Karina

Karina is a tough nut to crack. She is not what anyone would call verbose, and can has been known to start a fight or two just out of sheer boredom. When you try to engage her in conversation and she doesn’t feel like it, well, forget. And heaven forbid you ask her to brush her hair! It seems to me most days that she’s 12 going on 2, and that we will never succeed in getting through to her!

Karina and her brother and sister have been with us for a year now, and I will never forget the day they came in. Karina and her sister Eva were wearing old, stained,  and smelly clothing. Eva looked around fearfully while Karina glowered at anyone who met her eyes. Arturo, who was only eight, sobbed as their father left, and the girls just looked on with empty eyes, the question clear on their thin faces-what now?

To say that Karina and her siblings have been through some hard stuff would be an understatement. After their mother died, the girls were basically left on their own to take care of their younger brother. Their father is an alcoholic, and when he was able to keep a job he would be gone for days at a time. The family all lived together in a shanty made of aluminum and cardboard. The girls tried to attend school but their attendance was scattered, and they fell behind. When their father realized how poorly his children were doing, he began to search for a place to bring them, because he didn’t want them to grow up on the streets like he did. That’s how Eva, Karina and Arturo ended up at Esperanza Viva, but that’s not the end of the story.

Karina, as I said, is tough. Unlike her sister who wants to be friends with everyone, Karina doesn’t let people in easily, or often. In the group of girls, she often stands apart, isolated. She is a girl who has been rejected so many times by some many people she would rather just keep to the wings than experience rejection again.

It would be easy to write Karina off as a reject, as a problem child, as a screw up. It would be easy to label her, never taking into account that she is just a little girl who has been neglected, abused and rejected again and again. And I won’t lie to you, there are days when I want to do just that-because Karina is hard to deal with. She is stubborn and cranky and most days, it seems like I will never get through to her, no matter what I do.

Once in a while, though, I get a glimpse of an entirely different Karina. Once in a great while, she’ll come out of her shell, and the sound of her laughing will fill the room. She’ll smile-I wish you could see her smile, because it transforms her entire face. Once in a while, Karina will speak without trying to cause a fight, and will just play like the twelve year old that she is. After a year of hard work, we’re finally starting to see more of that Karina-a happy, hopeful, awkward-in-the-way-only-adolescents-can-be young lady.

It’s in those moments when Karina is transformed that a thin, fragile hope rises up in me: maybe, just maybe, in spite of the hurt and the rejection, in spite of the abandonment and abuse-maybe there’s hope for this one, too.