Los Niños

Now that I'm not actually teaching the whole day, I get a whole lot more time to talk to and help individual kids, and I enjoy that so much. I'm with a little bit older kids now, and I just love them. There is one little boy whose name is Junior and he has started to call me mom. He tells everyone that I'm his mom and every time he sees me he runs up and hugs me. He's about seven. Martha tells me that he lives in one of the poorest parts of the neighborhood, in a little tin shack. His brothers are in a gang. There's another girl who also calls me her mom and her name is Naydelin. Her mom is an alcoholic and doesn't take care of her at all. There are so so many stories like that among the kids in my class. Josué lives with his grandma because his dad is in a gang and his mom left him. He is the biggest troublemaker and cannot sit down for more than three seconds, but he is the cutest little boy ever and I just can't bring myself to get mad at him. He loves to tell me all the English words he knows. All of the kids love to hug me all the time. I think that a lot of them don't get a lot of hugs at home. Yesterday one little boy named Walter didn't want to participate and he was so sad, which is so unlike him. When the other kids left I asked him what was wrong and he told me he was sad because his mom wouldn't give him breakfast. I gave him some cookies.

It makes me so sad to think about the futures of these kids. When your dad and your older brothers are in gangs, and your mom doesn't really take care of you, there's not a whole lot of question about where your going to end up. Its all they know. I hope that their time at Preciosos Momentos at least shows them that there is another way to live, so that they can somehow break out of that cycle of brokenness.