Kids say the darndest

Bill Cosby was correct. It doesn't matter what language they speak, kids still have quite a lot to say and it ranges from the outright comical to the heartbreakingly sweet or tragic.

This is one of the boys I work with. He is one of the 18 (possibly now 19) kids that lives in Casa Samuel. He is extremely entertaining. He's quite possibly the most talkative individual at Casa Bernabé. Everyday when he gets home from school at 11:30 he wants to sit down and talk with me. He's somewhat of an old soul and doesn't like to run and play with the other children much. He always looks sort of underwhelmed with life and when I ask him what's wrong he just shrugs and tilts his head to the side. But he comes alive when you sit and talk with him. He's full to the brim with questions about anything and everything.

One of his favorite topics involves the separation of girls and boys. He's VERY concerned with the plight of Mateo. When I explained to him that our group consists of ten girls and one boy he was mildly horrified, yet intrigued. He asked me, "Don't the girls all get jealous?" I explained to him that it was actually going ok. Then he asked if Matt sleeps in our room, and I pointed down the hill to the boys' shack and told him that's where Matt sleeps. He was completely appalled. "He sleeps all alone in the field??!!" No, I told him. Matt has a house, just not in our house. Every time he sees Matt he asks me how he can be surviving as the only boy and if he's still being forced to sleep in the house at the bottom of the hill. So, Matt's parents, if you're reading this, fear not. Matt is not being entirely ignored...he has someone looking out for his best interests daily.

Today my little buddy was particularly talkative. While everyone else played with soccer balls, jump ropes, and swings, he sat with me and talked my ear off. He's a bit hard to understand and he seems to think I'm a little stupid when I ask him to repeat himself, but he's decently patient with me. He asks me frequently how long I'm staying and I repeatedly remind him that it's two months, which is roughly 8 weeks, or around 50 days. Today he made me count to 50 to see how many that is. When I finished he said, "¡Ay! ¡Es un montón de días! Es como la arena...nadie puede contarla, solo Dios." (Wow! That's so many days! It's like the grains of sand...no one can count them but God.) Leave it to a six year old to poetically quote the Bible to tell me how long I'll be here.

Next, he climbed on my back, leaned into my ear, and whispered that he had secrets to tell me that I'm not allowed to tell the others. He started to tell me about the house he used to live in. He told me that before he came here he had a house. He told me what color all the walls were painted because he says he doesn't want to forget. He has been very concerned that I work alone in their house and that I don't seem to have any friends. I keep telling him that I have friends here but they work in other houses, but I don't think he believes me. Today he explained to me that just like me, he has friends back home. He said that before he came here he had lots of good friends but they separated him from his friends. He said that he had to say goodbye. He said that he has lots of friends but that they're all far away from him. I told him that it's the same for me. I said that I went to school far from home and now that I've graduated I had to say goodbye to my friends and leave them far away. Then he asked me why everyone who comes here leaves. He said every time he makes a new friend they leave him. I feel bad because I know that I'm just going to be another person who befriends him and leaves him.

Finally, he told me about how scared he always is. He kept looking around and reminding me that this was still a secret. He said that at night he can't sleep because he believes that there are monsters from the woods coming to get him. When he looks under his bed he says that he can see their red eyes. When he tells his Mami (the name they call the house mothers here), she tells him to go back to bed and pray and the monsters will go away. But, he tells me, they don't go away. He says he has been to the entrance of Casa Bernabé and he knows that it's only a dirt road out to the highway, without a gate. He says he wishes there were two big doors that could close and keep out the monsters. I tried to tell him that he is completely safe here and that no monsters can get him. There are none under his bed and none in the woods at Casa Bernabé, but I don't know if he believed me. Finally, he said that his Mami tells him that between him and the monsters is Jesus, but that he can't see Jesus. He asked me why he has never seen Jesus and I told him it's because Jesus hasn't come back yet. His argument was that he should have seen Jesus when He made him and I tried to explain that he was too small to remember being made. For a child so young, he asks so many deep questions. Between my broken Spanish, his lack of verbal punctuation, and the confidentiality policies here that I am sure we are breaking, I have trouble knowing how to answer him, but I constantly assure him that he is safe here and that he has friends who love him.