By Damon Guinn
Sometimes, words are not enough.
Memories engulf us as we struggle to make sense of all we’ve seen and done. Inertia sets in. Words atrophy and no longer serve as a means to an end. They are an end.
By the time you read this, I will have ended a 12-year career with Children International, my longest tenure at any job. It’s a job I will deeply miss.
This is my very last article for the organization. From now on, when I share stories about children living in poverty, they won’t carry the same weight. They’ll be relegated to interjections in conversations and short anecdotes in response to the question, “So, what did you do for a living?” The audience will be different too … they won’t be emotionally invested like you.
Before I go, however, I hope you’ll humor me one last time by reading the short stories below. They represent some of the most moving interviews I had as a staff writer with Children International. They taught me about the absurdity of poverty … the beauty of humility … the benefit of charity … and how to find strength in adversity.
I can still see her sitting on the rock-flecked dirt floor outside her cinderblock shack in Chibolya, Zambia. Her clothes are ragged and torn. Her feet are calloused and covered in red dust. Flies swarm her body. They’re drawn to the thick stench of urine that clouds the air … or maybe they just have her pegged as easy prey. When families go hungry, so do flies.
A crowd looks on. Boys and girls have clamored up the block wall that separates Tabu’s home from a chaotic market on the other side. With hearty laughs and hungry eyes, they devour the scene. It’s a spectacle – this shy girl in the presence of so many mzungus. What makes her so special to a bunch of white foreigners? I can see them thinking.
They don’t know the truth about Tabu, a girl whose name means both “sacred” and “forbidden.” There’s more to her than dirty clothes and a frightened expression – she’s more than a feast for flies. Tabu has a promising young mind – a powerful tool she can use to free herself from her desperate surroundings.
When I visited Tabu in 2006, she was 8 years old. Children International had been providing benefits to kids in the area for less than a year. And, thanks to sponsorship, Tabu had not only enrolled in school for the first time, she had risen to the top of her class.
The painfully shy girl who could barely peel her eyes off the ground had a reason to look up. Access to school and good grades would bolster her spirits and give her the confidence to hold her head high.
I tracked the transformation with my own eyes, every time I checked on Tabu’s family’s situation and her latest photo in our database. One year her clothes were cleaner. The next year, she had a new hairstyle. Her posture improved the year after that. Then, suddenly, there was a smile on her face.
The girl who once cowered in a cloud of flies is maturing into a young woman who walks with grace and dignity. Sponsorship has given Tabu new meaning in life – a life that is truly sacred.
Eight years have passed, and I still can’t shake the memory of Tabu sitting there in the dirt. Her bravery and perseverance is heroic.
When I met Karina and Silvana, they had just fled for their lives.
The girls were all but abandoned after their father died, a kind man who was mugged and killed on the same day he learned of his wife’s infidelity. After that, Karina and Silvana only received attention from their mother when she needed them to beg for change so she could buy alcohol. Loving caresses were replaced with violent blows when the sisters failed to bring back money.
As a father of a 6-year-old girl, it broke my heart to hear Karina and Silvana’s story. But their smiles gave me hope; their bright faces reveal the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
“My sister used to hold me in her arms because I would cry,” recalls Silvana, 6 at the time. “But my mother didn’t want me to cry, so she would beat me, and we had to run away.”
The girls fled more than once, only to get lost and return to the spot where their mother was living under a bridge in Quito, Ecuador. Defeated, they would curl up on the ground and try to sleep through the cold and their fears once their mom got drunk and passed out. Eventually, they were picked up by the police and taken to their grandparents – a near-fatal turning point.
Everyone in the house abused alcohol and hit the girls, including their uncle, who locked them at home so they couldn’t attend school. Their only saving grace was a neighbor named Sister Olga. She urged Karina and Silvana’s grandparents to enroll them in Children International’s sponsorship program and even accompanied them to the community center to make sure they received the care they needed.
But, then, the unthinkable happened before CI staff could intervene. One day, while Karina was home alone, her uncle showed up in a drunken rage and tried to stab her. Karina ran for her life, straight to the house of her godmother and begged her to take them to an orphanage.
“When we got to the orphanage, we were really happy because there was a bed for both of us,” Karina confided when I spoke to her in 2009. “It’s very good there because we have something to eat – not just in the afternoon. They take us out to the pool. And I help them. I sweep … and I smile a lot.”
The girls also prayed. Every night. They prayed that somehow their dad would return and take them away.
So, why would I share such an unhappy story with you? To put it simply, Karina and Silvana represent the hundreds of thousands of children who desperately need support and attention from someone like you. Because of you and the care they received at the community center, they finally have a family who values them – one who won’t abuse or abandon them.
Reaching a dead end can be a terrifying experience. Without a sense of direction, it’s easy to panic and grow disoriented, even in one of the world’s most populated cities.
But imagine reaching a dead end in a dark, dank alley in a slum … and then living there.
That’s what the family of sponsored brothers Debraj and Hingraj did after they relocated from a southern district of West Bengal to central Kolkata to find work. Housing in the city’s center is scarce, and the boys' father, Goutam, didn’t earn enough money as an informal bricklayer to afford even the smallest apartment. So, the family of four, along with Goutam’s elderly mother, Sandhya, made their home in an open alley.
“At night, there are a lot of people who go back and forth,” said Rita, the boys’ mother. And then there were the rats and roaches … and floods from seasonal monsoons, which caused the sewage drain in the alley to overflow with knee-high wastewater. Rita would send her boys and Sandhya to a relative’s overcrowded apartment nearby while she and her husband squatted on stools and waited for the polluted water to subside.
It was a harsh existence, but the family had no other option – especially after Goutam fell from a building at work and was hospitalized with a cracked ribcage. That’s when doctors detected signs of multiple organ failure and gave him a month to live.
To raise money and feed her children, Rita preoccupied herself with selling plates of food to daily workers who passed through the alley. She managed to earn about $3 a day at what she came to call her “pavement hotel.” It wasn’t much, but both her mother-in-law and she agreed that it was better to live on the city streets and eat than go hungry in the village. Agricultural work in the village was only available three months a year, Sandhya explained. The other nine months, there was nothing to eat. “But here, somehow or other, we manage to eat at least twice a day,” she added.
Getting Hingraj and Debraj’s family off the streets is harder than I imagined. They’re not willing to give up, though, so neither am I.
“Throughout my life, I have experienced only sobs and sniffles,” Sandhya said. “I want my grandchildren to grow up and take the entire family out of this bad situation.”
I turned to the boys and asked them about life in the alley. They just shrugged off my question. When I asked them about visiting the CI community center, they both replied – “the space!” They said they liked to play with the toys and games in the library. “I want to study and grow,” Debraj belted out, suddenly beaming.
What would make them happier than anything else, I asked. Instead of giving the obvious answer, “a home,” both said they wanted a bicycle – clearly wanting to make the most of their outdoor existence.
Hingraj was receiving health care and medicine from the CI clinic for a kidney problem at the time. Between that, the educational support and the clothing and shoes, Rita said they were able to get by. If they had money and there was a room to rent in the area, they would move off the streets, she told me.
That was the last trip I took with Children International, in February 2013. I’m still working on a way to get the family off the street. The last report I received said there was no space available, and Rita didn’t want to move for fear of losing her customers and, therefore, her sole means of income. There has to be a solution, though. I can’t leave them there, trapped at a dead end.
Change is rarely instantaneous. More often than not, it’s difficult and tedious, full of snags and misdirection. But it is inevitable. And when we have the right people by our side, people who respect us and support us, we can change into something better and more beautiful than what we once were.
For those of you who made it to the end with me, thank you. It’s been a great journey, and I’m proud to have worked side by side with you to make the world a slightly better place.
Photos by Greg Tobey, David Nebel and Andrea Waters.
