These past few days have been full of fun and excitement, mainly because this weekend Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos El Salvador celebrated its ninth anniversary. Nine years ago this place started with twelve kids and one house in the city of Santa Ana. Now there are almost 500 kids and a whole campus full of new, beautiful buildings. As I may have written previously, this orphanage is only one of nine orphanages of a larger organization of the same name. The first house was founded in Mexico in 1954 by Fr. William Wasson, an American priest who died only a few years ago. The director of this house in El Salvador grew up as an orphan in the house in Mexico and came here to start another orphanage at the request of Fr. Wasson.
In what has become an annual tradition, all the kids get a day off of school and go to a water park about 45 minutes away from the orphanage to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of their home. This past Friday eight busses pulled into the orphanage and everyone piled in. After a bumpy ride in a beat up school bus that wasn't designed to handle the hills we were taking (not in a million years...) we took that water park by storm. Then, after pumping all the kids full of sugar with a brief snack, they were all set loose on the unsuspecting patrons of the establishment. If you need to form a mental picture, just imagine your local American water park only with less order, safety, and supervision and you will have seen “Termos del Rio.”
I spent the morning checking out the various parts of the park, including the awesome water slides, with a couple different groups of kids. Pretty soon, though, it was time for everyone's favorite pastime – soccer, or as it's known here – fúbol. The first game was between the adult male staff and the high school boys. Imagine this – they even asked me to play on the adult team. They obviously hadn't seen my performance in American little-league sports... Anyway, we got out butts kicked. The score was something like 7-1. I actually lost count after a while. To my credit, though, I attempted to make a header and almost got my head knocked off. I also managed to succeed in playing defense a couple times, sending the ball flying downfield to our waiting offense.
There was another game after ours, which I was quite content to watch from the sidelines. After that finished, all the kids got rounded up and put into their usual lines according to age to say grace before eating lunch. Fried chicken, bread, cole slaw, rice, cans of Coke, and ice cream bars were a welcome treat to a bunch of kids who are accustomed to a daily diet of tortillas, black beans, sour cream and powdered milk. I, too, was thankful for the change.
An interesting note about El Salvador is that some of the kids are what they call “chele.” That means they are born in El Salvador but very well look like they could have come from a farm in Iowa they are so white. So, after lunch, I had to get out the sunscreen again to protect my Irish self and my Salvadoran look-alikes. In spite of our most valiant efforts we all still got a little sunburned, which tells me that either the sun is stronger here than in Chicago or that I have already lost more hair than I thought. You can be the judge.
At any rate, all the kids had a blast with a full day of fun in the sun and got right back to playing soccer with any available ball as soon as they got off of the bus. Being able to spend the day at the pool with kids who are only guaranteed two such pool day every year made me considerably more thankful for having been able to go swimming all summer long during my childhood in the U.S. Also, I was with a group of three 10 year olds during the afternoon. We braved the wave pool, visited the hot spring, and went down the slides so many times that I thought I was going to lose that fired chicken. By the end of the day it was obvious to me how thankful they were to have someone who wanted to play with them and pay attention to them. That may well be the biggest lesson that I learn this summer, that is, how to be someone that these kids can look up to.
