An Orphanage Volunteer

I wanted to feel useful. To volunteer my time for a worthy cause. To have something meaningful to do one afternoon a week, while I lived in Mazatlán. A friend was volunteering at the local orphanage and I asked her if I could tag along. She said, “Ok. But it’s harder than you think it’s going to be.” She was right. 

I still remember the names of some of the children at the orphanage. The babies were Diego and Daniella. Two of the older girls were Mariam and Lupita. There was one darling little boy who was angry and hateful. He captured my heart but I don’t remember his name. For this blog, I’ll call him Diablito. 

The woman who ran the orphanage was a beautiful, kind Mexican woman. She operated on a small budget and very little training. The children slept in dormitories, girls in one room and boys in another. Each child had his or her own bed and an orange crate on which to display pictures and shiny objects. Some children had pictures of the parents who had abandoned them, hoping that some day they would return to celebrate their birthday and take them home.

There were other volunteers. Church groups donated clothes and toys at Christmas. A Rotary Club donated money to put a tall swing in the dirt yard “playground.” But no one donated enough love to heal the children’s hearts.

The babies were fat and darling. They would be adopted before the year was out, by American families willing to pay a crooked attorney a lot of money in order to take them home. 

The older children seemed sad. They knew they would not be adopted. They went to school but didn’t have much energy for learning. My friend was a yoga teacher who led the girls in a yoga class every week. The girls loved her. They would have gladly stood on their heads for hours, just to see her smile. 

I participated in the yoga class and other activities that the yoga teacher arranged. Otherwise, I was pretty useless. I often positioned myself in the playroom and helped Diablito build tall block towers. One day, when he left the room to use the bathroom, the girls walked over to our tower and kicked it to pieces. Diablito came back to the room, screamed and burst into tears. I wanted to do the same.

I tried to hug Diablito. He tried to bite me. When I told the director what happened, she shrugged her shoulders and said it happened every time Diablito built towers. She suggested that if Diablito would stop building towers, the girls would stop kicking them over. I walked out the door, caught the bus, and went home. 

I volunteered at the orphanage for six months, from November until May. The next year I volunteered at the library. Other American women volunteered at the orphanage and were more creative and successful than I was.

One day I ran into the Orphanage Director at the bank. She had happy news. Diablito found a home with a family who wanted him. Diego and Daniella had been adopted, too. But the girls, Mariam and Lupita and the tower-kicking girls, were still waiting.