Working with Kids in Nicaragua

Early March Joy and I arrived in Jinotega, Nicaragua, to volunteer with a group of thirty orphan kids. After six months of near constant travel, I was pleased to be settling in somewhere for awhile, for us to stay put long enough for relationships to take root. 

Juan Carlos

During my first week I got to know another volunteer named John and had the great pleasure of working beside him on the garden. He was a mechanic from Wyoming and was able to repair the broken tiller hiding in the shed. All week we toiled over a garden patch until the soil was soft and deep and ready for seed. We helped John and his wife, Beth, in organizing crafts every night for the kids. Nothing brings as much joy as to see the creative display of a child's mind. 

We loved the kids as best we could, and we learned a depth to love that was entirely new to our experience. We saw how discipline was just as important as affection, we found it necessary to be stern even when hugs were so much easier. Though I had been studying Spanish for most of my trip at this point, I never practiced how to yell demands and orders over the screams of thirty kids playing in a phenomenally acoustical gymnasium. Kids can be monsters, but in this place, when every argument, fight, and bullying affair is magnified times ten with an echo effect, the kids themselves believe they are monsters, and they have a powerful roar to confirm it. When kids actually believe themselves to be monsters, there is no authority that could tame them. Let alone authority like Joy and I whose Spanish is already underdeveloped. It was a definite challenge from the beginning. 

Garden Patch

Most of our work meant being the primary caretaker for a group of about eight kids. We would wake them up in the morning, get them dressed, ration out their toothpaste, spoon feed the little ones breakfast, and finally drive a fifteen passenger van full of them to school. This was just the morning. While the older kids were in school we would have to entertain the toddlers, change poopy diapers, give them a shower, and at some point, if we were lucky, get them in bed for a short nap. While they slept, if they slept, was pretty much our only free time during the day. Yet, we couldn't get very far away because then little Juan Carlos would end up sneaking out of his room and running around the gymnasium in his underwear, which isn't an entirely unpleasant sight. After we pick up the kids from school we would return home for a few hours of play before dinner. After dinner more play. More screaming monsters. Then getting ready for bed, which usually took upwards of 1 and 1/2 hours. By the time they finally got to sleep, we were exhausted. Someone remind me that when I decide to have kids of my own, that I don't ever have eight of them. We would repeat this routine every day with little deviation. Even the meals were nearly always the same - rice and beans with corn tortillas. Rarely did we have time to break from the schedule, but when we did, the results were unforeseeable and often disastrous. 

One day I decided to  put on a game of baseball for the kids after school, a privilege only granted to them if there was a volunteer willing to unlock the equipment and oversee the utter chaos that followed. Remembering my glory days in little-league and feeling a deep nostalgia for them, I considered the challenge worth it. But I quickly found that these were games which followed none of the established rules of the sport, and they resembled none of my own childhood recollections. 

Milton during crafts.

Sure, there were bases (blocks of wood painted white), but they were soon split to splinters, destroyed by the end of a bat in the hands of one orphan kid whose destructive tendencies I never could seem to control. And there were bats, several of them, all swinging at the same time, not only towards wooden bases, but at dozens of baseballs all of which seemed to be headed directly towards my face. Gloves were the only piece of equipment in scarcity, but the kids didn't mind. Who needs to catch a ball and tag the runner out when you can just peg him with the ball and let the bruises and tears speak for themselves. I realized this was no game they were playing but a war whose fight consisted of gathering as many weapons possible and using them against the nearest victim you could find. 

There were alliances and enemies I discovered which had been formed much prior to my arrival at the orphanage. My only ally was the three year old Juan Carlos who seemed to think that no flying object could ever reach him while in the safety of my arms. I tried my best to live up to his expectations, but realizing my failure he would notice only in serious pain, I decided to end it all as soon as possible and call it a day. But how does one end a war already begun between dozens of kids who don't speak a diplomatic language? Thankfully, I was saved from finding an answer when the dinner bell rang - the kids immediately dropped all weapons and agreed on a temporary truce for the sake of their hungry stomachs. After that first day on the field, I knew I had to find a safer sport for these kids to use to express their complicated psychological tensions.

It is a general principle that kids everywhere look forward to the weekend as a refuge from school. I find that my most precious childhood memories lie within the few days that lie at the end of every week. There was always something to look forward to, and if it was nothing in particular, it was simply that the weekend was the host of possibilities. But I realized quickly that for kids here at the orphanage, they know ahead of time exactly what will take place during the weekend—nothing much at all. The weekend reserved them the feeling of being trapped on the orphanage grounds, completing choirs outside, and playing movies that had been seen a dozen times already. For our last weekend at the orphanage Joy and I decided we wanted to do something out of the ordinary for the kids. 

We knew about a cross on the top of the mountain that looks over the city of Jinotega, and has thousands of steps leading up to it. It would be only an hour hike, one that many of the kids had done before, but it would be clean air, a beautiful view of the city, and we hoped, a rejuvenating escape offering them strength to continue on with the challenging days ahead. Back at the orphanage there were small fights everyday ranging from verbal wars to flights of fists. It seems like each kid is left to himself to find entertainment wherever he can, and often at the expense of any other kids who find themselves in their line of teases and jokes. There was no sense of unity. It was easy to see that each kid suffered from the pain of neglect, from a lack of love and attention in their life. But since they all struggle with a similar issue, why wouldn’t they come together in support and love? I had had this on my heart the whole week and tried to create opportunities to push for unity in the group. But as the above account of our baseball wars detail, they were often unsuccessful. 

When the group of twenty plus kids and volunteers finally reached the top of the mountain, out of breath, dehydrated, our bodies temporarily broken, in that moment I found another opportunity that I knew would break through. “Your lives are like our climb today," I told them, as we looked down on the city from the sobering view of a mountain perspective, "for some life is more difficult and for others it can be easier. But there is no point in beating others to the top. In the end, you find yourself alone and with no one to share in your triumph. Life is not a race and so you should never feel defeated. Life is about walking alongside your brothers and sisters in Gods love, supporting one another in your trials, and sharing the beauty with others whenever your blessed with a view." 

Our time ended with the orphanage much sooner than we expected. Exciting news from home had come our way requiring us to continue our trek north and head to California much earlier. Life never fails to rebel against our plans and our expectations, we can only know when it is necessary to let go of our seeming control and free ourselves to a gentle flow of un-resistance. From Nicaragua we had several dozens of local busses to catch which would take us through Honduras to El Salvador, then to Guatemala, and finally to mainland Mexico. We would be home in seven weeks time, but there was so much more to look forward to along the way.