Our First Night Back

The children's home sits atop a hill, much like a castle might sit, commanding a hillside, with clear views to the 4 directions. The drive up there winds around that hill. It is an unpaved path of creamy, slightly rusty, slightly yellow limestone, crushed and pressed by countless tires, a strip of green growing up between. And so, when our bus arrives, it is dark, it is night, it is nearly 10 o'clock. We have arrived later than usual, but the kids are all about, running out, walking out, to meet us, to greet us. Arnella approaches me steadily, her eyes on my face, her arms outstretched. She loves it that I remember her name, always, every year I remember her name. And there are new faces too, children we have not yet met, smiling, greeting, calling out, laughing, reaching out to us. The kids are eager to grab our bags, to help us carry them in. They are clambering all over the bus, all over us. Several of us have returned to the home for consecutive years, and others of us are new, and still others have come but many years before. None of that matters to the kids. They are simply overjoyed with welcoming us. As are we in greeting them. It is a crazy time when we first arrive, and I love it.

I don't see all my friends yet. Not all come out in the first rush of greeting. Some of the kids are slow to open their hearts again, and that is understandable. I always think about that -- what is it like to open in love and then to be left again when our week is over? How is it for the kids and the staff after we leave? Are the kids harder to deal with? Does it make more work for the staff? Does our leaving re-open old wounds of abandonment in the kids? These are questions I may never know the answer to, and they are not thoughts I have on arrival. I am not thinking, I am alight with joy and my eyes are seeking familiar faces.

So, we have carried boxes of water in and out, deposited our bags. It isn't quite time to eat yet and I feel like I am still going in and out, back and forth, seeing what is here and what is there, and who is here and who is there. On one of my trips back inside, I feel a tentative touch on my arm, from behind. I turn to look and it is Morris, dear Morris, whom I love. I do. I love that boy. He is simple and quiet and sweet and well accustomed to being overlooked and mistreated. He is quiet and shy again now, his eyes alight with tears. We greet each other softly--he is not a boy to reach out and grab up in a hug, he is all bones and angled arms and he is not comfortable in an embrace. Our smiles are huge, though, and our eyes are speaking what our shy words do not. One of the first things he asks me is when I am leaving. When am I leaving!? I just got here! But it is because he has something to tell me, he has to tell me he is playing drums in church on Sunday (today is Tuesday) and he wants to make sure I will still be there to see him play. Of course I will be there, I assure him, and then I tell him how happy I am he has been practicing the drums in the year's time since I saw him last, when I asked Kevin, a young man who also grew up in the children's home and who lives nearby yet, to teach Morris the drums, to promise me he would, and he did.

This is so important a thing, he has to tell me that first. He too has remembered all that he and I shared the year before -- when this shy boy opened up and revealed a talent for music and for art, a crazy sense of humor and love of singing, this boy who had been so quiet all the years before, and even now, if you did not know him, in his tentative shyness and stammered attempts to communicate with me, you would think him unable to say more than 5 words. But he has a vastness inside him that is kept mainly out of reach, hidden, safe, and yes, overlooked. He is accustomed to being overlooked, and probably he prefers it that way, as he is easy prey for the mean and the vicious, because he is so gentle, so simple, so quiet. He shows his agitation and nervousness when he is attacked by other kids only by twitching and itching. He never fights back, never raises his voice. He skitters away and keeps to the edges, and oh how I recognize all these traits in him, how familiar they are to me, though he and I are not the same, we share much in our approaches to life and to survival.

I do know what a fragile walk I must walk with him, balancing how to love and attend to him with a caution that comes from knowing I must leave again, knowing that I cannot make it all right for him. I can shed some light along his way. I am happy when others of our group reach out to him, but I also know he relates to me as he would a mother or a teacher, always seeking me out and asking me to watch, "Watch, Miss" as he draws or coasts downhill on a bike. So this small meeting of ours, our quietly ecstatic reunion, would look like nothing much to an outside observer -- it is but a brief touch, a small conversation, four eyes bright with tears shining in the night, and yet to us it is huge, it is so much. And I have had to trust, in faith, that God holds Morris in his hands as one of his own beloved children, an orphan at the mercy of a world that often offers little mercy at all. I have to trust that God is using me, my hands, my heart, my mind, to share his love with this gangly boy, and that when I fly away home again at the end of the week, God will continue to fill in the spaces of Morris' life, that other kind people will reach out for and care for and shelter him. I have to trust, in faith. I have to. God uses us in ways we might never imagine, until we offer ourselves up to be used by him. And it isn't all hearts and flowers and joyous love, it is also heartbreak and tears and fearful attempts at trusting, the agony of vulnerability. The naked edge of opening our hearts even though we know what heartbreak feels like and we don't like it, but we do it anyway because that is life. Life lived passionately. Passion as in suffering too--Christ's passion, intense emotion, the heart exposed in love. It is all that.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai