“Yes, it’s hard,” she admits.
“Take care of Natalia, okay?” I stand up to leave. I have more work to do. “You are doing much better than one month ago.”
She looks into her bag and heaves a heavy sigh as she counts dozens of Christmas cards. “Thanks. I have to go sell the rest of these cards. Merry Christmas, Don Chi.”
Daniela walks slowly down the stairs into the darkness. I was probably her last sale for tonight. She is caught in a system of economic Darwinism. The unskilled, the homeless, the inefficient are thrown into a pool of poverty and forced to compete against each other for a tiny pile of bolivianos. Many of these competitors die, others are imprisoned, and some fit into the mainstream economy as low-skilled, low-paid workers. Through this system, society rids itself of its less productive members for the relatively cheap price of prisons and incinerators.
I cannot change Bolivia’s economic system. I am not even Bolivian. Instead, Daniela has made a simpler request. She wants me to build a home for street children. One where people will understand street children. One where people will be patient with them. One where people will teach them skills so that they may compete in more lucrative markets than shining shoes or selling gum or begging. One where people will appreciate them even after they grow out of their cute “Little Orphan Annie” stages. One where people will give wings to their better angels.
But how can I do it? I need money. I need people to volunteer their money and their time and even their hearts. I need life efforts. Everything, like you said, Daniela, is in God’s hands.
23
Vicki
January 7, 1998;
Alonzo de Mendoza
What happens to street children when they grow up? Obviously some of them do not grow up. Some die on the street, their spirits going, we hope, to a better place. Some of them survive. Which is better, dying or living? An argument can be made for either side.
Little is known about what happens when street children grow up. Researchers do not follow individual street children over the years of their lives. Researchers take collective “snapshots” of the population of street children. They interview them about their pasts sometimes. They watch them over a period of a few days, a few months even. But the world really does not want to know how many of them are killed by the elements, by disease, by other street people, by adult perpetrators; how many commit suicide; how many become street adults; how few survive and find a home and a sustainable role in the world.
I stand in the middle of Alonzo de Mendoza. Over the months, I have come to think of these children as “my” children; will I watch over the years as my children grow into adults? Will they survive that long? Will they still retain their humanity while crawling through the concrete gauntlet? Alejandro taps me on the shoulder. “Do you see those men over there?” Alejandro points to the far end of the park. “They used to live at Bururu. Many years ago.”
“What happened to them?”
“They prefer the ‘freedom’ of the streets,” Alejandro says, suppressing his own disdain. From my own research, I estimate that about 10 percent of street people in La Paz are adults. And most of them are alcoholics. I approach the twentysomething young men and introduce myself. After hearing that I am the Bururu “doctor,” one of the men says to me, “I used to live in Bururu. How is Señora Lydia?”
“She is doing well,” I say. “Why did you leave Bururu?”
“I left eight years ago,” he says. “I lived at Bururu for a few years, but I had to leave when I turned eighteen because I wasn’t an orphan child anymore. I was an adult. I live on the streets now.” Daniela’s plea for a more understanding orphanage echoes in my mind.
The clock strikes eleven. A teenage girl approaches me. I recognize her but can’t remember her name. She shows me a five-day-old cut on her left arm. “How did you get wounded?”
She looks down and to the left. “I cut myself by accident.” I estimate twenty older razor blade cuts on each arm. No one is that clumsy. Five children have crowded around us. We walk away. The crowd follows. “You are going to have to wait at the other end of the park,” I tell the bunch, and they grumpily oblige.
“What happened?” I ask.
She continues to look down and whispers, “My boyfriend got mad at me.”
“Why?”
She looks away and acts as if she doesn’t hear me.
“Why?” I repeat.
“Because he wanted me, and I refused.”
“What happened after that?”
“He took out a razor blade and tried to cut my face.”
“And?”
“And I shielded my face with my left arm.” We sit down on the concrete, and she shows me her arm. I push down on her six-centimeter cut, and thick white pus spurts out. She winces and jerks her head away. I thoroughly wash her wound with sterile water and swab on topical antibiotics. I hand her antibiotic pills with the hopes that she will be compliant.
Directly Observed Therapy—watching patients to make sure they take their medication—has been proved to work well with tuberculosis and HIV patients. Direct observation is a little more difficult when your patients can’t be found. Street children. Visible one moment. Invisible the next. Dead. Sleeping. Looking for food. In an orphanage. Who really knows? Who really cares? I sit down on a bench among four street boys.
From the corner of my eye I notice a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl I’ve never seen. She is unusually slim. Her elliptical face—not round like the others—is clear of scars and bruises. Her neatly combed curly hair lies black and shiny upon her shoulders. She sports eyeliner and red lipstick, and she has donned a black leather jacket to match her black boots. A black scarf, fashionable among the wealthy high school girls, warms her neck.
Perhaps she has just recently come to the streets; no girl sleeping on the streets can maintain such a look for long. And yet she seems to be friends with all the street children; in fact, she is a social butterfly, moving from one group of children to another, laughing, flirting, and gracefully bowing out. She approaches.
“Dr. Chi,” she says, “I have this terrible pain in my stomach.”
I guess they all know my name now. “What’s your name?” I ask her.
“Vicki,” she tells me.
“Vicki, I need to ask you a few questions first,” I say. “I’m collecting information on the street children in La Paz. Would you like to participate in my survey?”
“Sure. Sounds like fun.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen. Almost fourteen,” she states, arms akimbo.
“How long have you been on the streets?”
“Seven years,” she says, standing squarely before me.
“Why did you leave your house?”
Vicki crosses her arms, looks down. “Because my parents were alcoholics.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Eturades neighborhood. Northeast.”
“Do you take drugs?”
“Yes. Paint thinner, glue adhesive, and alcohol.”
“Anything else?”
“Marijuana and crystals.”
“Have you ever had sex?”
“Yes.” She nods.
“Have you ever been raped?”
Looking down with uneasiness she replies, “Yes.”
“By whom?”
She points at the bench I had been sitting on some twenty yards away. The same four boys sit there as before.
“Which one of them?” I ask.
“All four of them,” she says, her voice unwavering. “A few days ago.”
The only words I can muster are, “I’m sorry.” What else can I say? Does she need someone to listen to her? Does she need a counselor? Does she want me to exact justice? Cowardly, I say nothing else. She waits for me to change the subject. “So, tell me about your stomach pain,” I say.
“It has been hurting over the past three days.”
“When was your last period?”
&nb
sp; “A week ago.”
“Do you have diarrhea?”
“No.”
“Does it hurt when you urinate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have frequent urination?”
“Yes.”
I open up my medicine box and hand her pills for her urinary tract infection. “So,” I say, “what do you do for money?”
She looks at me as if I were cracking a joke at her expense. “I sell my body,” she explains.
I’m shocked. I shouldn’t be, but I am. She’s a child. I maintain my cool. “How long have you been doing this?”
“One year,” she states as a matter of fact.
“How much do you make each time?”
“Six bolivianos.” One dollar. If I practice medicine in the United States, I will make in a matter of seconds what she earns surrendering her body to a stranger. The value of innocence? Inexpressible. The price of it? On a street in the developing world? One dollar.
Vicki changes the subject, going on about whatever comes to mind. I hear spunk in her voice. Confidence. Irrepressibility. She moves from one subject to the next, not out of anxiety but simply to move on. She walks over to a group of street mothers and asks them about their children; she strolls over to the boys. The way she stands, horses around with the boys as if she were one—she’s tough. Her square shoulders shout it: Get off me, world, I’m a salvageable one. Salvageable.
She walks to the bench of boys who raped her. She sits among them. She chatters with them for a spell, and then they all inhale together, drifting off to sweet oblivion.
24
Not All of Us Children
1 a.m., January 15, 1998;
Alonzo de Mendoza
I find Vicki sitting on her own on a bench in Alonzo de Mendoza park. In one hand she clutches her thinner-soaked yarn, and in the other she holds what looks like a beef sandwich. “Dr. Chi,” she says to me, “what are you doing here tonight?”
I’m not sure I understand the question, since I am here most nights. “I came to see you,” I say. “How are you? Have you been taking the medicine? Is it getting better?”
“Yes,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt like crazy anymore. Are you hungry?” Vicki offers me some of her sandwich.
“No, thanks,” I say. I sit down on the cold concrete bench next to her. She’s wearing another relatively fancy outfit, and I can smell perfume blasting past my face as an Andean gust blows her black scarf at me. “I also wanted to make sure that you were okay, you know, because you were attacked by those four boys.”
“If I was okay?” she asks. She looks at me for some clarification, but the subject is awkward for me, too. “Yes, I am okay,” she says. “It’s over now. It was horrible when they raped me, but it’s finished now. We are getting along again.”
“Getting along?” I ask. “How can you get along with them? I mean, because of what they did to you.”
“Dr. Chi.” She puts down her sandwich and takes a deep breath of thinner. “Look around you here. This is Alonzo de Mendoza.”
I look around. Street mothers stand around talking about their kids. Street girls inhale thinner together and speak gibberish. Groups of boys stand against the walls, some of them gesticulating about last night’s violence. Most of the street boys and girls have finished working for the day—peddling gum or drinks, stealing, washing cars or windows, singing on the buses, reciting Bible verses, shining shoes, watering graves, or just begging.
“Everyone here either rapes or is raped, Dr. Chi,” she says to me. “Or both. Even some of the boys have been raped. Men on the street rape us, our parents rape us, our relatives rape us, strangers rape us, whatever. After I talk to you, I will go sell my body for six bolivianos anyway. So do you understand why I am not going to tell those boys—those boys who protect me from other men—you see why I don’t tell those boys to f— off? They are my friends. All of us here, we are family. We have to be. We have family fights, but we can make up under the right circumstances.”
I try to hold my breath, to not show any emotion; if I act shocked, Vicki might be offended or hurt. And then I ask a stupid question. “How can you sell your body for six bolivianos?”
“That’s the going rate. You see those girls standing over there?” I look over to a group of thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds. “That’s what they charge too. It’s our best way of making money. Some of them take more than one trick each night, but I prefer to only take one a night. Most of the men are drunk so if they don’t pay, you just steal it from them. Some of them are so drunk, they can’t tell the difference between men and women, and they go to a hotel with a transvestite. The transvestite beats them up and steals all their money.” Vicki laughs.
“So,” I clarify, “there are hotels that will rent a room to a man and a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“Yes, of course,” she says, as if I have a hard time understanding how the world works, which I do.
“I suppose it makes sense,” I say. “If stores are willing to profit from selling thinner to street kids, somebody’s going to make money off of child prostitution. That’s sad.”
“Yes, but how else are we going to survive if we don’t have the thinner and the cheap hotels?” She takes a snort of her thinner.
I realize that I am not going to win an argument with her when she is in this state of mind. Not that she can’t think while she’s on thinner. There’s another mind-altering drug she’s addicted to: the drug of self-worthlessness. And yet how can I erase the lifetime of degradation and abuse that led to her self-devaluation? I sit and shiver for a moment, as my rear end has now iced over from the cold concrete bench.
“I’m going to go now,” she says. “I have to make money.”
“Wait,” I say, “don’t go,” offering no reason.
“Why not? I don’t have much choice. Um, do you understand? I have to make money.”
“Why not sell candy or colas? Or shine shoes?”
“This is what I do,” she says, presenting her outfit to me.
“I understand,” I say, “but why not skip a night? I want to hear about your life.”
“My life? I am thirteen. And I am a street child. What else do you need to know?”
“I need to know the details.”
“No,” she tells me. I can tell I’ve offended her.
“I want the world to know your life, to understand your struggles. Your life is just as important as anyone else’s. Just as important as mine or the president’s.”
“No, it isn’t,” she insists. She doesn’t want to hear my words. “Stop tricking me.” She starts to walk away.
“I will give you fifteen bolivianos for an interview.”
Vicki squints her eyes at me, as if I might be a mirage. Why would anyone pay money to hear her talk about her life? I can tell by the look on her face that she is internalizing this; perhaps her story is worthy of being heard. She wants to take me up on the offer, but she waits a moment, perhaps hoping I’ll up the amount to twenty or twenty-five bolivianos. Realizing that she truly wants to talk anyway and that the money is pure gravy, she sits down. I take out my tape recorder. She takes a deep breath, and I soon realize that Vicki can talk. She can really talk, which is wonderful.
Since I was seven, I have fled and returned home several times. My mother used to beat me too much.
She used sticks, sometimes a belt. . . . My father was an “antisocial” and a thief. They used to fight a lot. Some days my father would ask me to pass him a pair of scissors to cut down my mom. I said, “No!” while he was brutally beating her. I said, “No, please,” and he pushed me away. I was crying in a corner. That is why I used to escape from home, far from home.
My father kept a pair of scissors to cut my mother’s face. That scared me a lot, and that’s why I used to escape from home. “What am I going to do?” I would say. Then some time passed, but my mother would still beat me. So my sister took me into the streets. So then I was alternating between the
streets and my house. Then I traveled to Cochabamba and came back to La Paz. By then it was already a lot of time I was in the streets. After that I returned to my house.
But my father divorced my mother and married another woman. So my mom married another man, who was very kind with us. But after that my mom broke up with him and started hanging out with another one. Meanwhile my father had children with this other woman. That is why he did not give us any money. That’s why I was very sad. Moreover, my mother did not take me to school. Although my mother did not take me to school, my grandmother took care of me. My mother used to beat me a lot, and that’s why I escaped many times. One day a woman stole from me two hundred bolivianos’ worth of merchandise, and my mother beat me until I wet my pants. So I fled and started living in the streets. I started stealing and inhaling rubber cement. I used to sleep in torrantes (small and warm nooks) and abandoned rooms.
When violent men caught me, they usually beat me, and when I didn’t want them to beat me they would say, “Let’s go to a dark corner to have sex.” I would always tell them that I was going to scream. So they would start to beat me harder, and only after that would they release me, and also because I would scream sometimes and some street boys would come to help me.
That is why I fled again. I traveled to Cochabamba again, but I received the same violence there. Now I am here. I was once in an orphanage, but my mother used to come to bother me. She took my clothes. That’s why I occasionally left the orphanage.
My mother has beaten me a lot. . . . She even wounded my hand with a knife. After that my grandmother sent me to my father’s house, but he was a drug addict and tried to abuse me sexually because I upset my stepsister. He wanted to beat me, but I asked him not to do it. Then he took me to the room and asked me to take my pants off. I told him, “No, Dad, please. No, Dad, please. No, Dad, please.” And then he told me, “Okay, but forget everything I said.”
That’s why, fearing him, I left this house. This happened in Santa Cruz. My father then found me and sent me to live with my grandmother again. My mother was then with another man, who was very evil. He fondled my sister and me in Cochabamba and abused us. Since that moment I did not want to return to my house ever again.
When Invisible Children Sing Page 19