Glee

I walked by one of the rooms and saw Hermina sitting on her bed. The thirteen year old (?), developementaly slow girl was rotating the trunk of her body back and forth, shaking her hands at the writs and staring upwards at the air with a gleeful smile. Her joy seemed so bright that it was almost other-wordly. Three days ago, Hermina jumped out of a second story window and fell on the dirt road beside the building. She spent the weekend in the hospital. She broke no bones and seemed to have suffered very little. "She must have had an angel on her shoulder," a Dutch volunteer told me in broken English when we disgussed the outcome of Hermina's fall.

Today I tried to have patience and help a girl with Cerebral Palsey eat her food. "How old is she?" A woman visiting the center asked. "Eight or nine years old," I guessed of the skinny and fragil girl I was easily able to hold in my arms without assistance. The woman looked at me with surprise. "Why is she so skinny? so small?"

"I think it's because she eats so little," I said. "Her mouth muscles are difficult for her to control and she can't swallow. As a result, she eats very little."

The woman I spoke with had come with her seven-year-old son to the center so that the nurse here could take a look at her son. The seven-year-old boy had some sort of problem that kept him from walking.

He sat on the orange couch with a smile. "I can walk!" he told me with excitment. His mother held him under his armpits wile his nearly limp legs tried their best to make a walking motion. "I can walk!" He told everyone who came into the room with perfect glee. One girl from the center ran into the room only to slap the unsuspecting seven-year-old visiter. His mother came to his rescue while a volunteer simontaniously pulled Ana Maria out of the room and explained that Ana Maria only hit people in order to get attention. Her son was not singled out; Ana Maria did this to everyone. I can vouch that this is true. Twenty minutes later the seven-year-old was using his hand to scoot over on the couch in order to throw his arms around another girl from the center he had never met before. This girl was seventeen. He seemed the ideal picture of childish happiness, even though his little legs wouldn't move and he'd earlier been hit for no fault of his own. How much I could learn from such a tutor?