Chaclacayo again

I don't believe how natural it feels now to live at Dr. Tony's in Chaclacayo. While last year I spent all my quiet moments here marvelling at the gray mountains, the flat-roofed houses, and the buses barrelling by on the highway, now this neighborhood feels like the Peruvian equivalent of my parents' neighborhood in Ellicott City. Quiet, beautiful, lots of green (comparatively speaking), and a VERY full house of kids to be with. Tony and Terri are still here, of course, the dad and the mom of the house respectively; the cooks, the teachers, the nurses, and about ten or so of the kids are still around from last year and doing exactly what they were doing back when I first got to Peru. Plus, my good friend John is back in Peru from Ireland, which is like having your big brother around again. So the Hogar even more than Lima feels like coming home.

There are about six or eight young kids who take up probably 50% of the volunteers' time. Two are in wheelchairs and three more can only walk with walkers, and they need help with tooth-brushing, going upstairs to the bathroom, putting on and taking off leg braces, opening the door to the patio, pulling other kids off them when they start fighting and end up squirming in a pile on the floor, etc. My favorite of these is Rocely, a nine-year-old mentally retarded girl who is in the house to receive therapy so she'll be able to walk. She gets this sneaky sort of grin when you look at her, and when I ask her, What?, she goes, What? back, and giggles, and I tickle her, and she laughs and laughs. My other favorite, who was around last year, is Mallco. His actual name is Juan Carlos Mallco, but last year there was a Juan Carlos Malchi, so they both went by their last names. Mallco came to the house last January as a tiny little five-year-old who scrambled around on the floor and jumped up on you like a puppy when he wanted attention--he has cerebral palsy, so he couldn't walk at all. He also didn't speak any Spanish, having come from a Quechua-speaking home in the mountains. His only way of communication at first, therefore, was to whine, and in a country where whining is an acceptable way for kids and adults to get what they want, this kid beat everything I have ever heard before or since. Now, however, he speaks great Spanish, has grown several inches and a little pot belly from eating the mamitas' abundant cooking twice a day, and is walking around the house with a walker and leg braces. He still whines, but not nearly as much.

Last Saturday my friends Sara and Celina from Lima came to visit and play with the kids, and at night we went out to Chosica to a karaoke bar. I had never been to a karaoke bar in my life and was expecting terrible suffering of the ears, but it was great! Those who couldn't really sing just did popular cumbia songs with their group of friends, and those who could hold a tune did so. My friend Ever kept ordering one jar of sangría after another, which may have accounted for my fearless renditions of Mariah Carey's Hero and Bette Middler's Wind Beneath My Wings.

During the week I usually have to go to Lima with the kids to their medical appointments, and the waiting is just as terrible as it was last year: there are no appointments beforehand, so you have to show up early, essentially take a number, and then wait for two to five hours for the kid to see the doctor. It's an utterly ridiculous system, there are huge crowds of people in the hospitals, and Tony's employees in charge of these trips usually have to push their way to the front of the line or get a friend who works there to give them special privileges ahead of the waiting crowds, in order to get the kids in. After one of these trips, which can last from six to eight hours there and back, I am utterly useless for the rest of the day and usually take a nap. It's amazing to me, given the extent to which the system doesn't work--the fact that the care the kids get is so often not what it could be--that Tony keeps running this whole operation day after day, dedicating his whole life to it, so that these kids can get even the insufficient medical care that's available. Because otherwise, they'd have no care at all. Dedicating your life to something that can never truly work as well as it should... is an act of faith.

But of course, don't get me wrong, there are many, many success stories from the house of kids who have gone home well to their families. And Tony says the doctors they see are good, it's just the logistics and resources that aren't there. And in the everyday reality of the house, you hardly think about the kids' treatment, you're thinking about the park and toothbrushes and finding Ronaldo's walker and getting out the guitars to play with the other volunteers... it sounds trite, but it's a whole house of people who are very far from their families and so become a family for each other.

And thanks to John, at least once a week we're down at the Chaclacayo park for drinks with the volunteers, for some badly needed relaxation after the kids go to bed.