Preparing for Work
I was planning and preparing from the get-go. With the rest of the Ayundando Niños en Centro America (ANECA) group, I studied the origins of at-risk youth in Latin America, and developed ways to build cultural gaps in a county where some basic rights—like gender equality—were simply unheard of.
But, as we were to learn, not every activity we carried out in Costa Rica could be planned and prepared for.
Facing Reality
Every afternoon, I took a 10-minute walk from the school I spent time in each morning to an all-girls orphanage. Everyday, I’d walk along what seemed to me like a dangerous highway with no sidewalks, just thin man-made trails, along a busy road accompanied with catcalls and obnoxious honks.
But the walk was always worth it.
The moment I entered through the gates of Hogar Cristiano, a handful of little girls would run up to me, jump on me, hug me and greet me. They would all want to hold my hand or be carried in my arms into the three-acre property that consisted of four houses, one classroom, a computer room (that went untouched), one play room, a prayer room and a kitchen. The girls living there were so deprived of attention that one gringo, to them, was simply a person who paid attention, if only for a couple of hours.
The national child social service agency of Costa Rica, known as PANI (Patronato de la Infancia), takes the children of Costa Rica away from dangerous situations and violent homes to national orphanages and foster care systems. Ultimately PANI decides which girls get placed at this orphanage.
Most often, the girls at Hogar Cristiano are labeled by PANI as “socially at risk”. Typically they have been abused, neglected or abandoned. Girls there range from ages two to 17 and there are currently 44 girls who live in what—by American standards—would be described as a prison.
The girls live in three of the four homes. The eldest girls, ages 11 and up, share the responsibilities of the household. They cook for the younger girls and are responsible for the chores of that house. There are about 15 girls in each house and only two bedrooms, which leaves the girls at seven or eight to a room.
The fourth house on that property is not at all like the others.
It belongs to a handful of Sisters of the Assumption—who run the orphanage—and it stands out because it is two floors. In fact, the girls call it the “alto” which means high, because it is significantly higher than the other structures in the orphanage. The sisters have unchipped tile, clean bedding and home decorations; their home does not compare to the homes that the girls live in.
Not What I Expected
We had a couple of projects planned for our first week at the orphanage. Mornings were scheduled to consist of dance classes, theatre, and jewelry-making, whereas afternoons were scheduled to consist of literacy, computer labs, reading and sewing. But none of those projects actually began until the third week of our program.
The first three weeks consisted of something we had not planned.
It all began the day I held a three-year-old girl in my lap and read her the Spanish version of Little Red Riding Hood. I noticed an unusual bug in her hair. My first thought was that it was a mosquito, but as I attempted to brush it away, it sank deeper into her hair. As I went searching for it, I parted her hair and found a family of small critters roaming around her head. Sure enough, the girl had lice, and she wasn’t the only one.
As I looked up, I realized that every little girl around me walked around with a little-boy haircut, and many scratched their heads in pain.
We immediately began to check every girl’s head, and sure enough we found lice.
I went to the “alto” to tell the nuns of our findings. They shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew, and further explained that the lice had become immune to the shampoo that they used. We later discovered that the shampoo they used on the girls was dog and cat shampoo, for flees.
Outraged in frustration, we set aside our projects and planned for a spa week. One week of hair washing, lice killing, nail paintings and focusing on improving hygiene. But a week of spa was not enough. Although we had a chance to demolish the critters in our girl’s heads, what was going to happen when we left? The problem wasn’t just the lice. It was that the sisters there didn’t do anything about it. They didn’t even help us wash the girls hair. And they never checked on the girls throughout the days.
The sisters had a job, and it was to raise these girls in this orphanage. But the bulk of their performance consisted of neglect.
I remember the first time I got lice. My mother was upset and called my elementary school immediately. I sat outside in our backyard scratching and crying while my mother fished for the critters with her hands one by one. I also remember feeling so dirty because my mother had to take all of my clothes, bed sheets and even my mattress out of my room to wash. I didn’t understand why then, but I understand now. Lice hide everywhere and they are very difficult to defeat because although pharmaceutical treatment can kill the bugs, the small eggs live and hatch even weeks after lice die.
In Costa Rica, treating lice is a different story. If a child has lice, teachers estimate that the rest of the children will have it soon too and they just accept defeat until the end of the school year.
It isn’t about uncaring teachers, it is about community resources and cultural norms. In Costa Rica, like most Central American countries, one cannot approach parents to contradict the way they’ve raised their child. Even if discrepancies were pointed out, it is often the case that parents don’t have the means necessary to go about properly cleansing their child, may find it offensive, or may not feel as if they’ve done anything wrong. Lice may be something the parents grew up with themselves and handle with routine hair cuts, not pharmaceutical treatments.
This is the big cultural gap I faced at the girls orphanage: Dog shampoo. For the Sisters of the Assumption, that was what they believed would get rid of the lice. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding, a lack of education, maybe even a cheap method of solving the lice problem. But whatever reason it was, it was not working and it was inhumane.
My Lesson
I have always had a mother to care for me, defend me and clean me up. The girls at Cristiano do not. Even though we were only there for two weeks out of the year, when we were there, we showed these children what it is like to be cared for.
