Hopefully they won´t make comments about missing Taco Bell.

Then there is Natalio. Natalio is my Tsotsil teacher. We have two hours of class per day and then later we have some kind of communal activity, where I do or don´t get to use a little bit of the Tsotsil I have learned. Natalio is a 22 year old Zapatista promotor (spanish for promoter of education, used by the zapatistas instead of the world "teacher" which implies a one way exchange) who has been teaching tsotsil to gringos like me for 3 years and plays on a Zapatista basketball team. (the zapatistas LOVE basketball. who cares if none of them exceeds 5 foot 3. if they are all short it doesn´t so much matter.) He is beautiful, brilliant, patient, and hopefully not the only reason I´ve fallen so deeply in love with learning the language. Katie calls him dreamlips. He has greased-back jetblack hair with one little piece that falls to the front, and loves to sit around and think and gaze. Whenever you catch his eyes it just kindof knocks you over for a second. I am the only Tsotsil student so our classes are a mix of learning new words and conjugations, and telling me stories that his grandparents used to tell him.

Learning a new language in a language that you don´t speak natively can be hard as hell, but at the same time has been one of the most exciting things I´ve done in a long time. I study more for this than I did for most things in college because he teaches me what I want to know, not what he thinks I should know. One day our activity was to meet with the Zapatistas that took over the government building in San Andres Larrainzar. I introdced myself to them in Tsotsil. Te oyoxuk. Ja´ jvi Xantel. Talemun ta los Estados Unidos. Literal translation. You are here. My name is Andrea. I am from the United States. Natalio told me that because they didnt laugh when I said it that I pronounced it well and they were impressed. Most gratifying thing ever. We also went and asked prices of things in one of the women´s artisan cooperatives. Speaking to an indigenous person in their native language is fucking awesome. One of my favorite lessons was when he was teaching me the numbers, and we are clipping along til he gets to 20, and he tells me that it literally translates to "one man." He says, "you want to know why?" and he holds up one hand "one two three four five" and then another "one two three four five" and then says the same for each foot. "One man." Twenty fingers and toes. Sigh. 40 is two men. 60 is three, and 22 is one man and 2 borrowed from another man. Sigh again.

Katie and I had this incredible day yesterday where we went to the market for breakfast to our favorite little stall, and then went to the Mayan Medicine Museum and on the way we kindof tripped into a a little indigenous language book and music infoshop in the corner of a furntiure store, and I spoke to the man running the store in tsotsil and bought a book of tsotsil stories. I thought life couldnt get better until we got to the museum which had a whole room about Mayan birth and midwifery, and a movie of a Mayan woman giving birth. The tradition is for the woman to give birth on her knees with her husbands arms wrapped around her. After that we went to the market to buy food for the night, which everytime feels like the market in Guatemala, and I feel really at home. One more week of Mexico and Tsotsil classes. We head back to Oventic this afternoon.

One more week of singing revolutionary Zapatista songs, and eating delicious corn tortillas, and not quite understanding why I get to do all of these incredible things all the time. Expect a nice little gushy, nostalgic sign off before I´m headed back homeword this weekend. I don´t quite believe that the homestretch is here again.

Tek Oyanik,

Xantel (andrea)

Here is a story I wrote a few days ago.  I don´t really have much time for an update but it is beautiful here and I like it a lot.  It´s a long one so don´t feel obligated to read the whole thing.  It gives kindof a glimpse of what I´m up to but I´ll write more later. 

Amor,

Andreita 

Odilia´s voice changed when she spoke to Doña Carmen on the phone.  She transformed from the confident, tough midwife who specialized in either scaring the crap out of you or soothing the baby out of you, to victimized mother of twelve who forgot all words but two, muchas and gracias, and of course Doña Carmen’s name.  Carmen serves who knows what function at the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging.  She had some how come across Odilia´s house as the perfect source of 6-10 year-old orphaned children attending school and capable of making candles and other handicrafts to send to well-meaning Americans with check books and bleeding hearts. Doña Odilia has 12 children, 10 still living with her in her home in a village outside of Tecpán, Guatemala and in January of this year acquired 5 additional mouths to feed after the death of her sister, who oddly, or better, eerily enough, may have died in the bed in which I am now lying.  The father is long gone and Odilia remains the only one with the means to take them in.  The house of her sister and the children is still standing, and by house I mean crumbling cinderblock frame stripped of its laminate roof, about 500 meters from here.  The kids are 15, 13, 6, 4, and 2 and if you take the 6 year-old back to the site of the house, he’ll show you exactly where the kitchen was, his bed and even one of his old shoes that was left behind. 

 

Doña Odilia didn’t know why Doña Carmen wanted her to bring only a couple of orphans and one of her own school-aged children into town into the office of the NGO; just that it was some project that wanted to help poor children trying to go to school.  The combined income of her husband’s chicken bus and microbus service that he provides shuttling people around town and the sale of the vegetables he grows plus her midwife’s salary is enough for them to get by, but she is in no position to turn down a little help. 

 

She had just finished breastfeeding her yet unnamed newborn of 15 days when she hung up the phone.  I had never heard her speak to anyone that way before.  I had never seen her at someone else’s mercy before.  Raising 17 kids on less than what I made at my part-time hostess job per year can’t be easy, but I was angered by the sound of helplessness in the voice of a woman who I’ve seen resuscitate a purple newborn with one hand and coax a reluctant placenta out with another.  She told me we would bring Luisito, the six and the four year-old, and Juana, her seven year-old on Carmen’s recommendations to the office of the foundation at noon the next day to do who knows what.  I inferred from the conversation that she was asked if they had nice clothes to wear, at which point she reminded Carmen that because her sister had left her with nothing to support the kids, she just bought the cheaply made clothes from the market: the t-shirts and underpants that only cost three quetzals (about forty cents U.S).  Solo tres quetzales.  Tres quetzales. Tres quetzales.  As if Doña Carmen was not yet convinced of the perilousness of the situation, Odilia seemed to latch on to clothing prices as the perfect way to paint that picture. 

 

I knew from the second I heard about it that this unnamed project (the name of which was still never formally disclosed to Odilia even after the meeting) was another Save the Children sans Sally Struthers in which a small dollar amount a day would support a bureaucratic institution the size of a small Caribbean country that thrives entirely on monthly contributions and appropriately unfortunate sounding situations.  I wanted to reserve judgment however because at the end of the day, Odilia would still be getting help in who knows what form to take care of these kids with whom I am completely in love.  About twenty minutes before the set appointment time, I peered over the banner of the patio where my room is to see Juana, Odilia´s seven year-old, with her head half way submerged in the water tank and a comb double the length of her head’s diameter slowly making its way through her mess of wet, black hair.  Valentina, the four year-old was dressed to the nines in her traditional Maya skirt and blouse with her hair being aggressively combed into a ponytail.  The end result being the world’s most devastatingly cute little girl who at this point I’d only scarcely ever seen without two straight streams of green snot oozing from each nostril and smudges of dirt accenting her cheeks, forehead, and alternately everywhere else she had exposed skin.

 

The six year-old orphan, Luis, who is nicknamed Patas, was out to pasture with the goats when it was time to hit the town so Odilia grabbed Miguelito, her 3 year-old to go in his place.  The three chosen ones piled into the microbus with excitement; going into town doesn’t happen often for the littler kids.  Unfortunately, Daniel, the 2 year-old, got swept up in the excitement and piled into microbus as well.  The last thing you could hear when pulling out onto the road was the sound of him crying hysterically after his older sister, Sarah, peeled his tiny body from the van.  I wonder if the people who chose to sponsor a kid in a foreign country ever think about the fourteen other kids in the child’s household who don’t get a new sweater and greeting card every Christmas.  The microbus took off towards Tecpán in what I think of as a pothole with some road in it.  They each fought an appropriate amount for their spots next to me or in may lap.  The seatbelt-free seating arrangement slowly but naturally eroded into the most dangerous combination of positions for children to be in in the event of an accident.  I hardly recognized the three eager little faces without their usual layer of all organic makeup. 

 

Around the second bend in the road we came across Patas and two of Odilia´s boys making their way back to the house with the goats.  Santos , Odilia´s husband, rolled down the window and, according to my pathetic command of the Spanish language, tried to coax Patas into the car by telling him that we were going to see his father.  Patas just stood there, fighting the accelerating goats, with his usual unsuspecting smile, a little reluctant and as cute as hell.  Odilia seemed uninterested in pursuing this tactic given that even at six, Patas could figure out that that dude was not coming back, and just barked at Patas to get in the van.  He hoped in, confused, but placid as ever.  She told him to change his dirt streaked t-shirt and clean himself up, thought at the time I didn’t really process that request, so I instinctively grabbed what I thought was a dirty, wet towel on the bench of the bus to smooth his multiple cow licks into conformity.  I pulled his boots off to try and tuck them into his filthy sweat pants but he pulled off his pants too, one step ahead of me, to put on the clean pair of jeans and belt that were sloppily folded next to him.  I hadn’t noticed but, Odilia had put a clean set of clothes and a wet rag in the van for just such an occasion.  With that realization, I abandoned even the mild hesitance I’d previously exercised and began violently wiping dirt and snot off of his face with the rag and went to town on those cow licks.  Why I felt so compelled to make this kid look squeaky clean for the NGO and their digital camera I don’t really understand.  Why did we want them to look clean and well-taken care of?  Isn’t that the opposite of what is expected of a bus full of charity cases?

 

We were late and Santos and Odilia were frantic.  We couldn’t locate the office so Odilia shouted to a lady making roadside snow cones to ask for directions while simultaneously calling the office for guidance.  Once we found the place, I was told to stay behind, immediately angered that my presence as a white girl could in some way injure their chances of charity.  Apparently never showering and having dirt all over my clothes did little to make me less conspicuous.  It’s hard for a 5´8” fair-skinned white girl to keep a low profile in a land of Maya Indians who barely graze 5´1”.  Odilia reconsidered and told me I could come along.  I couldn’t see how having a gringa here to learn about her practice of rural midwifery possibly hurt her case.  The office was an empty house with old wooden school desks lining the entry way and absolutely no identifying markings on the outside of any kind.  A tiny woman in non-traditional dress, who was not Doña Carmen, raced around the office greeting us only with a, “Do you have an appointment?” before rushing in to assist two other perhaps also unusually well-dressed young boys that could be characterized only by their awkwardness.  Odilia commanded all four kids to sit in the desks and wait to be received.  I took my place in one of the little wooden desks and smiled at each of the little angels down the row.  The walls were lined with crumpled notebook paper signs that were either requests for children to keep their materials clean or lists of food and clothes that children of different age groups were supposed to receive, all written in orange or purple washable marker.  On the floor in the room straight ahead were piles of cellophane-wrapped sweaters that had been removed from cardboard boxes and picked through.  I got up to look at a Xeroxed copy of the NGO´s newsletter taped off to one side of a wall:  a Christian children’s foundation.  Just as I had suspected.

 

The frantic woman passed us down the hall and called us into her office.  More boxes.  More sweaters.  More almost bare walls.  First order of business was to distribute plastic-wrapped sweaters.  They only had one in Juana’s size so that was the end of that task.  Odilia snapped at to get the kids to sit down on this stool or that bench, trying desperately to order them in some way, despite having no particular guidelines to do so.  The tiny lady pulled out some blank forms and began asking questions about how the orphans came to be the helpless creatures in need of assistance that they are.  Odilia shifted immediate back into three quetzales mode, explaining the death of her sister and her lack of support in their upbringing.  At the same time that I was angered by Odilia´s self-victimization, I felt myself mentally encouraging her to ham up her situation a bit.  Why not milk this for all it’s worth?  The woman asked us about Valentina and as soon as we told the lady her age, the woman pushed that form to the side. Nope.  No good.  Too Young.  “Excuse me,” I said silently. “Have you seen Valentina?  Do you have any idea how charming and precious she is?  What do you mean she is too young?”  She jumped right ahead to plan B, and started asking about the other orphan, Patas, and began to explain that the organization was interested in orphans as a priority and only those of school age.  At six years old, and in his first year of school, Patas was a winner. 

 

I enjoyed that she felt the need to explain herself to me knowing full well that her higher ups are English-speaking white woman just like myself.  I asked her whether it would be better to bring in his tow older sisters, Juanona and Sarah, thirteen and fifteen, who weren’t going to school because Odilia couldn’t afford it.  Nope. Too old.  Not marketable.  Only 6 to 10 years old and ALREADY going to school.  I found this restriction as confusing as I did obvious.  She said she was scared to sign up one of Odilia´s kids because they obviously weren’t orphaned. So of the four kiddos we glossed up for the show, only one got to perform.  Thank heavens for that moist rag.  She asked Patas´ birthday which neither he or Odilia knew, so we made a quick call to Sarah to find out.  She asked what he liked to do and then immediately wrote play soccer before Odilia said anything.  Ok, I know we are in Latin America here but I’ve never seen the kid even touch a ball.  However Odilia said yes and then listed some other activities that he actually does like to do, but the lady didn’t write any of them.  “He doesn’t play ball!” I wanted to scream.  He likes to pick wild mushrooms and raspberries watch WWF.  Wouldn’t Jane Doe from Des Moines, Iowa or whoever rather know that? 

 

She asked about the house, what the floors were made of, whether his bed was wood or metal, whether we cooked with wood or gas, i.e., exactly how poor is he.  Odilia said the rooms had cement floors which is true in his bedroom but not in the rest of the house.  Odilia clearly felt the make-it-sound-as-bad-as-they-want-it-to mandate.  The woman then hastily explained that Patas would have to come and make greeting cards and candles for whoever his benefactor is every so often. I absolutely hate the idea of him making a Christmas card for someone he doesn’t know for reasons he won’t understand to thank these people graciously for their good will that he may not really realize he’s getting.  She said they would have to come by the house too to look at it.  We found out later that night that the NGO had already contacted a neighbour to verify her story only about 15 minutes before we arrived.     

 

After the sob story was duly recorded, she rushed us out to the back yard patio, lamenting all the while that there wasn’t good sunlight for the photo.  She put Patas in front of some shrubbery and pulled out her little, silver digital.  While she was complaining about clouds to Odilia, I got a surge of pride when I turned away from the photo shoot to see that Miguelito had dropped trow, and was unapologetically peeing on the back fence.  Odilia seemed to try not to draw attention to him.  Patas stood there with his mild grin, like always, the fly of his pants popping out and his little boy belling extending boldly over the belt that had in recent weeks become too small for him.  “Pobrecito,” she kept saying.  Poor little guy.  “And, oh, how cute he is.  Poor, poor thing.”  At this point the cool contempt I had been projecting until this point turned to a quiet rage.  Why do you have to keep saying that?  He is not poor!  He is perfect.  What good does it do to keep telling him that?  I told him to smile when she took the picture because I didn’t want him to look sad like I thought they might want him too.  But then I thought his sponsors might just pick him because he is so cute and smiley in spite of all his hardship and I felt guilty.  She kept saying how cute he was in spite of it all, as if being orphaned automatically meant you had to be homely looking.  Odilia inquired about bringing in Valentina and Daniel when they were school aged and the lady showed us the pictures.  I smiled politely; more convinced than ever that I was at the root of some evil NGO conspiracy to commodify the children of the world.  Odilia disengaged by thanking this woman profusely in alternation with giving stern orders to the kids to get in the bus. 

 

When Patas got in the car, I hugged him like he had just returned from fifteen months in Iraq .  I hugged him like he needed protection or consolation from something traumatic though I think it was far more traumatic for me than for him.  So despite being unaffected, I continued consoling myself by kissing his forehead until I was about 3 kisses away from wearing off the first layers of skin.  Back we went with four immaculately clean children to a house full of even more children who are just not the right kid of adorably poor. I explained to Odilia and Santos how these organizations work while trying to restrain disillusionment.  I was by no means successful at self-restraint, though I can’t imagine how or why it would change their course of action.  Is Patas gonna be on a television commercial?  Is somebody going to flip through a booklet of photos of slightly confused, uncomfortable children and fly right past him?  Are these people ever going to have any idea how adorable he looked on that car ride home?

 

While Odilia´s family will benefit in some way from this transaction, I can’t stand what people feel like they have to do to get people to open their pocket books.  I felt today like I saw something I shouldn’t see, the part of the process that people from my world aren’t supposed to know about: that this has almost nothing to do with that little boy or girl in the picture, or else maybe Miguelito and his golden arch in the background would have made it into the shot.