A Memoir

Jenny and I went to the San Carlos school for the first time- only 6 children in our class, 20 in the school, 3/4s boys, from ages 7 to 12. The girls are eager, wanting to learn, but the boys are restless, ever moving, not letting slip whether they understand me or not- how can I know if they don’t understand my mangled spanish or simply don’t want to move. During ‘recreo’ (free time), one of the girls falls while we play “semaforro”, more or less ‘red light green light’ and lays there, a statue with streaming tears, until I lift her. I am enveloped by the three other girls while I hold the one, and each holds their breath-what will I do? I must cheer them up, bring back the dimples, so out comes the old game I used to play with my grandfather- my hand here, yours on top, now yours, now my mine again, don’t let them bottom one escape. No words necessary, and yet smiles erupt again. At least on the outside, for this moment, all is better again, but what do I, a gringo, know? Later on the teacher shares her silent griefs- I have but known her a few hours and she seems to trust me, or perhaps the pain and frustration she bears cannot help itself and must emerge. ‘these boys, so young, and already hope has let them down’ they do not try, bad grades do not phase them- no one at home checks or cares. For some, they never knew a father. For others, the only father they know is, and has always been, behind bars.

Some of the children are without notebooks and pencils, the money wasted on drugs and alcohol. And so, the boys, more so than the girls (she did not seem to know why the girls seem more resistant to a crumbled family life), seem to scorn learning, and much prefer to play in the dirt with their toy trucks-using dusty hands to make dusty roads. The rest of the cities are just scraps of wood and a few pieces of withered orange peel.

The teacher, with over twenty years of painful watching, tells me how, after years of military rule, many changes were made far above- where laws and rules are made easily enough, like breathing in your sleep, but lower down, the laws hit the dirt to become reality, and everyone around-teachers, children, families- choke and gasp for air, unaided by the law makers. She works valiantly, even cheerfully, day after day in her one room school, but I can tell it breaks her to think that her students, so young and capable, may be smothered, and spend the coming years just trying to eek out enough to live on.

So what is my role here? To what can I aspire? I cannot change the Elqui Valley of northern Chile, I cannot give these children parents like I have had, I cannot change the government. I do not know how far I can reach, but I surely am convinced that I cannot do nothing.

I can dance the Macarena to the ‘greece’ soundtrack with the girls, and teach them the electric slide. I can bring banana’s, Christian’s favorite fruit. I can teach them how to say ‘Good Morning. It is eight o clock’. Overall- I am called to love them- love them like Jesus did, and tell them of the hope that we have, a lasting hope that cannot be extinguished by all the world throws at them. I see them as small seedlings, fighting oh so hard against the wind that is ever whipping around the valley in the afternoons, threatening to uproot them. I know that I am like a wisp of smoke, a fleeting breathe, here for but three and a half months, and yet I put no limits on what God is already doing here in northern Chile, and I enter the days to come with great expectancy.

For “foolish is he who did nothing because he could only do a little”.