“I hate you!”
“Would you rather have your wrist infected and eventually become necrotic?”
“Yes. I hate you.”
“Let’s go to the examination room, Mercedes. Let’s walk down the stairs and get your wounds cleaned and bandaged. It won’t take but five minutes.”
“Give me your radio, and I’ll do it.”
“I’ll let you listen to my Walkman if you want.”
“No. Give it to me.”
Blood rushes to my face. “No! Do you think Yassela is a palace for you?”
“I hate you.”
Something needs to change. She’ll never get anywhere in this world if she continues hating everyone who tries to help her. Eventually, her wounds will become infected. Her arms, her legs, her body, even her soul, will become necrotic. I grab her good arm, the one without the fresh cut. The arm is limp, as if it were already dead. I pull Mercedes. I try to pull her up, to lift her up, to help her help herself up, to use the loaded language. She doesn’t budge. I pull harder, more laterally. I will drag her to the examination room. Her back scrapes along the rooftop floor like that of a nonviolent protester being removed from the premises.
I drag her several feet toward the stairs and she shrieks, “Leave me alone! I hate you!”
Nurse Olivia appears in the stairway. She motions to me calmly, and I walk over to her. “Chi,” she says, “if she does not want your help, don’t give it to her. We have so much work here that we cannot waste our time. Look at all these little girls here. If that isn’t enough, look at all the little children on the streets.”
I look at Mercedes lying motionless on the tile floor. “Mercedes, do you want to have your cuts treated or not?”
“Leave me alone. I hate you.”
“I have seen girls like Mercedes,” Nurse Olivia tells me. “Unrecoverable. Incorrigible. If she wants to die, then let her die.”
I take a deep breath. I crouch down next to Mercedes, and I speak to her as gently as I can. “Mercedes, all I want to do is help you. To keep you healthy. I am not here to make you feel bad. Do you want me to treat you?”
“I hate you.”
“Well,” I say, “I hope your arm becomes necrotic.” I immediately feel terrible. How could I say such a thing to a child? I walk away with my head bowed.
The next morning, I hear that Mercedes has left the Yassela orphanage. I stare into the bustling downtown streets as if asking them to take pity on her. I have truly failed. I have helped to send a girl back out there. Of course the truth is more complicated. Mercedes was preparing to leave Yassela anyway. She was about to be kicked out by the Yassela staff. In some ways, it is better that she is gone, so that little girls like Sara do not learn to cut themselves and exchange sex for clothes and drugs.
And that was at the crux of our short relationship. She expected me to be another sugar daddy. Instead I treated her like a big brother treats his sister. In the end, I lost control, and she got what she wanted: the feeling of rejection, of being only an object, not worthy of simple brotherly care. She loves pain. She savors the razor slash, the puncture of her skin, the sharp agony running up and down her limbs like lasers bouncing between two mirrors and gaining strength, until she finally feels something other than heartache and emptiness. I have failed. Failed tremendously. I could not draw the girl out of Mercedes; I could not make her feel loved.
Perhaps the toughest maneuver of the streets is to accept love. Should I take up the responsibility of teasing out the youthfulness of broken children? If I don’t, who will?
5
Introduction to the Street
August 29, 1997
It is 10:40 p.m., and I pace in my room in the half-constructed church, counting the minutes until midnight. My thin twin mattress rests snugly in the pine bed frame. Atop it lies my heavy-duty sleeping bag. Next to that, a small space heater blows warm air into the spacious room; the buzzing noise comforts me. On a metal table next to the window sit my most prized possessions: my Bible and my Macintosh laptop. The window rattles; the wind wants in. My walls are decorated only with pocks of plaster undone. Even for my minimalist taste, it’s a sad-looking room.
In exactly one hour and twenty minutes—at midnight—I will meet David at Kennedy Plaza in El Alto. A counselor at Bururu, David talks to street children in El Alto every Tuesday and Thursday night. He befriends the children and eventually gains their trust so that they might join the orphanage. I have been trying to get on the streets ever since I arrived in La Paz, but most people politely tell me “okay” and then don’t show up on the night of our planned outing. I have a feeling that whether David shows up or not, I will introduce myself to the street tonight.
“Ayweirea! Wnkiknnaa! Eireiis!” So chants, in her high and eerie voice, my neighbor Ximena. Sometimes I wonder if her family is committing a ritual sacrifice with all their chanting. They are squatters from a rural area. They don’t speak Spanish, but every week or so Ximena mimes a request for water. I drag my water hose over to their buckets and give them a week’s worth of water. Her family has no plumbing, indoor or out. But somehow they “borrow” enough electricity to keep their rooms lit. Unlike Ximena, I have my own bathroom, supplied with cold water. I take showers at noon, when it’s warmer—the sun, not the water.
Eleven-thirty. I’m tired of waiting. I slip on my hiking boots. I tie them hard. Double knot. I stuff one hundred bolivianos into my right boot. “Lord, help me and protect me from the dangers that lie ahead. I pray that what I am about to do is not foolish. Amen.”
I gently close my front door. I look up. It’s a full moon. Past the rocks and the scrap wood on the half-built church’s grassless front yard, I come across a small cat. It looks at me, meows hungrily, then dashes away.
“Good evening. I need to go to El Alto.” The taxi driver and I look at each other in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t believe me. “It costs eighty bolivianos to go there,” he says.
“That’s funny. It cost forty the last five times I’ve gone there. Did the price of gas double today?”
“Forty it is.” He shifts gears and begins our forty-minute trip. “Are you meeting someone at the airport?” he asks me. The local airport is in El Alto because landing in La Paz would be a steep and deep dive. As it is, landing in El Alto is a winding descent between frozen Andean peaks. An airline jet once crashed into the side of one of the mountains, killing all the passengers upon impact. At twenty thousand feet, I don’t know if the recovery effort was ever fully successful. Dead bodies may still be up there.
“No,” I tell him. “I want to meet a friend of mine who works with street children.”
“Have you ever been in El Alto at night?”
“No.”
“You know, I don’t work in that area because it is not worth the risk. There are gangs and knifings. It is where the sex trade is prospering. A woman was raped and then killed just last week. Left strangled and naked.”
“Uh-huh.” I remind myself that the kids on the street are more like Mercedes than Sara—older, tougher, maybe less trusting, maybe more violent. Those who live in the orphanages have chosen to subject themselves to the rules of the orphanage. They trust that this orphanage world ruled by adults will not be worse than the street. Those who still live on the street prefer the rules of the street. The streets are dangerous. The streets are cruel. But on the streets, at least in part, they write the rules. I want to go to the street. I must walk into their world, abide by their rules to some degree, and try to help them. It is there that they need help the most.
“You know where your friend is?” asks the taxi driver.
“In the Kennedy. Do you know about it?”
“Kennedy. Yes, there are dozens of street children there. But they are gangs. Are you sure you want me to take you there? I can take you back home.”
I rub the black plastic covering of my Swiss army knife over and over again. Its greatest deed thus far is cutting hard German cheese. “Yes,” I tel
l the taxi driver. “I am sure I want to go.”
I fall into a trance, hypnotized by the blinking night lights of La Paz as they recede slowly into the deep hull of the valley. The engine of the taxi hums loudly as it crawls up the northern mountain, up to El Alto. As we penetrate the mountainside outskirts of El Alto, I cannot tell if I am entering a gigantic construction site or a bombed-out war zone. The taxi weaves between potholes that could easily engulf it whole. A lot of people stand around on the streets, seeming to do nothing, just looking at us. There is dust everywhere. It no longer forms clouds but is simply the final layer of atmosphere here.
Along the roads are the homes. It’s hard to tell if they are going up or coming down. I look closer and I can tell. They are tiny, half-built houses made of oven-baked red bricks stacked together haphazardly. As a family comes into more money, they add more bricks. When a family suffers a crisis, the house begins to rot amid the elements. Survival races decomposition.
El Alto is a shantytown suburb of the capital city of the most impoverished nation of the contiguous countries of the Americas. El Alto is the burning fringe of the periphery of the periphery of the global economy. Its population, more than 750,000, grows up to 10 percent each year. More people live in this shantytown suburb than in many U.S. state capitals—and El Alto has no sewage system.
El Alto is a holding cell for rural indigenous people wanting to trade in thousands of years of indigenous culture for a modern urban job. The lucky make their way down to work in La Paz; others die in El Alto. Meanwhile, the children of these migrating families trip their way into the streets. Poverty begets homelessness, and El Alto is a font of street children.
The cars before us slow to a halt. It is around midnight, and on this four-lane road, the nonstop honking, revving, and human barking make my head rumble. I look out at a dozen teenage boys playing fútbol in a park the size of a street intersection. “This is the Kennedy,” says the driver.
“Can you wait for me to come back?” He pulls over to the curb, reclines his seat, and begins his nap.
Along every side of the raised hexagonal park, cholitas dressed in blue and white checkered aprons grill meat. They’ll be here until 5 a.m., serving the drunks, prostitutes, and late-night streetwalkers. I walk around and around the park looking for David, to no avail.
Why do I need to be introduced to the street children? I can introduce myself. My legs carry me between stumbling middle-aged drunken men. In my ears I hear the trickling of liquid. I stop. A drunk urinates at my feet. He looks at me. I look at him. I walk on. Inebriated men dressed in 1960s-era polyester shirts stumble out of bars with women at their sides. One woman lies on the sidewalk getting her face pounded in by an angry, drooling man. Scantily dressed females switch their hips as they search for tricks. I step into a puddle of urine; thank God for Gore-Tex. I turn at the next corner and find more bars and more neon signs advertising hourly rates. But no street children.
I turn in to a dark alleyway. If I feel uncomfortable, I’ll just turn around. I walk several steps down the alley. I make a turn down another alleyway, and then another alley; this seems like the kind of area a street child might hide out in. This is where the poorest of the poor are forced into the solitude of cold pavement. This is where I belong, serving the children. I see movement. A group of young men approaches. At first I suspect that they are drunk, but I can tell by their purposeful gait that they are not. They see me, but they don’t say anything. I turn around. My heart races. I look back, and they are still there. Jogging toward me. Boom. Boom. Boom. I begin to jog lightly. Now they are running. I run. I make a turn. Another turn. Another dark alley. I cannot see the men. Nor can I see anyone else. Where am I? I run. I try to think. How do I get back to the Kennedy? How? Think! Dark alley after dark alley. Turn after turn. Adrenaline courses through my arteries. I expect to see the gang at my very next turn. Where are they? Did they even notice me?
I stand motionless in an alleyway. The Andean wind claws at my face. Did I think there would be children huddled in these back alleys, innocent and shivering, saying “Burururu,” waiting for me to rescue them? A sympathetic rat looks up at me, sniffs, and then abandons me to my fate. I hear voices. Voices of young men. They are yelling. What was I thinking, coming here? Did I actually think that a foreigner could show up at midnight and all the street children would come? What an act of idiocy. I can’t do this alone; I need help. Especially right now. The voices get louder as I walk farther down the alleyway. They are screaming, laughing, yelling. Louder, louder, louder.
They are the voices of teenagers playing fútbol. I am near the Kennedy. My entire body relaxes. I walk out of the alleyway into the green lights. I take a breath of joy when I see the prostitutes, the men in suits, and the drunks and their puddles of urine. I wipe the sweat of fear from my eyes and rap my knuckles on the taxi window. The taxi driver wakes up, half startled. “Any luck?” he asks.
“No.”
“You didn’t find the kids.”
“Not exactly.”
“Good thing you didn’t get into any trouble.”
Several Days Later
Plaza San Francisco is a blurry tangle of human activity. The campesina women break down their outdoor shops and prepare their makeshift tents for the night. Couples hug each other, necking like American teenyboppers. Trash hovering an inch above the pavement scoots along, drawing unusual polygons. Puddles of vomit and urine give the area its pungent smell and add color to the gray rock floor. I stand in the middle of this activity watching a young woman eat a cow’s heart—a common Bolivian delicacy often sold on the streets.
Rodrigo walks up to me and shakes my hand. “Hungry?” he asks me. He is a Bolivian medical student who attends La Iglesia de Dios. Next to him stands Elizabeth, a Danish college student who has been volunteering at Bururu. Both of them want to see what the streets are like; they want to help the street kids.
The cold Andean wind whips my face. I zip up my jacket and stuff my hands in my pockets. A drunk wearing a shirt and tie walks up to Elizabeth. “You have the most beautiful eyes,” he says and stumbles toward her, hoping to get a free rub. She gives him a look of disgust. I slip between the two of them. “Back off,” I tell him.
We take a circuitous route from Plaza San Francisco to Bururu in order to avoid the dark alleys. A scantily dressed, toothless woman approaches Rodrigo. We march ahead without missing a beat.
“Wow, Chi, that was a huge woman!”
“Uh, Rodrigo, ‘she’ was a ‘he,’ not to mention a prostitute.”
“That was a man?”
“Rodrigo, her arms were bigger than my thighs, and she had a five o’clock shadow.”
We get to Bururu, tiptoe up the stairs, and sneak into Room 4, the most “senior” room that the orphans aspire to. I shake the leg of Alejandro, who is sleeping in his street clothes. “Alejandro,” I whisper, “do you still want to introduce us to the streets tonight?”
We double-check our gear—the medicines, the guitar, the soccer ball, and so forth. We bow our heads and say a prayer.
My body courses with electricity. Tonight is the first night. The veil will finally be lifted. I will know the children. We walk. We get to a concrete, fenced-in park that I’ve passed half a dozen times. We go inside. The clock strikes twelve. The white fluorescent lights in the park produce an eerie feeling as the damp, cold air wisps by my face. “You know about this place,” says Alejandro. “Don’t you?”
“No, not really.”
“This place is Alonzo de Mendoza. Over against the back portion of this park is where all the drug dealings occur. Along the edges, the street children sit and talk on the benches. Up the street is where the prostitutes sell their bodies every night. It is also where all the bars are located. It’s Friday. Singles night.”
“Singles night?”
“Yes, singles night. It is the night when men, married or unmarried, become single. They go into town, drink, and have sex. On Saturday, they return to th
eir wives or girlfriends as if nothing happened.”
“Oh.”
We walk up to four kids sitting on a bench—three boys and a girl. They range from five to twenty-five. Each one of them holds a fist to his nose. None of them are looking up. When they do, I see an impenetrable glaze on their eyes. A teenage boy’s eyeballs roll back into his skull. I take a step back. “Are they high on cocaine?” I ask Alejandro.
“No, Don Chi,” Alejandro says, using the highly respectful term usually reserved for older people. I can’t ask him to stop using it without hurting his feelings. “No,” Alejandro says, “they’re using paint thinner.”
“What’s paint thinner?” I ask.
“What they inhale.”
“Why?”
Alejandro shrugs his shoulders. “It keeps you warm in the cold. It makes your hunger pains go away. It gives you an unbreakable armor. No one can hurt you when you are high.”
“Why don’t they use alcohol?” I ask.
“Because it’s too expensive and does not last as long.”
“What do you mean it’s too expensive?”
“The street children can buy a whole gallon of paint thinner for one American dollar,” Alejandro explains, pantomiming each step. “They buy it from the store, and they give it to all their friends in small bottles. The street kids soak strands of yarn in these bottles, then they hold it in their fists and breathe in the thinner. When the police come by, they throw the yarn away.”
In the past, the Aymara and Quechua Indians often kept coca leaves in their mouths all day. It also kept them warm and warded off hunger. I guess thinner is the new coca leaf, only cheaper, more toxic, and mass manufactured by industrial companies.
Alejandro announces to the four kids on the bench, “This is Chi. He is a doctor from America. He can sew up your wounds. He’s here to help you.”
The four kids lift their faces from their fists and then lower them back onto their fists. Some of them don’t even look at me before they sniff again.
When Invisible Children Sing Page 6