Day 2: First Day at Hogar Senora de la Paz

I am rapidly realizing that life is a long list of anomalies strung together to keep everyone guessing. Each and every one of us thinks that we have figured out life at one point or other. We believe that it is straightforward, predictable. We know what's coming, in a sense, because that is what prior experience has taught us. How much is left in this "small world" of ours that we haven't already gone through personally, or at least heard about?

But we haven't figured life out. No matter our age or amount of exposure, we probably haven't figured out a tenth of what life can deal us. It has its ways of throwing curveballs to make sure that we are left in the dark, so to speak. Because in the end, if we knew everything that life had to offer, then what's the point of living it. No element of surprise, no fun.

I just had one of those "lights out" moments today. My life pulled all the plugs and made me start from scratch. When I signed up for a program with CCS, I mentally prepared myself as best I could. I knew that I would be dealing with absolute poverty. For those of you who don't know, absolute poverty is defined as a situation in which a family of four lives on less that $1 per day. Less that a dollar. That's the equivalent of one quarter per person. It's hard to fathom. You read about it and talk about it. You know that's it out there, even though it is not close to home. I thought that I could deal with it, brush it off my shoulder in order to move on and do my work here in Peru. But I was wrong. The reality of absolute poverty is in stark contrast to what we think we know from a distance.

My volunteer placement is called Hogar Senora de la Paz. Its rough translation is the Fireplace of Our Lady of Peace. It is also called Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and Destitute. Mother Teresa chose four sites in Peru to open hospices in the early 1970s. The site where I volunteer is in a part of Lima called La Victoria. This is a town where absolute poverty has taken hold. The people here are so utterly poor that they have given up. They have stopped fighting to improve their lives because they have lost hope. Opportunities for them in Lima are nonexistent. They spend their days on the street, walking around aimlessly, sometimes asking for spare change. Some people sell produce and textiles, but their success is extremely limited. Stray dogs, bones bulging from malnutrition, roam the streets, digging through trash to find scraps. And then I got to Hogar Senora de la Paz.

Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and Destitute is a hospice. The first floor of the facility houses over 100 adult males, mostly elderly, who have various physical and mental disabilities. But through it all, they are some of the most joyful people I have met in my entire life. They immediately introduced themselves to me and my fellow volunteers and thanked us for being there. Some of them even danced in the hallways as they were going about their daily routines.

Even though the elderly men had obvious disabilities that hindered them, it was nothing compared to what I witnessed on the second floor, the floor where I eventually learned that I would be volunteering on. This floor was designated for the children in the facility, all of them boys. They range in age from toddlers to post-adolescents. The vast majority are confined to wheelchairs, afflicted by terrible conditions such as cerebral palsy and quadriplegia. Many also have mental disabilities, only adding to the difficulties that they face. All of these children are a byproduct of the community that surrounds them. Their mothers were too poor to receive adequate, if any, prenatal care while they were pregnant. Once these children were born, and their parents realized their disabilities, they abandoned them at the hospital. While I understand that caring for a child that has such significant disabilities requires large amounts of time, money, resources, and emotional stamina, I cannot find a way to justify abandoning a baby at a hospital without even a word's notice.

And this is where the story really gets bad. Not even the hospitals have the resources to care for these children or find them someplace else to receive care. Instead, Mother Teresa's nuns walk around La Victoria, searching for the destitute. Once they are found, they are invited to live at Hogar Senora de la Paz. The nuns know that they cannot cure these individuals. They do whatever they can, however, to make the quality of life for the patients more humane than before. It is their way of becoming closer to God. I certainly hope that God has a special seat waiting for these nuns when their time comes. They are saints.

And so, I was recruited to work with the children, who depend on the nuns and volunteers because everyone else in their lives abandoned them. When I first realized the depth of the situation, the air was knocked out of my lungs. Like I said, I thought I had mentally prepared myself for this journey before I left the States for Peru. But nothing short of first-hand experience could prepare me for this.

Today, I worked with a physical therapist who sees teenaged patients. I saw fours patients with him today. They all had either hemiplegia or quadriplegia. They also had mental disabilities. None of them could speak. In many ways, their bodies as well as their brains have failed them. They are only shells of what could have been. It is difficult to sit back and think about what their potential could have evolved into if they had been given more opportunities in the past. Unfortunately, for most of the patients, we will never know.

The work was extremely hands-on. The physical therapist immediately had me on the therapy mats, sitting next to the patients, manipulating arm and leg muscles to try to stretch them out. It is the only way to combat the atrophy of muscles that these patients experience. I was also asked to massage each child's face with cream. Once again, it is a good way to stretch their facial muscles. But even more importantly, it helps them to relax. The physical therapy is extremely painful for them, even though they cannot express it in words. Only their cries gave me clues as to what they were feeling. The facial massage was the only way to take their minds off the painful therapy that they experience.

Surprisingly, giving the massages was also beneficial for me. I couldn't bond with the patients through speech, but I was able to feel a connection through direct physical contact. It is this type of connection that I hope to facilitate throughout my time here in Peru. The stark reality is that these children do not have homes to go back to. They do not have mothers or fathers who wait with open arms to see their child at the end of the day. They only have the nuns and the volunteers. So, it is up to us to give them the love and attention that they so desperately need and deserve. Maybe that is life's curveball in this situation. Maybe that's the lesson to learn...