(always) (just) getting there.

            Last Thursday we took our trusty scooby-doo van and left at 4am fully prepared with a chicken and rice lunch that Tomasina, the amazing “mom”, cooked at 3 am, and we set out for a little town that I could not remember the name of for the life of me. Tino, the supervisor and resident wise father of Albergue, warned me with a mischievous smile that this would be a long trip. I now know that “a long trip” means driving eight hours through winding pebbled and dust roads where you occasionally honk at the mountain goats or wild pigs that get in the road.

            Goats or no goats, paved roads or not, we had a destination to reach and Tino and Tomasina were willing to do anything to get there. The three of us were going with one of the girls to a town near her hometown, where she would hopefully see her mother for the first time since she had her baby.  The meeting, we prayed, would start a crucial healing process.

            Maria, (her name is not Maria, but I felt like this story called for a name change) was dressed in her beautiful traditional Quechan dress and her baby girl was ready with little dress and yellow-flowered headband, which would no doubt help win the affection of grandma.

            For most of the trip Maria was wide-eyed, perched against the window, admiring the beauty of the mountains we were driving through. Her emotions were as unsteady as pebbled roads but she kept them as quite as the surrounding countryside. I watched her eyes. Excitement. Anxiety. Fear. Anticipation.

            “How do you feel Maria?” Tomasina asked.

            “A little bit sad.”

            Despite the roads and the anxiety of the situation, I was able to sleep on and off for the first 3 hours of our journey, thanks to some genetic miracle passed down from my mom’s side of the family. Each time I woke up, Maria would yell to me, smiling, “it’s the hour to wake up Hermana!” Her 8 month old daughter, sound asleep on the seat between us, was undisturbed by mom’s mischievous enthusiasm. I would yell back, “I don’t understand Spanish this early- I don’t know what you are saying!” and would go back to sleep.

            After I had really woken up, we passed the next 5 hours sitting together on the bench seat, admiring together the mountains, cows, sheep, shepherd girls, horses, donkeys, and the quaint towns we passed. Our bathroom stops often were on mountainsides somewhere. We had no toilets- but the view was fantastic. One of our stops Maria and I got out and were walking to find privacy somewhere in the woods. I asked her what kind of animals lived in this part. She answered matter-of-factly “cows and mountain lions.” And then walked away smiling to go find her bathroom.

            “Pasorapa” the sign read. At last we reached the little town that I couldn’t remember the name of for the life of me! We pulled up in front of the office of the Defensoria, the governmental child defense agency. And everything about Maria  began to change- her eyes filled with some replayed memory, her shoulders slouched with some kind of defeat, and she looked at Tomasina and said, “I’m not getting out.” 

            “It’s ok, Hermano Tino is going to go into the office, and we will wait here.” Tino went in. And we sat with Maria and the baby, who was now awake and fussing. She started sharing bits of the memories behind her eyes.

            “Over there-“ she pointed to a bench in the plaza where we were parked, “is where my mom had to leave me. I was just two months pregnant. We were both crying. Llorando grave. Crying hard.

            “She left me there. And then they took me on a big bus to the city. I was so scared.” Her memories were sharp, “ I didn’t speak Spanish, I had never left my town before, I felt sick on the bus, and I couldn’t sleep. For days, I just wanted my mom.” She was 14 when this happened.

            We were quiet. All we could do was hug her. Then the baby started fussing, so I took her out and walked her around the plaza, leaving her mom in peace with Tomasina.

            The small garden/sitting area in the plaza was beautiful. The sun was shining, brightening up the bright-blue fences that kept the lush green plants from growing out into the stoned walk way.  In the center of this squared central garden was a circular stoned patio with benches. Here in the middle of the patio, where this baby’s life started, is where I started to sing the Michael Gungor song:

 http://youtu.be/uumI-PdeZzY  (here is a link to the song.)

You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of the dust.

Why was I singing? I don’t know. Maybe more out of desperation than faith.

You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of us.

Yes I was playing with a beautiful baby girl, but I still had so many questions- … what exactly about this will be beautiful?

You make me new, you are making me new.

I stood baby girl up on a bench and made her dance. She started giggling.

            Tino came out with a woman from the office. They went over to the van with concerned and disappointed looks on their faces. I watched as they explained something to Maria. Then her head fell into her hands, her chest into her lap. She began to sob. Tino’s face hurt for her, he kept telling her something. He turned to talk to the woman who was apparently a lawyer and they gave Maria some space. She fell into Tomasina’s arms, weeping. And I grasped the baby, who, with a smile wrapped her chubby little arms around my neck.

And I stubbornly kept singing.

All this pain. I wonder if I’ll ever find my way.

I wonder if my life could really change at all.

You make beautiful things. You make beautiful things out of the dust…

            Maria would not see her mommy. Her mom didn’t want to see her, what were we suppose to say? I went to the lawyer’s office with Tino and listened. It could be that the men in the community didn’t want her mom to leave, explained the lawyer. They have their own rule of law there, afterall, and are afraid that she might say something to put even more of the men in jail. …Or maybe, they both said, Maria’s mom really doesn’t want to see her daughter. With eyes looking down to the ground we all knew this was possible.

The baby, after all, is not just her daughter’s baby. It’s her husband’s baby too.

            Mary Oliver once said, “ There are things you can’t reach, but you can reach out to them all day long.”

            This is something we could not reach. All we could do is reach out. All we could do is send gifts to the mom from her daughter, all we could do is call her aunts and uncles and try to let her see someone in her family. All we could do is keep reaching, keep driving a little further so she could feel some sense of family. All we could do is hold the baby and pray over her- God bless the despised, the innocent. All we could do is promise to help her make a new home somewhere else, because this little girl, this little innocent mom, would not be welcome in her own town ever again. And she knew it.

            After  we did manage to find  her aunt and uncle. We got to visit their house that night and we saw them loving Maria and playing with her baby. They were very poor, but bought a coke to offer us, their guests. We took turns drinking, sharing the only two cups they had. We joyfully sat in their home and played with their kittens, that they kept trying to sell me.  (I finally said I had allergies.) And before we left Maria’s uncle brought us at 10 pm to a dried up riverbed where his tomato plants grow. And he gave us a box of tomatoes to bring home.

            The drive the next day was long. There was a roadblock on the highway, so the three-hour tour turned into 10 hours. We ventured through some sketchy “off roads” in the Scooby van, we pushed the car through an old potato farm, and we laughed at our misfortunes. Maria was still deeply disappointed. After all, we could not reach in that far.

            But as we made the effort to see her uncle and aunt, as we showed her we were her family and would stick together through potato fields, as I held her baby when she couldn’t, we silently promised her we would keep reaching out.

            By the end of the day on Friday, Maria, full of scars, very protectively embraced her sleeping baby. We laughed a bit about our adventures and she told me, “I think God really helped us back there. For a while I didn’t think we’d ever get out of that farm.” But we did. We made it home paved roads or not, goats or no goats. And one day hopefully, we will make the journey again.

PRAY.

Pray that one day Maria’s mom will love her and that they can reunite. Pray that mom and granddaughter will embrace- because this is not outside of God’s power. Pray that Maria can move forward planning her work and life, accepting that she will not have her mom’s help.

Pray that we can keep reaching out, even though we can’t fully reach in.

And when our prayers become still, pray that we can dance in gardens with babies who were never suppose to exist and sing:

All around, life is springing up from this old ground,

Out of chaos life is being found, in you.

You make beautiful things out of the dust. 

a big painful question mark.

I am not a mom. I have had mom-like feelings, however, for certain people in my life. And whether it’s the beautiful kids in Guatemala, the beautiful gringos I babysit for in Wheaton, or the girls at the house right now, I can’t even start to imagine what sending any of them away (because I couldn’t take care of them) would feel like, especially if I didn’t know if I would ever see them again.  And yet that is what Her mom did. She was 12, her mom and dad couldn’t feed her. She would go work.

Later this mom and dad would ask about their daughter and all they would find out was that she was missing. After a year, they would assume she was dead.

After 3 years, they would be contacted by a girls’ home in the big city (us) and find out that she was indeed alive and her previous employer in jail for what he did to her.

On a Saturday in October a gringa from Chicago would get up early to leave with this daughter, the supervisor, caretaker, and a van full of food to try and find the family after 3 years.

On this day, the gringa, the least important in the story, would see what poor looks likes. She would see what a nervous girl anxious to find her mom looks like. And she would see a mom without much affection, a mom with a lot of fear, stare into her child’s face only to offer a hello after 3 years. She would see a younger brother with a face is aged by the stress of hunger, and she would see him asking his sister to take him with her.

This gringa would then see what little boys left alone for days looks like. She would see a two year old boy who is cold and hungry stare instead of cry. She would see him void of something… she would look away afraid to find out.  She would see the two brick “rooms” , one 7 by 3ft where the 11 would sleep with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. She would a sixteen year old shepherd girl, her sister, with her own baby tied on her back. She would find out the baby was 3 years old.

Then the gringa would see the mom of 8 begin to cry and hug her daughter when she said goodbye. And this gringa would cry. Because she would know that something went terribly wrong.

This couple would be left with food sufficient for a time. And their daughter would be relieved that she would not stay there.

And the gringa would look back as they left and wonder what it feels like to be a mom. And the daughter would take this gringa’s hand to hold it tightly as they walked back to their van.

Sunshine.

Life is poetry. It’s a dance. It’s a song. It’s sunshine highlighting what was there all along. Life is stopping to look at what the sun illuminates. It’s the moments when the banana and milk juice tastes spicy because someone didn’t wash the blender after blending a hot pepper. It’s when snack time turns into a contest to see who can drink the juice.

Life is the moments when I say “I want a baby that looks like yours!” and she answers, “oh that’s easy!”

It’s moments when my aunt has me guessing what different china dishes she has are for.

Life is needing help and getting it, because God said ask and it will be given.

It’s sharing everything- even really bad colds. It’s teacher and student sniffling miserably over a Children’s Bible and realizing that She is actually learning to read.

Life is sitting with her and hearing her say- I want to tell you that I am really starting to get to know God. I pray to him and then wait for him to answer. And he does.

It’s listening to her explain that she knows one day she will teach other people the bible and she will tell them all what happened to her. And she’ll tell them that God used all that to bring her to Albergue- where she could learn who he was.

Life is hearing: Yes, I was left behind. But it’s because God wanted me here.

It’s is learning to forgive because someone you love was strong enough to do it.

Life is hearing “are you embarrassed of your faith?” and answering “No, my faith in God is my whole life.” Life is seeing her smile and answer “I’m not embarrassed either.”

Life is talking about how she aborted the baby, and it’s promising her that her baby is safe in heaven. And that when she gets there, he will know her and he will know that she loves him. Life is her eventually deciding that God is good because he is caring for her baby.

Life is wondering at the sunshine, and it’s stopping to think- how did I get here?

Life is poetry. It’s baby Susanna dancing. It’s Beati singing Dios es Poderoso, it’s Ximena laughing and admitting that she likes the other girls.

Sunshine.

Thanks.

So raising teenage girls who go to school, need uniforms, clothes, school supplies, medical care and food costs money. Therefore, there is no money for recreation. No money for playing, no special outings unless they are free. I think back on how many amazing memories I have- either special lunch dates with dad, great family vacations, summer nights walking to get ice cream and I am so thankful for the love and attention and sacrifices my parents gave me. These girls just don't have that. They have love (now, anyways), and Tomasina, the caretaker, works so hard to make special snacks within the budget, and we get creative with money- but the girls still do not have the same opportunities that other people with good parents have. So guess what Parkview (church family) - we did what their parents never got to do. We took the whole house- the babies, staff, and girls- to the pool.  

At 4 in the afternoon I was sitting with the two babies on a lawn chair while the girls were all playing some game in the pool. They all started laughing so hard- I had no idea at what. Tomasina, the caretaker, walked over and sat down in the chair next to me. She smiled and looked at me and said, "Look at them. They've forgotten everything. Thank you."

Parkview, thank you for giving joyfully and for letting me receive your support here. 

Thank you.

From the bottom of our hearts.

Love to you all,

Lauren