Good things come to those who wait. I hope.

This is one of the girls I work with. She is the oldest child in Casa Samuel. She is still in this house because she is deaf and they decided it would be too hard for her to be moved. She attends a special school for deaf children off of the Casa Bernabé campus and sometimes comes home much later than the other children because her bus has to make so many stops in traffic. She has to sleep in a different room than the other girls too because one of them was scaring her in the dark since she can't hear her coming.

She sometimes has a hard time communicating with Veronica and the other children because no one can understand what she is saying. Veronica told me that she used to know sign language but because no one here uses it she has forgotten most of it. Now she reads lips. She has enough hearing that if you make a very loud sound in her direction, sometimes she will turn around. She also knows when music is playing and always tries to dance. But she can't hear herself talk so she doesn't know that the sounds she tries to imitate come out mangled. She's very good at charades and tracing letters in the air. She also has excellent visual memory skills, as I learned today when she DESTROYED me at memory matching cards. But her most valuable virtue is her patience. She knows that everyone else can hear and she can't. Yesterday she had a little toy guitar that plays music when you push a button and she went from person to person, putting it next to their ears, pushing the button, and delightedly watching their reactions as they heard the music. Then she put it to her own ears, pushed the button, and nothing happened. She shrugged her shoulders and moved on to the next person. She is always patient in communication and doesn't get angry at people for not understanding her. She is clearly frustrated but she knows we are trying.

As I have been observing her I have noticed this patience. I asked Veronica about her and she told me more of her story, which helped explain where that patience comes from. She has been at Casa Bernabé for much longer than she originally expected. A woman in Ohio has been trying to adopt her for the past 3 years, but she is still here. Whenever she can, this woman visits her, and she even sent her a photo album of pictures of her house with her picture in all the places she would normally be. But because of tiny loopholes in the international adoption process, she is still here. Waiting. A few months ago they told her it would be two more months, but those two months have come and gone and she still lives with 18 other children who she can't hear. I think she gets through everyday of silent chaos because she is still holding onto the hope that the adoption that started 8 years ago will eventually go through and she will get to move to the beautiful house in Ohio that she sees in the pictures. I so hope that her patience will not be in vain.