I kneel down so I’m eye to eye with the doll. “Isabel, how long have you been here?”
“Long time,” Sara says.
“Do you like it here, Isabel?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“I miss my mommy.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“In El Alto.”
“Where’s El Alto?”
“It’s high above, in the mountains. It’s far, far away. And it’s very, very poor.”
“Why are you here, Isabel?”
“Because Mommy does not have any money for us to live with her.”
“Do you get to see your mommy?”
“Yes. She visits every week.”
Sara’s shoulders slump, and her eyes look far away.
“Will you show me the rest of your house?” I ask her. Sara’s face lights up again. She jumps off her bed and scurries out of the room. We walk into the concrete courtyard, where a nurse grabs my arm. Nurse Olivia is a large woman, a strong woman. With her rouge thick and her silver hair pinned tightly into a bun, she looks like a big-limbed Tammy Faye Bakker. “Chi,” she says, “I know it is your first day, but I need you to see this girl’s arm.” She raises her eyebrows and peers into my eyes. “Her name is Mercedes.”
The bedroom hosts six sets of bunk beds. Mercedes, about fifteen, sits on her bed, which is a lower one and neatly made. Her hair is a bird’s nest beneath which her face is safely sequestered. Her clothes hang loosely over her slender frame, her faded pink sweatshirt having seen the scrub brush one too many times. Her skin is a dark olive; her brown eyes are encircled by black rings of makeup. She looks down and away, deep into a bedpost.
“My name is Chi,” I say, as I sit down on a parallel bed. “I am the new orphanage doctor. What’s your name?” I ask. She studies the bedpost inside and out. A lightbulb hanging from the ceiling yellows everything. “Señora Olivia wants me to take a look at your arm.”
No response.
“Can I look at it?” I ask gently.
“No,” she says.
“Why don’t you tell me what it looks like since you’re not going to show it to me? Is it red? Is there blood coming out of it?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“I have a cut.”
“When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“How did your arm get cut?”
“I cut it,” she says.
“With what?”
“With Gillette,” she says. With a razor blade.
I try to slow my breath. “How come?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“Were you mad at yourself? Were you sad?”
“No, I just felt like doing it.” She looks as far away from me as she can. “It feels good. I enjoy cutting myself,” she says.
I feel my stomach turning. “It doesn’t hurt?”
“It hurts later,” she says. There is no pride in her confession, but no shame either. I am sickened, perplexed, and my throat tightens out of anger. Knowing the tremendous odds against her survival, why does she make her life even harder? “Is there any pus coming out of your wound?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I need to treat it.”
“It doesn’t need to be treated,” she tells me.
“If you don’t treat it, the wound will become necrotic,” I say. “You’ll not only get the skin infected, you’ll get your muscles and bones infected.”
She stares at nothing. “If you get your muscle and bone infected, I will have to cut your hand off.”
She looks at me, and for the first time I see a young girl in her eyes. She is wondering who I am, why I am here, and if she can trust me. She looks away for a long spell. “Okay,” she says.
We walk to the orphanage examination room, a small room stocked with only bandages and hydrogen peroxide. Mercedes sits down on the wooden examination table.
“It is 2 p.m. now. What time did you cut yourself?” I ask her.
“Midnight.”
“Fourteen hours. I can’t sew up your wound. I’d be closing a wound filled with germs, keeping them in your arm. So we’ll have to disinfect your wound and bandage it. Please uncover your arm.”
She uncovers her right arm. I disguise my gasp as a deep breath. Over twenty razor blade scars run up the palm side of her arm, tracing ragged lines from wrist to elbow. By their color and texture, I discern that the scars vary widely in age. Has she been cutting herself since the age of twelve? Ten?
“Uncover your other arm,” I say.
Dozens of parallel scars line her other arm.
“Do you have razor blade marks elsewhere?”
“No,” she states with a twitch of the eye.
She’s lying to me. But do I have the right to insist on seeing the other cuts? If not the right, at least I have the obligation. But if I insist, will I squander what little trust I’ve earned?
“Do you have any razor blade marks on your legs?” I ask Mercedes.
“No.”
“This is my first meeting with you, Mercedes, I know. But I need to make a full examination. Are you lying to me?”
Nurse Olivia shouts at her, “How you can do such things to your body, and before the eyes of God, is a mystery to me! You don’t love yourself and you don’t love the Lord!” Only the vitriol hurled at this child can distract from the horror unfolding before my eyes. Five razor blade marks of six centimeters line each of her thighs. Longer scars cover her stomach, stretching from one side of her rib cage to the other. Is this real? I feel like I am a minor character (“DOCTOR”) in a tragic play. With scars closing up over other scars, she has probably cut herself at least two hundred times. If she continues, by the time she is an adult, her entire body, save her face, will be covered by this street map of razor scars.
“Did you do all this yourself?” I ask Mercedes.
“Yes,” she utters robotically. As soon as Nurse Olivia went into her tirade, Mercedes tuned out of reality.
“She is a cutter,” states Nurse Olivia.
I clean her arm wound and bandage it up. A putrid odor has been emanating from her lower body and getting worse. I don’t want to offend young Mercedes by gagging, so I open the window and the door for air. The odor recalls for me the time I relieved a man who had been constipated for two weeks. She’s fifteen! She should be clean and happy. I take a deep breath and reach for a speculum, and then I remember where we are. I have essentially no medical equipment here. I manually examine the labia. As I examine her for herpetic sores, green pus flows steadily out of her.
I sit there dazed. I didn’t expect anything like this. I had hoped for docile children who just needed some antibiotics and a break in life. Whatever I envisioned, now that I’m here, I wonder what I can possibly offer these children.
“You probably have a venereal disease,” I inform Mercedes.
She looks at me oddly.
“You should never have sex again, Mercedes!” shouts Nurse Olivia. “God has punished you!”
“Please,” I implore Nurse Olivia, “let me take over here.” Taking a calming breath, I look into Mercedes’s eyes. “You have a sexual infection,” I tell her, the words altering neither her face nor her breathing.
“Please take these samples, Señora,” I tell Nurse Olivia. “I’ll be right back.” I walk to a neighborhood pharmacy and return with enough antibiotics to cover most venereal diseases. After explaining to Mercedes her schedule of medication, I ask Nurse Olivia to send the blood and cervical samples to the nearest laboratory in order to identify Mercedes’s disease. And then I walk to the boys’ orphanage.
Bururu. This is what the street children say when they are cold. You can hear them saying it at night when the cold wind blows.
“Welcome to Bururu Home for Street Boys.” Señora Lydia opens the door to Bururu and then points eastward. “As you can see, we are located in the downtown area, not far from the old cathedral of San Francis
co and the grand city square known as Plaza San Francisco, where the campesina women set up shop and the street children sell drinks and shine shoes.”
Walking past Señora Lydia, I extend my toe past Bururu’s threshold. Whuff! A quartet of boys tackles me, staggering me but not felling me. They each grab hold of a limb and try to pull me down, giggling the whole time. I finally catch my breath, and I playfully punch a chubby boy in the chest, swing a skinny boy around by the arms, drag a boy in a fútbol (soccer) jersey across the room, and try unsuccessfully to shake the fourth boy off my leg. My back grows weaker with each giggle, and they pull me to the brown Spanish tiles.
Then one of the boys speaks to me. He stops to see if I understand him, which I don’t, before he continues. I’m not even sure if he is speaking Aymara—which is spoken by 1.6 million people around Lake Titicaca—or Quechua, the official language of the Inca Empire, spoken by 13 million people along the Andes mountains. A second boy tries to explain what the first boy said. He is speaking a different but similarly incomprehensible language. Slowly, though, words such as la and el stand out. They mean “the” in Spanish, a language I do speak, shakily.
“My name is Chi,” I tell them. “I am your doctor.”
The boy with the soccer jersey tells me, “I am Marcos. I am a fútbol player. When I grow up, you won’t see me playing in the street leagues anymore. You’ll see me only in the stadium. Do you play fútbol?”
Before I can answer, the boys all say, “Upstairs. Let’s go upstairs!”
“What’s upstairs?” I ask.
“The bedrooms,” Marcos tells me.
Room 1 stinks like feet unwashed for a fortnight. A dozen blankets laid side by side on the floor mark the boys’ sleeping territories. I walk over to a beautiful, brightly colored blanket and pick it up. The indigenous women, or cholitas, weave these blankets, and every boy seems to own at least one.
“Ahuayo,” says Jesús.
“Ahuayo,” I repeat.
The children burst into laughter at my pronunciation.
“Ahuayo,” I say.
More laughter. I grow popular through incompetence. I study their giggling faces. We look alike, the boys and me. We are all brown. They are short kids, and I am five-six. Their hair is straight, coarse, and black. Mine is so straight that it stands punk-rockishly vertical after a shower. Broad strong cheeks. My fleshy face-flanks make deep dimples when I smile. Eyes like fat or skinny almonds. My eyes are pretty round, but I retain the almond flavor. Yes, this twenty-five-year-old Taiwanese American medical student can pass for their indigenous older brother.
“It is time for the meeting.” Señora Lydia stands in the doorway to Room 1. She is of pale Spanish skin, her white, oval face shining through a shower of dark curls. Dressed “Euro,” like an Upper West Side art dealer, she escorts me through the carpentry room. Aged five through seventeen and of both indio and mestizo blood, the boys hammer together bookshelves and footlockers. Bang! Bang! Bang! They are dressed in cotton shirts and blue jeans or beige slacks.
“Many of these children came from off the streets,” Señora Lydia tells me. “The others were dropped off by parents who could not afford to care for them.”
We enter the meeting room, and four women sitting in a semicircle stand up and give me solemn smiles. “Some of you have already met him,” says Señora Lydia. “Let me introduce him formally. This is Chi Huang.”
Nurse Olivia shakes my hand. “God bless you for coming here,” she says.
“I am the social worker at the Yassela Home,” says Señora Lola, who seems to possess a knowing peace. “I handle fights and hurt feelings, and I keep order.”
“Hello.” A woman in blue jeans and a collared shirt waves. “My name is Jessica. I do whatever needs to be done. I pick up the loose ends.”
A psychologist named Eva tells me, “The boys need more men around here.”
“The girls will like him too!” exclaims Nurse Olivia. “He is a godsend! A blessing!” She opens her arms to the heavens.
Señora Lydia clears her throat. Although she is now the head administrator of three orphanages, in earlier years Señora Lydia Morales spent many nights on the streets of La Paz coaxing street children to leave the street and join her orphanage. On the streets where women get beaten, raped, and murdered, Señora Lydia earned the trust and respect of the children by practically living in alleys and nooks. That is why some tiny fraction of the La Paz street children population is willing to leave the familiarity of the street to live in her orphanages.
“Dr. Huang,” declares Señora Lydia, “we have been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for so long,” says Jessica.
“Is it true that you are from Harvard Medical School?” asks Señora Lola.
“Yes.”
Harvard. They nod their heads as if the word itself were a panacea, even here, thousands of miles from the seat of global superpower, deep in the southern hemisphere among the crevices and crags of the Andes mountains. One 60-watt lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, flickering furiously to light the three-hundred-square-foot room. Boys galloping across the orphanage interrupt the uneasy silence. These women think that I am some kind of godsend. What’s going to happen when I ineptly sew a boy’s hand to his chest? I doubt I even qualify as an effective charlatan.
“So, Dr. Chi,” says Señora Lydia.
“Um, Señora Lydia,” I say in halting Spanish, “I’m not a doctor yet. I still have a few more classes before I graduate from medical school. I’m still learning.”
“For the next seven months, you will be the staff doctor,” says Señora Lydia. “Do you understand my Spanish? You will be a doctor for fifty boys and twenty girls living at two orphanages: Bururu for boys and Yassela for girls. They are orphanages for street children, Dr. Huang. Street children learning to live an ordered and meaningful life, learning to bake bread in our bakery, cook in our kitchens, and build things with their hands in our carpentry rooms. All this so that when these children leave the orphanage at age eighteen, they will survive and, if not prosper, at least sleep under a roof and within four walls. Dr. Huang, are you familiar with street children?”
File image: cold concrete; naked, protuberant bodies; rain. “Yes,” I say. “I am.”
Señora Lydia takes a deep breath, relieved.
Then I open my big mouth. “Park Street Church is my church in Boston,” I announce, “and they sent me here to work at these two orphanages. But I must also treat the children still living on the street.” My voice trails off. “Treat the children on the streets,” I repeat weakly.
The staff members stare gravely into the floor. “For you to pay a visit to the streets is wonderful,” says Señora Lydia. “When do you plan on going?”
“At night. I plan to work most every night on the street, and I want to go as soon as possible.”
Señora Lydia tilts her head and frowns. “Do you know how dangerous the streets are at night? Especially for a foreigner?”
“Nighttime is the only time when the children are not working the streets for food and money. And they usually sleep in the same place. By visiting at night, I can establish a consistent relationship with them, as a doctor.” I know she knows this; now she knows I know it.
“Dr. Huang,” says Señora Lydia, “exactly how familiar are you with street children?”
“One hundred million children live on the world’s streets. They are our silent canaries in the mine shaft, shouting to the world the state of the poor.”
“Eloquent. How familiar are you with street children?”
As I look around the room for a good answer, my own trite words echo in my ears. Nativity scenes the children made out of paper and clay sit on the shelves behind the staff members. Their creativity warms my heart. My silence answers her question.
“Yes,” says Señora Lydia, “and the streets will teach you.”
I walk southward. I am living in a partially constructed church in the southern district of Obrajes. Partially
constructed means a few bricks here and there along with running water, albeit cold. I stop on the sidewalk, trying to recall how to get there, and I notice a campesina woman looking at me. She is selling bags of Brazil nuts and Coca-Cola, which she pours into plastic bags for the customers. Bolivia cannot afford to throw away its glass bottles, and she saves them to be recycled. She is a typical campesina mother. She wears a dark bowler or derby hat, the color and shape denoting the area of Bolivia from which she originates. Her loose, full red skirt only accentuates her pear-shaped body. And on her back hangs a multicolored shawl, in which she holds extra food, recent purchases, and her young child.
Several street children come up to me with their dirty faces and ask for a peso. Somehow these children lost their parents or had to let go of that colorful shawl. I give them some pesos. I walk on. Street girls sell fruit drinks for one boliviano. Masked, homeless shoe-shine boys, looking like banditos, offer to shine my sneakers. I want to buy all the drinks from all the girls; I want to offer Imelda Marcos’s entire collection of footwear to the shoe-shine boys. But I cannot. My pockets are already empty. I walk on, past grandiose, all-knowing colonial edifices. Past modern utilitarian architecture. Past more and more and more street children.
Why does God sentence these children to life on the streets? Why does God let Mercedes cut herself? I could quote Saint Augustine, who asked similar questions. I could devise logical syllogisms about an omnipotent, inviolable, immutable God who allows such suffering. But it brings me no closer to the answers I have sought since my first days as a Christian. Since that Christmas Day almost ten years ago.
Theologically, my brain knows that God is in control; my heart has miles to go. I scramble forth like an ant whose mound is being kicked away. A lifetime could be spent helping the children living within these four blocks. Can hope sustain me? Can injustice invigorate me? Can I make a difference within one square block?
Yes, I can. “I can,” I insist. And yet, as I walk, I cry. And no matter how many times I tell myself that crying is weak and useless, I cannot stop the tears.
When Invisible Children Sing Page 2