I decide to walk home instead of taking a taxi. It takes forty-five minutes. It is not boring. The background is not drab. It is alive. Every life journey takes a million little steps. Each one of those steps must be walked with gusto and with care. Vicki has stepped forward on her journey. She takes a little step. Maybe two or a dozen or a hundred. I take a step too. I understand a little better now that I am here to walk with the children. To take each little step with the children, regardless of their directions, regardless of whether we seem to walk toward success or failure. Success or failure are not life. The walk is life. Yes, I must be present in the moment. If I walk every step with them, I may be surprised every once in a while by where we have walked, where we are going, and where we are. Tonight we stand within the halo of a minor miracle.
A minor miracle? Vicki has found love in her heart for herself. It is not a little step. It is a big step. A big step, and I must continue to walk with the children, however boring it might seem when we don’t seem to be going anywhere. Walk with the children. Wherever they are going. It sounds simple, overly metaphorical, but nothing comes closer to truth.
28
Headbutt
11 p.m., March 10, 1998;
Alonzo de Mendoza
Only on the street are teenage prostitutes and working mothers the closest of friends. Mirta, a prostitute, brags about how she threatened to find the wife of one of her johns if he didn’t pay. The other prostitutes and working mothers tell her that she did well and that they hope he still comes around to solicit her. Fernanda, a street-child mother, talks about how her lover made a fortune the other day—twelve bolivianos—and they went and got sodas as treats. Fernanda complains about a man who works on the street who stole five bolivianos from her. She was going to buy her baby a second diaper with the money. Most of the child mothers have only one diaper, which they constantly wash in the river.
“Chi, give me the soccer ball,” says Christopher, whose eyes seem to have recovered fully, although I have not rolled out the sight chart for him. I hand him the soccer ball, and he runs off to kick it around with his brother Daniel. They play for a few minutes before accidentally kicking the ball into a man’s chest. The man and his girlfriend scowl at the two street children and then walk on. Christopher and Daniel barely even notice and initiate a big soccer match.
I cut open the leg abscess of a street girl named Noemi in order to clean out her wound. Of course, I’ve applied lidocaine (a local anesthetic), and she doesn’t feel too much pain. I am now completely accustomed to lancing out abscesses on these germ-infested streets and telling the kids to avoid infecting their wounds as they sleep on filth and excrement. I sew Noemi up, and she walks away without saying a word to me about anything, not even a complaint about how painful it was. I walk among the invisible children of La Paz, and ironically I myself sometimes feel invisible to them.
“Joven Chi, come here,” Fernanda lilts.
“How are you, Fernanda?”
Fernanda shrugs. She raises her son on the streets; how is she supposed to reply?
“What did you do today?” I ask her.
“I took care of my baby.” Fernanda typically takes pride in how she cares for her son, although, like all street children, she sometimes doesn’t seem to act rationally, from my overeducated point of view. Fernanda’s son and the other toddlers of his playgroup chase each other and talk gibberish, just like the children at any suburban day care center in the United States.
“Don Chi,” laments Fernanda, “my baby has diarrhea again.”
I pick the infant boy up into my arms. He is small for his age. Street babies, born in blind alleys or in cheap clinics, are all runts. They start a few months behind and fall further and further behind. As I look at Fernanda’s son, I can’t help but think, Maybe you should have stayed in the womb. At least it’s warm and you get a constant supply of food from the placenta. Well, it’s too late now. You came out, and you can’t go back in.
“Fernanda, how long has the baby had diarrhea?”
“One week.”
“Why didn’t you tell me a week ago?”
“I don’t know. . . . I couldn’t find you.”
“I was right here in the plaza, and you know that. Do you want to let your baby die?”
“No.” She hangs her head.
“Okay, Fernanda. You know the routine. Give your baby this special water every hour. If he doesn’t take it, then I will need to take him to the hospital.”
“I understand,” says Fernanda. “That is why I am going to give this a chance. I am going to come back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Where will you be at that time?”
“Right here on this bench,” I say.
“Okay.” Fernanda carries her baby away and stands a few feet away. There is now a line of a dozen mothers with their babies.
“Okay, who is next?”
“I am, Joven Chi.” A mother steps up, with her baby on her back. “My daughter has bad diarrhea.”
“Really. How long has it been going on?” I quickly discover that most of the babies here tonight have diarrhea.
In the distance, several men watch me with seeming fascination. Some are dressed in suits, others in simple button-down shirts. They seem to be talking about me, or is it just my imagination? It is Friday night, also known as singles night on the street, and these men could be talking about the street prostitutes around me. Or maybe they want me arrested. Last week a man reported me to the police, complaining that I was pimping underage girls. A police officer came by and started interrogating me about pimping. Me. A pimp. I don’t know the first thing about pimping. All the street-child mothers started to shout at the officer to leave me alone.
Three men, arm in arm, approach me. My voice quivers as I explain the diarrhea medicine to the mothers. I ignore the three men as they glare at me; I haven’t gotten beaten up in six months of working on the street, and I hope I never will. The three men push their way past the mothers and stand before me.
“Who are you?” asks the man in the middle.
“Hey, I was here first,” shouts a street mother. “Wait your turn!”
The man rears his head back and BOOM! Lights out. A deep, sharp, stabbing feeling from my forehead into the center of my brain robs me of sight.
“Aghhhh!” screams Fernanda. I recognize her voice.
I feel like I’m falling, and I grab whatever I can. Cloth. Skin, flesh, and bone. The man and I tumble down to the ground. My jaw suddenly throbs hard, and I can taste blood in my mouth. Did I get hit again?
The world is pitch-black. Where am I, and why am I here? Will they call a doctor? The police? They’ll invite me to a soccer game, but I’ll never join the team. I hope I survive. Feet shuffling. Scraping concrete. Grunts of pain. Cursing. The deep thuds of a torso being punched and kicked. “Stop!” I hear a voice shouting. “Stop!” Are the mothers being beaten? Are their babies falling to the concrete? Are the girl prostitutes being stabbed? I attracted danger to the girls, and they are being pummeled. Why am I here?
Boom! Boom! Boom! The lights come back on as if a switch had been thrown. What is this in my hands? The man’s jacket. I must have grabbed it and pulled us both down. The street mothers, the street boys, the other street girls, and even the street babies have formed a large circle around me and this two-hundred-pound thug. We lie on the ground. The girls are kicking him and the children are pulling his hair with all their might. The other two men are trying to extricate their friend from the melee. They succeed and drag him away about forty feet. Having gotten some distance from the street children, they pick him up, and all three of them look at us for a moment. They concede defeat, but they still need to look at us for a few seconds. They run away.
“Are you okay, Don Chi?” asks Fernanda. Fernanda and the other street girls kicked my assailant into the middle of next week; he was the one shouting, “Stop!” They defended me and punished a man who hurt me.
“Are you all right?” asks Christopher.
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My head is pounding with pain, and the world is still spinning. I taste salty blood in my mouth. “Yes,” I say, “I am fine.”
“Those men were terrible,” says Fernanda.
“Do you know them?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “We’ve never seen them.”
“What did they want?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she tells me. “Maybe your money. Maybe they don’t like you because you are Chinese. Maybe they don’t like it that you are talking to us.”
“Umm,” I say, assessing which sounds are least painful to make. “Well, I hope they don’t come back.”
A small child, no older than seven, exclaims, “Well, if they do come back, we will take care of them!” He flexes his biceps for us.
I am sitting on the bench now, holding my forehead and jaw. “Okay, who is next?” I ask. I want to finish my work as quickly as possible so I can find some ice and reduce my swelling face.
“Joven Chi, my baby has diarrhea,” says a street mother.
“Oh, really?” I ask. I look at her foot. She kicked the man for me. They have brought me into the family now, with a flurry of kicks and hair pulling, saving my face from being embedded into the street. “How long has your child had diarrhea?” I ask.
“One week.”
“Okay, you need to give your baby this special liquid for his diarrhea.”
29
Baby
10 p.m., March 20, 1998;
Awning next to Casa de la Cultura
(Museum of Culture), Downtown La Paz
It is cold tonight, but not colder than any other night. That doesn’t make it warm.
I just visited the two sites where the greatest numbers of street children congregate at night, Alonzo de Mendoza and Plaza San Francisco, where I played a hard game of fútbol with the kids. My body is sweaty and shivering. I now stand at the top of the steps leading down to El Cóndor, Casa de la Cultura. Along the rear doors of this museum of Bolivian art and cultural treasures, homeless bodies lie together like mismatched jigsaw pieces. I can’t make out which legs belong to which heads. A blue tarp blankets this amorphous tangle of human flesh, which is asleep at the hour of 11 p.m. It must be drink night.
I silently pull back the tarp and see the face of César. I gently tap him on his good leg. César’s body snarls, disengages from the mass; he blinks away his substance-induced coma. César squints his eyes to focus on me and then turns to another boy.
“Juan Carlos,” he whispers into an ear, “Chi is here.”
Juan Carlos shakes his head laterally as if to jiggle his brain into place. Once he recognizes me, he stands up and shakes my hand.
“Hi, Chi,” he says. “How are you?”
“Good,” I say, giving him my trademark firm handshake.
“Can you give us something to eat?” Juan Carlos asks, not a shred of whining in his voice.
“No,” I tell him. “Maybe you should have used the money you spent on drinking for food.”
He nods humbly. Juan Carlos and César are as close as any two brothers. César voluntarily joined Juan Carlos in prison so that the violence Juan Carlos would suffer might be divided between the two of them. Both Juan Carlos and César were beaten by men in prison, and César suffered a leg wound. César uses his good leg to gently kick awake the rest of his friends, who open their eyes in the fashion of a line of dominoes. On the end of the row are the homeless men, in their twenties and thirties, who drink both night and day. Equal opportunity drinkers, I call them. It is sad, really. These men are like fathers to the younger ones, and each father has taught each son to drink his blues away. Grandfather Time stands up to salute me in his drunken stupor. He is the oldest among them. How do I know? The white whiskers jutting out of his chin and upper lip give him away.
“Hello, Dr. Chi!” He opens his arms as if to hug me. “So nice that you could come and visit us.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, unable to resist smiling. “You are drinking again, aren’t you?”
“Drinking is good for the soul.”
“Whose soul?”
“My soul! Ernesto’s soul.”
“And don’t forget your liver,” I say. “You shouldn’t encourage these younger boys to drink.”
“Ohh! I tell them that it is terrible for them. To stay away from that poison! I teach these children many things.”
“Like?”
Ernesto opens up his arms and looks up at heaven. “‘For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ John 3:16. That is just some of what I teach. There is an entire Bible these children must learn.”
“Is that what you used to recite on the buses?” I ask Ernesto.
“No,” Ernesto says. “I am the son of a pastor. I know the word of God inside and out.”
I treat the various wounds and sore throats of each boy and each man, and after treatment each one quickly falls back asleep. In the middle of the string of bodies are two women. One woman looks as if she is about forty or fifty, and the other looks to be about seventy. Between them is tucked a little lump of blankets. From the end of the lump peek two little eyes and a smile. They are the eyes of a girl not more than four years old. The toddler hops out of her blankets and jumps toward me.
“What are you doing?” she asks me as I examine a boy’s leg.
“I am treating these boys for their wounds,” I tell her.
The cherubic child wears a soft fleece jacket with a hood. Her red corduroy pants complement her white plastic dress shoes. “Why?” she asks.
“Because they have cuts and bruises, and some of them are sick,” I say.
“Why?” she asks.
“Why? Let me ask you a question first.”
“What?” she asks.
“Where is your home?”
“Home?” she wonders. “Hahh! My home is right here.” The girl cackles sharply.
“Where?”
“Right here. You are standing on my bed.” She giggles.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Right there. The woman sleeping over there.” She points at the fortyish woman. “And right next to her is my grandmother.” She points at the seventyish woman. “I sleep between them to stay warm. You know, it is cold at night.” She looks at my jacket. “You should wear a little more.”
Gee, this girl is a little smart aleck. She walks over to my medicine box and starts digging through it. She proceeds to pick up bottles of antibiotics and shake them vigorously. She opens a bottle and examines each individual pill as if it were a newfound toy.
“Hey, Doctor!” she yells. “What’s this?” She takes a roll of bandages and sends it bowling ball–style down the corridor of Casa de la Cultura. “Bahahaha!” she screams in self-delight. “That’s fun.”
Wait. Wait. It finally hits me. This little girl is a third-generation street child. Her mother and grandmother live on the street with her. There are no runaways here. No parent here has abandoned a child. No child has run away from physical or sexual abuse.
I need to stop thinking about this and get back to work. César’s leg wound needs cleaning. “Hey, little girl,” I ask her, “what’s your name?”
“My name is Rosa and I am three,” she replies.
“Rosa, do you want to be my little helper?” I ask her.
“Sure.”
“Please take the flashlight and shine it on César’s leg.”
“Okay,” she says, taking the flashlight and turning it around in her little hands. “How do you make it shine?”
“You push this button.”
Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The flashlight switches on and off like a disco strobe. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Rosa shines the light in her own eyes. “Ba! Ha! Ha! Ha!” she laughs. “I’m getting dizzy now. Ba! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Rosa, if you are going to be my helper, then you must shine the light properly on this man’s leg.”
“Okay, Chi.”
I inject 2 percent lidocaine without epinephrine into César’s leg. He yelps at the initial sting. The light wanders astray again.
“Rosa, I need you to keep the light on the leg.”
“Oops. So sorry,” she apologizes. I open the wound to clean it out, and then I sew four stitches into the boy’s leg.
“Can you take a look at Rosa’s ear?” asks Rosa’s mother. “I am Catia.” An old scar runs shallowly from Catia’s nose to her left ear. Bags hang from her eyes, and her cheeks are like bulldog jowls.
“How long have you lived on the streets?”
“Twenty-five years,” she says. “My whole life.”
“Your whole life?” An entire life on the streets. A person who has never known the inside of a home, her only roof being the dark gray, raining skies of La Paz.
“Rosa was born here, and so was I,” she explains.
“Where? Here?” I ask.
“On the streets here,” she replies quietly. “We have both lived on the streets our whole lives. You have already met my father, Ernesto. You know, the soul-man preacher. My apologies, he is always drunk.” But by the slur of Catia’s words, I can tell that she, too, is more than a social drinker. Catia points down at the old woman lying next to her, looking at me as if I were a freak of nature. “Sleeping next to me is Monica. She is my mother.”
Monica sits up. She seems to be the only sober one of the whole group—sobered by a deep sadness—with both her mouth and shoulders slumping. “I am Rosa’s grandmother. I was not born on the street. Misfortune brought my husband and me onto the street, and we have raised our family here.”
Three generations on the street. How can this happen? What happened? I want to scream at the top of my lungs, “This is wrong!” But nothing comes out of my state of shock, just a faraway, glassy look.
“Could you check Rosa’s ears for me?” asks Catia. “I think that she may have an infection.”
When Invisible Children Sing Page 22