Reality

Somehow, nearly a month has passed since I’ve come here. I’m not going to pretend that it has been an easy month; little girls are complicated! But it has been a rewarding month, and I’d like to share why.

I never really expected to be working in the little girls dorm, and at first, I inwardly rebelled. After all, they had told me I was going to be in a different dorm. And I’m not even any good with little girls. And they’re there all the time, and they want hugs, and kisses, and to have their hair done and their clothes picked out and all of those things that I really just don’t do.

You could call this a stretching experience.

However, after being the dorm for a month, I can tell you that (unsurprisingly) there’s a lot more to my girls than a truly shocking amount of barrettes. I have eight little girls between the ages of 6 and 12, and each one of them is different. They each have different personalities, different likes and dislikes, different ways of waking up in the morning. Some are smiley. Some like to cuddle. Some resist categorization in all forms.

One of these little girls is Ada. She’s seven years old, and she came to us along with her sister Alejandra in March. Ada is a sweet, caring little girl, who loves to play and cuddle and to spend time with others. Ada also has anxiety about just about everything on the planet, right down to whether or not she can eat a piece of candy that was given to her.

This is where life starts to get real, here in the dorms. Because Ada is a little girl who wants nothing more than to go home to her mommy, and she doesn’t understand why she can’t. Even though she likes it at Esperanza Viva, she doesn’t understand why she’s here. She worries constantly about her family, and wonders what they’re doing without her. She worries that her mom won’t come to see her on visiting day (because sometimes she doesn’t make it). She worries about her siblings, about her grandfather, even about the supervisors. If any of us leave for the night, we can count on hearing Ada’s anxious little voice asking “But you’re coming back-right?”

One of the things I recently learned is that life just isn’t fair. How do you explain to a child that her mommy had to pick which kids to send away, and she picked you? How do you make that not sting? If life were fair, I wouldn’t have to hold a little girl as she cries herself to sleep because she just wants her mommy and doesn’t understand why she can’t go home. That’s not fair. In no way is that fair. But that’s what we do here.

We, as supervisors, take care of children that don’t have anyone to take care of them, for whatever reason. We wipe the noses, we dry the tears. We’re there for the big moments, the small ones, and the crisis. That’s what we signed up for, and there’s very little-if any-glory in it. But there are moments.

When Ada finally stops crying and gives me a hug. When she tells me she loves me when I tuck her in at night. When she prays for her family and tacks on at the end: “And God bless Alisha and her mommy and daddy too!” These are all good moments in my life, moments that I’m learning to love.

It would be easy to end here, on this happy note, but that’s not where it stops. Because even though she’s a happy, healthy little girl, sometimes Ada still cries herself to sleep. Life isn’t fair, not for her, not for any kid here. But, thankfully, God is good. He’s putting these kids together, and equipping us supervisors with the tools we need to take care of each of them.