I had a particularly emotional day related to service recently. I didn´t write about it at the moment because I didn´t have internet access that day, but today I am sitting down to delineate exactly what was going through my mind.
Usually when I work with the kids I work with the younger ones, the ones who are not yet capable of communicating orally. That day in particular I spent the day working with older children who were perfectly capable of communicating with full, sentences, and I cannot understate how heartbreaking it is when you can completely understand what it is they are thinking and feeling at the time.
It first started with innocent play, throwing a ball, solving puzzles, and playing with a baby doll. As we were playing however, two nurses rushed out of the clinic with two babies in arms. One of the children asked me where I thought the children were going. Without really thinking, I stated that I thought they would be going to see their moms.
“I don´t think so. I think they´re going to the hospital.”
This child said this so blatantly and frankly, like it was just a fact of life. Like about how bears go into caves to hibernate or how birds migrate south to escape the cold. “They´ve just gotten really sick, they might die so they have to go to the hospital,” the child said as he continued to play with his toy truck.
Later, I was asked by the resident psychologist to help take the older kids outside to play. I was more than happy to do so. Seeing the kids running around on grass, swinging on swings, just being kids was so refreshing. Listening to them laugh and scream as they soaked up the sun and enjoyed life was a great moment of bliss.
“We take them out twice a week, to let them play so that they don´t get bored.”
30 minutes. Twice a week.
Thats all these kids got to play outside in a week.
That´s it.
Moreover, later, as I was listening to the psychologist talk about her research to other nurses and students in a round table, she stated something that was shaking me to my very core.
Many of the cases of malnutrition they had been seeing recently were more than anything just a result of neglect, that these moms would go out about their business and forget to feed their children for days.
For days, some of these kids did not obtain any food or water from their parents. Not because their mothers didn´t have a means with which to feed them, but because their moms simply didn´t feel a maternal instinct towards their children.
But who is to blame them? These moms were mostly teenagers. Some were no older than 15 years old. How can we expect them to have a maternal instinct for their children when they themselves are still children?
I cried because the situation of these children. I cried because even when they go home they will not receive proper care. I cried because nomatter how well these children are fed at the center their future will still be bleak. I cried because these children were born into a life that is against them.