The Elephant In the Room

I don’t know what you want to hear. I could relate all that I’ve done since I last blogged, but I feel like that would be ignoring the elephant in the room.

I’m leaving … and whatever I would write, that fact would be buried under all the sentences, lurking between the lines.

I’ve always liked writing. Sometimes when I've felt something deeply I would sit down and tell myself to write a poem in order to express myself better, to experience some kind of catharsis. But so often I would start with what was pounding in my heart and would find that I was trapped by very plain and simple language. My feelings may have been intense, but my language was not complex and routine. I feel the same way now when I write, “I’m leaving.” Such a simple sentence with so much weight.

I’ve been thinking that spending three months in another country when you speak the language, know a few people and are working on a fascinating project, can be torture. It is torture because something happens in three months; some kind of glue is formed naturally. I’m not sure from where it comes or when it comes, but the recipe for you soul sticking to foreign land for sure has the requirement that your soul must sit there for three months.

I try to write happy or interesting things when I blog and I’ve left out a lot of the negative, but the truth is that up until a month ago, I had days when I wanted to be in Sacramento badly. HOME. I didn’t feel the same “magic” as I did last summer. Many of the kids I had loved and lived for had been re-assigned to other orphanages. Many days I was the only volunteer at the orphanage. I felt so frustrated with the Romanian language that I felt like I somehow gave-up on it, though I still used it daily … but now when I think about returning I am confused.

Recently I have been volunteering in a small classroom for six of the older orphan boys in the center. I LOVE THE CLASSROOM! It is such a unique little place with a sweet security, and it brings new purpose to the lives of these boys, many of them actually men. Try putting 19-year-old boys in a school when they’ve never been in one their whole lives and you will find that there is a lot of drama to be had, but as you learn the peculiarities of each child, and the children begin to understand structure and security, there is such a sweet, motherly/teachery feeling that develops. It is one of those feelings that fill up the tank, and make your life a song. I find that the boys can almost be controlled by praise, so I have become one of their main cheerleaders. Also, as my friend Ariana teaches the clas,s I cheer her on, giving her a smile when the boys give her black stares, trying to be an extra pair of arms for her as much as I can. I feel that I would lie down on the floor if she needed to be a little taller. Because I believe in her and what she’s doing, I would do almost anything to help her, even to my own detriment.

And there are somethings I don’t like about the U.S., but once I go there, I am trapped. I can’t get away from the U.S. when I am home. It’s bothering me how alone I will feel when I’m there. When the streets are empty, and there aren’t a dozen people to meet along the road to where you’re going. I’m going to sadly miss working with people, monitoring the process of children that I’m dreaming for. I’m going to miss the company, even when it’s bad. I dread being all alone again, and for anybody who’s traveled, I’m going to miss that the people around me won’t miss what I miss. They won’t long for a world they’ve never entered.

I don’t think I’m going to like how clean people are in the U.S. I won’t like how they can leave the shoes they wore outside in the house as well. I’m going to hate hearing hour-long conversations about seemingly pointless you-tube videos and going to parties when there’s no one in the room who obviously needs help. I’m going to miss trying to speak Romanian. I’m going to miss the questions I can ask here without really offending anyone. I’m going to hate it when I eat at a restaurant and the waitress/waiter is being abnormally kind and attentive. I’m going to miss sweeter fruit with more seeds and eating peppers. And really I’m going to miss the boys at the school in the orphanage. I just don’t like them growing without me. I don’t like that Alexandra Sa. is at the orphanage right now in her bed, staring at the ceiling when she could be speaking and dancing. I’m going to miss the sincerity that seems more common here.

What I don’t like about America is shallowness, being bored because we have everything we need, being too nice, and being afraid of insulting others and therefore holding back on what we really think and feel. Oh, how guilty I am. But I want home, too, I think. I just have to wait till I get there to see if I really wanted home as badly as I imagined when I was away.

Mathematical Sense

Bianca wailed for the volunteers long after they were gone. She couldn’t rest but held onto some hope they would return and she would receive their affection. She held onto the bars of the backyard gate, distressed.

“It makes my heart hurt to hear her wail like that,” a worker told me. The worker told Bianca not to cry, but somehow holding the dirty little Bianca to calm her was something the workers NEVER do. Bianca has stopped looking to them for affection.

I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, but it caught my attention for an hour or less inside the orphanage. At some point, I had come out briefly and noticed that Bianca was still crying.

When I came outside I saw that Bianca had escaped from the back yard. She was moaning, whimpering, and kind of running around aimlessly. The eight year old had somehow lost all the clothes she had on earlier. Even her diaper was gone. She was completely naked. I was distressed by her running around naked and couldn’t help but note that she clearly had a six-pack. A life of tantrums had made this little girl ripped.

An older girl with MR, Doina, was attempting to grab Bianca. But Doina would respond to Bianca as the caregivers did, and Bianca would never willingly go where Doina led. I couldn’t bare Doina’s hitting and yanking the eight year old, dragging her tantruming body on uneven concrete.

I ran to Bianca and spoke to her. “Okay, come with me,” but Bianca was beyond listening. She wouldn’t have trusted an angel at this point. I saw some large cuts on her that were bleeding. I couldn’t take it. I scooped her up in my arms while her legs kicked and her muscles tightened. I held her close to me. Two adult men who work at the center had been sitting just outside the gate, enjoying their cigarettes and laughing at the sight of Bianca running around naked. I could hear their laughter as I carried Bianca inside the building, up the stairs. As I was on the stairs I set Bianca down. I attempted to use my voice in a soft and calm way to create an atmosphere in which she felt she was loved and cared for and everything was okay.

“Bine. Asa. Mergem sus sa facem o baie, dar trebuie sa cautăm pentru rufele inainte de facem baie, da? Cautăm rufele si pampers …” I walked through the steps of what we were doing and going to do. Between every word was another message, “This is such a normal, familiar, calm environment. If we feel a little excited it is only because what we are going to do is so fun.”

I washed Bianca as one of the staff watched. I was glad she only watched and didn’t tell me to make Bianca wash herself. This is usually what the staff tell me whenever they see me doing something children can do themselves. I delighted to wash out the bleeding wounds on the little girl.

“Look at your shirt,” the staff worker and Doina pointed out. Little specks of Bianca’s blood were on my yellow shirt.

I took Bianca to a room to stay alone with her after she was clean and dressed. She was distracted by all the toys in the room, donated but never used, and couldn’t sit still. I employed the ABA techniques I had learned at a seminar the day before to control Bianca, who still lacked calmness. As I sat next to her at the table I had a thought about how Bianca was hated by the staff and the workers because she insisted on receiving what crumbs of love and security she could get and wouldn’t give that up. Being beaten and having her hair pulled out and her body dragged downstairs (as I had watched for two years) wouldn’t keep her from insisting, “I must be loved.”

I thought about how thankful I was for this attribute in Bianca and how I would hate it if it left because that would mean that we had lost Bianca and she would be dead to us. As long as she insisted on being reached in meant she had a soul that still had a hope of being rescued from a mindless black night.

I looked at her across the table and felt compassion for her need.

“Come here and sit in my lap,” I said, and she got up and sat down. I moved us to a bigger chair where I just held her as she held onto a doll with no legs in her arms.

I’ve heard or read somewhere that when a mother holds her infant, chemicals are released in the mother and child’s brain that are so healthy for them. As I held Bianca, kissing her cheek periodically and telling her I loved her and what a good girl she was, I could FEEL the love inside me, and something of its power had to do with the fact that it wasn’t just myself involved with the emotion, but Bianca was there, too, giving and taking.

There was a moment there (and not a second or a minute or anything measurable, but a MOMENT) when I felt with Bianca in my arms that all the pain I had caused and encountered in my life was worth it in order that in that moment I could hold and love Bianca.

Maybe it doesn’t mathematical sense that the nine hours my mom had of labor plus months of depression in my own life could equal one moment in Romania, but in this moment it made sense.

A Needy Bunch

A handful of Americans wanted to visit the orphanage and gained permission to do so after much string-pulling. The director insisted on being there when they came to supervise the visit. I was so excited when they arrived, but only a few of the really sweet kids who were not locked in the backyard were around them as the director took them on a tour of the facility.

I walked with them through the orphanage as they looked at empty rooms that the director showed them, but the whole time I was trying to think how I could get them permission to go where the kids were outside. A couple in the group asked about a boy they had met last year, Johnny.

“He’s outside,” the director said.

Almost without thought I found myself saying, “I could take my guitar outside. We could sing with the kids, and they could see Johnny. I could get some instruments for the Americans to use with the kids? “ I looked at the director. “What do you think? Would that be okay?”

When the director consented I ran to collect the tambourines that spent their hours locked up in room, unused. I grabbed my guitar and one American girl passed on the tambourines to the Americans.

As soon as we approached the gate to the back yard, the kids ran towards us screaming. They were shouting unintelligibly, so excited to have visitors, and from the drool on their shirts and their pushing each other, you could tell they were a needy bunch.

One worker yelled at me, “Marilyn! Tell your friends to come in quick and not hang around the door or else the kids will run out.” Once the kids get out of the backyard they can no longer be supervised, which is quite dangerous.

I yelled in English, “Come in, quick so the kids don’t run out!”

I wondered why they waited.

I forget how intimidating these “children” (many of them actually adolescents and teens) can seem.
In the end, two of the men entered. Kids surrounded them. One adolescent girl was walking around topless. Nobody knew what happened to her shirt. Bogdan hit the guitar as though it were a baseball, using his instrument like a baseball bat. Then he twisted the tuning strings, making the guitar out of tune. I sang a few songs (before Bogdan twisted the strings) and then yelled for the Americans to go. They left slowly, one by one, so that the kids wouldn’t notice them leaving. I continued playing, but nobody was really excited about the songs now.

Looking back, it was a complete disaster. The workers chastised me for bringing the group. Somehow the instruments were broken or stolen and Bianca couldn’t stop crying for about an hour after they left, because she wanted the visitors to come and hold her. Bianca has received affection primarily from visitors. When they come, this eight-year-old fights to get the attention and affection of just one.