When Invisible Children Sing
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When Invisible Children Sing
Copyright © 2006 by Chi-Cheng Huang and Irwin Tang. All rights reserved.
Cover photo copyright © by David Roth/Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Designed by Beth Sparkman
Scripture taken from the New King James Version.® Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huang, Chi-Cheng.
When invisible children sing / Chi-Cheng Huang with Irwin Tang.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4143-0616-2 (hc)
1. Missions, Medical—Bolivia. 2. Missionaries, Medical—Bolivia. 3. Orphanages—Bolivia. I. Tang, Irwin A. II. Title.
R722.H83 2006
610.73’70984—dc22 2006010371
ISBN 978-1-4143-5311-1 (sc)
ISBN 978-1-4143-2965-9 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-2964-2 (Kindle); 978-1-4143-8820-5 (Apple)
Build: 2013-02-01 13:56:26
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
George and Deb Veth
for allowing me
to continue my dreams
of caring for our children
during difficult times,
to my sister
(Mingfang Huang),
and to the millions
of street children worldwide.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: We’ve Been Waiting for You
Chapter 2: Slash, Slash
Chapter 3: American Dream
Chapter 4: Be Careful
Chapter 5: Introduction to the Street
Chapter 6: Miguel and Pilar
Chapter 7: Gabriel
Chapter 8: Stabbing
Chapter 9: Into the Night
Chapter 10: I’m Bleeding
Chapter 11: Lice
Chapter 12: Fatso
Chapter 13: Christmas Eve
Chapter 14: Wake Up!
Chapter 15: Just One More Time
Chapter 16: Red January
Chapter 17: Magic Juice
Chapter 18: Not in Any Hurry
Chapter 19: A Way of Life
Chapter 20: The Wake
Chapter 21: Batir
Chapter 22: Merry Christmas
Chapter 23: Vicki
Chapter 24: Not All of Us Children
Chapter 25: Dance with Me
Chapter 26: Rain
Chapter 27: Potato Chips
Chapter 28: Headbutt
Chapter 29: Baby
Chapter 30: Child One
Chapter 31: Rosa Must Stay
Chapter 32: I Want to Go Home
Epilogue
Acknowledgments / Chi Huang
Acknowledgments / Irwin Tang
Foreword
This is an extraordinary effort by a sensitive and knowing physician deeply interested in young people and their manner of living. I’ve read of his work with enormous interest and with great respect—a doctor transcends barriers of geography, nationality, and class. In so doing, Dr. Chi Huang gives us much to consider: how young people, no matter the odds against them, affirm their humanity even as they struggle day by day to stay alive and consider and understand the world around them.
If only more of us in the United States would get to know the people of Bolivia through the words in this book—words that tell of others we very much need to meet and come to know! Yes, we who now try to ascertain what is happening in that far-off nation can learn of it mightily, knowingly, through a doctor’s carefully chosen observations—reflections which one hopes and prays will be attended by many of us in the United States and elsewhere.
Finally, here is a doctor who lives up to so many ideals. Some of us in medicine have unfortunately lost sight of these ideals. As I read this book, my mind went back to the work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer many, many decades ago in Africa; and indeed, Chi Huang, the physician who does this valuable and instructive work in Latin America, very much belongs to the tradition of honorable and valuable medical work that Dr. Schweitzer pursued in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Dr. Robert Coles
James Agee professor of social ethics at Harvard University, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School, and author of The Moral Life of Children and The Spiritual Life of Children
Introduction
Angry. Not a great word to describe a future physician or someone hoping to care for street children. But angry accurately describes what I felt as a kid. When my naive eyes saw the black and white of the world, I was angry and confused about injustices such as poverty and famine. I was also angry about getting beat at basketball. I was angry about those three points wrongly deducted from my English grammar test. I was angry about my little sister getting more and better gifts than I got. My father, in his charity, called this anger my “temper.” When my mother witnessed this temper, she would roll her eyes, shake her head from side to side, and tilt her head back, laughing.
Christmas Day 1987. The day my life changed. The day I began to question all that I knew. Why was I alive when so many others die from cancer, HIV, TB, war, and famine? Why was I born in South Carolina and not in a developing country, earning less than a dollar a day? Why did I have two caring parents rather than abusive parents who beat me every night? Why was education stressed in my life and not just getting by? Was it luck? fate?
The meaning of life. As an agnostic, I was officially clueless, questioning everything and searching. At Texas A&M University, I learned about existentialism—we’re like ants scurrying around doing everything and maybe nothing. It made some sense, in a world that seemed to make no sense.
Having grown up in South Carolina and East Texas, I had heard the word Jesus many times, both in prayers and curses. Slightly coerced and slightly out of guilt, I had occasionally attended church with a Christian friend, although I sometimes avoided going to church with him. Most of the church stuff was a sack of lies, in my opinion. I saw how some of those Christians lived very differently Monday through Saturday.
Nevertheless, one day I opened the Bible, desperately hoping to find an answer to the chaos and senselessness around me. Upon comparing the prophecies of the Old Testament with the events of the New Testament, I faced the same questions that Josh McDowell had asked years ago: Who was this Jesus? Was Jesus a liar with a knack for miracle making? Was Jesus a lunatic who convinced himself, and others, that he was the Son of God? Or is Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as prophesied in the Old Testament?
After three years of careful study and much resistance, there came a time when the research and studying did not lead me any closer to believing in God—Jesus. I had walked to the edge of the cliff, and intellectually I had accepted the evidence as proving the existence of God and Christ, but my heart was light-years away. I peered over the cliff and made that proverbial leap of faith, hoping to land on the other side. Years later, I landed. I became a Christian. While I reserved the right to ask God many questions once I made it to heaven, my faith did make some meaning of a maddening world. My faith allowed me to bring some structure to a chaotic humanity. Eventually, some of that anger transformed into a pa
ssion.
I wanted to become a politician. As a college student, I joined a Quaker peace mission struggling to stop the Serbian-Croatian War. When I was in Belgrade, a refugee girl named Nadia looked up at me with big hazel eyes: “Where is my father?” Maybe he was dead. Maybe he was killing others. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Why do you murder the Croats?” I asked an eighteen-year-old Serb soldier named Tomas. “Chi, if I do not shoot forward in the tank, there is a gun right behind my head ready to shoot me. It is not hard to kill. What is hard to accept is that my best friend, a Croat, is on the other side, trying to kill me.” In some respect, I gave up politics that day. The politicians might as well have been negotiating in an orbiting space shuttle. I was too impatient, too passionate, too ready to spit angry, honest words to be a politician.
I applied to Harvard Medical School. When the acceptance letter arrived, I stared at it in shock. I packed my bags and moved north of the Mason-Dixon Line with excitement and fear.
In medical school, I struggled to keep up with my classmates. They studied two days for a test, and I studied a week. I learned from wonderful teachers and toiled in superb hospitals. After four years of medical school, I needed only a couple of additional classes to graduate and begin my career as a physician. I reread my medical school application essay. Did I really write that? My face burned with embarrassment as I whispered to myself, “Save the world? Cure for cancer?” Did I sincerely believe in what I wrote? Hypocrite.
Call it youthful arrogance, if you may be so kind, but I wanted to change the world. And after four years of medical school, with passion intact and hundreds of hours of hard work logged, I had not changed the world one iota. I feared, in fact, that the world had changed me, softened me, bought me out. I decided to put off graduation. I asked Harvard for a yearlong sabbatical, and it was granted. My father worried that I had quit medical school strapped with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar debt in order to join the Jesuits. When I told my mother, well, my mother just rolled her eyes, shook her head from side to side, and tilted her head back, laughing.
During the first six months of the sabbatical, I studied the Old and New Testaments one page at a time. It was difficult and challenging. I was not a sitter or a thinker. I was a doer, and I was getting antsy. I was ready to serve. I did not really know what it meant to serve, to help, to assist—I just knew that I wanted to do it. I knew one other thing, something I had known since I was a little boy: I wanted to work with the poorest and most marginalized children. I wanted to treat severely malnourished children living in the jungle and suffering from kwashiorkor. I wanted to care for children with AIDS. I wanted to treat street children who, well, lived on the street. I stuffed a hundred letters into the mailbox.
Dear Organization X:
I am a fourth-year medical student from Harvard Medical School looking to spend up to six months in some service capacity. . . . I would be greatly appreciative if there are any volunteer opportunities available.
Sincerely yours,
Chi Huang
A handful of organizations responded, and one of them fit the bill perfectly. Scott Womack, the pastor of Iglesia de la Comunidad, was willing to let me work with street children in a poor Latin American nation called Bolivia. Just as I had applied to Harvard not knowing it was in Boston, all I knew about Bolivia was that it was south of Boston.
I knew nothing about street children. I knew that they were children and that they lived on the street. I had read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, or maybe I had only seen the movie. Wasn’t Oliver Twist a street child? There was very little written about street children in 1997, and I did not hunt it down. I was a doctor, almost, and they were children; my knowledge and my stethoscope were all I needed. As I got closer and closer to leaving for La Paz, Bolivia, I became terrified of working with street children. Do these children carry knives? Do they snort cocaine? Will they accept me, or will they kill me? How will I introduce myself to them? Do they have a booth on the street that says, “Come and meet the street children, five cents please”?
What difference could I make in their lives? I was not a social worker, psychologist, teacher, or reverend. I wasn’t even a doctor. I was a twentysomething, privileged, idealistic medical student unsure of who he was or what he was doing with a plane ticket to La Paz.
Oftentimes in book introductions, writers give statistics and histories concerning the people in their book. I will offer here only the same knowledge that I had walking off the plane in La Paz: nothing. Your introduction to the street children and their world comes with no numbers, no contextual spin.
I will tell you this one thing. At the end of my first year in Bolivia, I sat on the cold cement blocks of downtown La Paz, wondering what difference I had made in the lives of the street children on all sides of me. I asked a girl prostitute, “What do you want from me?” She did not want money or drugs or anything immediate. She said she wanted me to be present in her life. She asked me to build a home for the street children. She asked me to tell others about her life and the lives of other children of the street.
This book honors the last of those three promises, even if it is ten years later. I have attempted to portray five street children—Mercedes, Gabriel, Daniela, Vicki, and Rosa—as objectively as possible. They are real children growing up in a raw environment, and their language is often raw as well. I have used their own words whenever possible, in an attempt to depict an accurate snapshot of their lives. It is with great reservation that I write about myself. By nature, I am an introvert and private about my personal life. I have tried to describe my life and my transformation, to the possible dismay of my parents, with warts and all, so that you can understand these children through my eyes. Over the past decade, the street children and I have changed one another. In the end, I want this story to be about them and not about me. I have only lent you my glasses so you can see the children.
1
We’ve Been Waiting for You
Noon, August 1, 1997;
Plaza San Francisco, Downtown La Paz, Bolivia
A child.
His hands all too visible, cupped as if holding water, but holding nothing. His eyes adhering to my every twitch. His eyes glazed over from sleeplessness, from 3 a.m. flights into the sewage system, from wincing too hard trying to forget, from seeing everything, even the eyes of all those who see straight through him. He is invisible.
I reach into my pocket for a small metal disk that will make him more visible. These disks are almost magical, the way they work. The child is watching and waiting. He speaks poor Spanish. He is Aymaran—of blood indigenous to the Andes mountains. I fumble the metal disk. It falls to the pavement.
The street. This is his workplace, his bed, his table, his plate, his fine crystal. This is his home, Mother Street. I pick up the metal disk and place it in his cupped hands. Now they are not so empty. Now he is not so invisible.
Money. The metal disk is known here as a boliviano. It is the currency of Bolivia, worth about twenty American cents.
Everyone loves children, as long they belong to someone. When they belong to the street, few love them. And the children know it. Those cupped hands never ask for love. They ask for money.
I crouch down to ask him his name. He looks at my face. He knows I am new to La Paz. He knows it is my first day to walk the street. He knows he might get easy money from me. But he is not sure what I want now. Most people drop the coin in his hands and walk away, returning to their own sweet oblivion.
The child looks into my eyes, and he walks away.
The hill is steep and covered by cobblestones. The stones warp my feet as I lean forward, walking fast, as I usually do, marching double time to the girls’ orphanage at the top of the hill.
By the time I reach the door of Yassela Home for Street Girls, I’m grabbing my sides and ready to vomit. A young girl runs by, giggling at me. Mountain climbers wear oxygen masks at ten thousand feet. Paceños—the people of L
a Paz—live their entire lives at more than twelve thousand feet.
I look around me at the snow-covered, craggy peaks of the Andes mountains. Each year, tons of silt roll down from these mountains, enriching the soil of the altiplano, the five-hundred-mile depression from which La Paz springs. The mountains only partially shield the 2 million Paceños who live there from ice-winds that blast through the altiplano. I’m told the wind is cruelly cold at night.
Panting for air, I bend over to catch my breath in front of the orphanage door. A little eyeball peers through a low peephole and examines my face. The peephole slams shut, and feet pitter-patter away as a little girl’s voice shrieks, “Strange Chinese man! It’s a strange Chinese man!” The door swings open to reveal a middle-aged mestiza woman, her hands clasped before her food-stained apron. “Dr. Chi,” she says. “You’re here already. My name is Señora Lola.”
Señora Lola leads me silently down the stairs into the cozy main activity room where girls from three to sixteen sit quietly in groups of three or four. They knit. I take my position in the center of the room. “Hello, my name is Chi. I am going to be the orphanage medical doctor here for the next seven months.” The girls glance up at me, return to their knitting.
A little girl peers up at me with her twinkling, starry eyes. Her rich chocolate skin is accentuated by her simple pink dress, with which she obscures her face. She lets down her dress slowly, slowly, and ever so carefully she reaches out to me. “Do you want to see my room?”
I put my fingers in her hand. “Sure. What’s your name?”
“Sara.”
“My name is Chi,” I say.
“Chinito,” she says. Chinaman.
“Actually,” I say, “it’s simply Chi. Chi Huang.”
Señora Lola and I follow Sara to her room. The air is stale with mold. Posters of teenage singing sensations spice up the pastel pink walls. Sara hops onto her bed. From under her covers, she brings forth a ragged doll, its head secured by thin cloth. The doll has one black plastic eye and one imprint of an eye long gone. “Her name is Isabel,” Sara introduces.