Tomorrow being Friday, my time as a volunteer will soon be
over, and my trip will be beginning its last phase. These past two weeks, I have been spending my
afternoons at a local orphanage for boys called Remar not far from my
house. The time spent at Remar has
allowed me to get to know that children better than at the school, but as you
can imagine, the whole atmosphere has a depressing cloud over it. I wanted to wait awhile before writing
anything about the place because it was pretty easy to form some very strong
opinions early on and I needed to see if time would validate what I was afraid
was true.
I had never been in an orphanage before my first day at
Remar, and to some degree wondered if it would resemble a movie with a long
hallways full of beds and patrolling nuns threatening kids with swinging rulers. Instead, Remar turned out to be something
much more threadbare. The place is a
two-story house much too small for the fifteen or so kids that live there. The children sleep in two rooms, one with a
single bunkbed and the other with four or five.
There are three very young girls that live in the orphanage with the
boys, but once they get a little older, they will have to move to the girls’
orphanage. I don’t know why they live at
Remar to begin with. The boys range in
age from one in diapers (I don’t know what that translates into years. 3? 4?)
to a seventeen year old. Not every child
is an orphan in the traditional sense. Some
have living parents, but have either been abandoned, or their parents cannot
afford to raise them at home. The mother
and brother of one boy, Carlos, came to visit him yesterday, actually. Given that all of the stories are likely
heartbreaking and hard for the boys to tell, I don’t dare ask them about their
families. It seems best just to accept
that they are there because of some very unfortunate things, which they were
helplessly affected by.
One of the sadder storylines relates to three mentally
disabled boys at Remar that obviously do not receive the kind of help they
need. The least severe case is
Christian, an eight year old who suffers from some sort of learning
disability. One of the previous
volunteers thought, that like the other two boys, Christian has some level of
autism, but I don’t know enough about autism to really have a clue. For the most part, he is completely fine
interacting socially with the other children.
His problem manifest itself most notably, though, when we play word
games in Spanish or English and he has difficulty visually matching two cards
with the same word on them. The next boy
is César, who I believe is also eight.
César has as much energy as any of them, and my first day was spent as
his personal human jungle gym. He can be
a handful on his bad days though, as he requires constant one-on-one
attention. He uses his time on the dirty
playground next door to scavange for trash, which he usually then puts in his
mouth. The first day, he came up to me
with a straw from Lord knows where and began pouring some white powder out of
it into his mouth, and earlier this week I spent the time trying to get him to
spit things out that he found in a trash bag that he had ripped open. César has the same problems as Christian
learning, but also seems to need help socially.
He is always in the process of hitting or being hit by one of the other
kids. The most disheartening case,
however, is David. David is seventeen,
and very clearly needs a lot of help that he’s not getting. Most of the time that I am there he sits on
the couch silently with his head turned to the wall. It takes a lot of effort to get him to
interact somewhat, but it soon becomes clear that he loves it when you can get
him to.
The thing about the orphanage that is most frustrating is
the woman who lives and cares for the kids, Roxanna. I can imagine that living in a house full of
fifteen boys would drive someone to wits’ end in moments, but at the same time,
it’s unfair to the kids to let that be an excuse for how she acts. Roxanna is probably in her mid to late
twenties and lives in the house with her kids and husband, although the husband
is never around when I’m there. She
seems to spend most of her time screaming at the kids throughout the
house. The purpose of volunteers coming
to Remar is to give the boys someone to play with and interact with for a few
hours each day to break up the monotony of their day. Yet, many days Roxanna won’t allow them out
of the house to do anything, and my second day I actually spent sitting on a
couch watching cartoons for over two hours because she had decided that she
didn’t want to unlock the front door so they could go to the playground next to
the house. Luckily, I since have brought
the other half of the games and books that my mom and sister donated to the
house, and have been able to get some games going with the kids on the days
Roxanna refuses to let them out. The
most infuriating moment happened this past Monday. A bunch of the boys were begging me to ask
Roxanna to let them go to the playground.
When I asked her, she snapped that it was too cold outside. It was the exact same temperature that it is
every afternoon in Cusco. Instead she
said that they should watch TV or do chores.
Well the chores take place outside in the backyard, and the TV room is
in a partially enclosed room in the back yard, as well. She followed all of the this up by grabbing
the Bingo game that I brought and shoving in my chest. These boys have a pretty rough life, and her
terrible attitude doesn’t do much to make it any easier for them.
Last week, there were two other volunteers from Utah at the
orphanage in the afternoons with me. They
had been there a few weeks, and it helped to have someone show me the
ropes. They left for home last weekend,
though, and this week I am on my own.
Despite Roxanna and the pitiful state that the house is in, working at
the orphanage has been a positive experience.
The boys are full of energy, and it’s obvious that they enjoy having
someone there to play with and give them attention. A couple of the boys actually were students
of mine at the school a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve tried to keep quizzing
them on their English.
With my volunteer work finishing up this week, the less
altruistic part of my trip starts this weekend.
I will have ten more days in Peru before flying home, and will be
kicking that off at 4:00 A.M. on Saturday morning. I will be hiking and camping for four days
and three nights on the Inca Trail, waking up Tuesday morning to watch the
sunrise over Machu Picchu. Then I come
back to Cusco for a couple days, before heading to Lima for three days. After that, I’ll just be a couple of flights
away from a long-awaited reunion with BBQ, fajitas, and bone-thawing Texas heat.
Scott
