Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos

This summer I am living in El Salvador at a place known as Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), or in English, “Our Little Brothers and Sisters.” It is an orphanage for about 500 children who come from various backgrounds; some are here because they have no family, others are here because their families fell apart because of poverty or some other reason. This is only one of nine houses that NPH runs. The other eight are located in Mexico and all throughout Central America and down to Bolivia.

NPH is an alternative to growing up on the street. Reports indicate that there are 11 million orphans in Central America. The mission of NPH is to try to break the cycle of poverty by providing some of these children with a safe place to grow up and an excellent education. I will have several roles here at NPH. Each day I will study Spanish myself from 7 – 11 in the morning with a teacher from Santa Ana, which is the nearest city. He walks 40 minutes each way to come and teach me every day. Also, I am supposed to be the Pastoral Care Minister here. While there is a priest here, my role is simply supposed to be to live and talk with the children about what goes on in their daily life. There is also a clinic here on campus, and I will visit the kids who have to stay in there for whatever reason. Lastly, with so many kids and so few resources, birthdays really aren't celebrated each day , but only about once a month for everyone who has their birthday in that month. So, I have been given a list of all the birthdays and I'll be passing out birthday greetings and candy to the kids on behalf on NPH.

Now for a little bit about how I got here...

I flew into San Salvador on Monday around noontime and was met by one of the employees from the NPH house, José Juan. He told me that I was going to get started working right away because we were going to pick up a donation. It seems that NPH runs mainly off of donations, and, according to José Juan, the businesses here in El Salvador usually donate to the home regularly. Well, to pick up this donation we drove around in circles and down busted-up roads in little shanty towns for about two and a half hours while Juan José made about sixty-five phone calls to someone who allegedly knew where this place was located. We finally found the place after realizing that the business had recently moved (and thus their address had changed) and that there were two different exits for the same town that went two totally different places. Also, it didn´t help that their building was located in the middle of a muddy field with no discernible road or exit off of the highway. Anyway, we drove up to the huge steel gate and were met by several fellows brandishing shotguns. After some negotiation, they told us we could come in to the parking lot for the donation. We then proceeded to wait in the parking lot for another hour and half while José Juan made another dozen phone calls trying to get these people to give us the donation they promised. By this time I was so tired that I passed out in the front seat of the van for about an hour or so. Finally they gave us a bunch of bacon, ham, yogurt, and cheese for the orphanage and we could go on our way.

From there it was another forty-five minutes drive to the outskirts of Santa Ana. Then we had to crawl down this narrow, rocky road for another twenty minutes or so before we finally reached the gate of NPH. We pulled up to another steel gate and were again met by some nice folks with guns. (Basically, the way José Juan explained it me, if you want to hold on to something in El Salvador you had better put a guy with gun in front of it.) I went over to Fr. Ron´s house (the Director for Central America) and met him and another priest from Chicago who is on sabbatical here. Then we hopped in his truck and took a drive around the campus. There is an office building, separate dorms for the boys, girls, and babies, and a clinic that´s open 24/7. They also run their own school here for the kids until they finish 9th grade. Then they have to go into Santa Ana for high school.

My room is in the boy´s dorm. I´m sharing it with another volunteer from Seattle. We live on the top floor of a very noisy building full of kids. Monday though Friday we wake up around 4:45am when the extremely loud bell goes off to wake up all the kids. Then we line up outside with the kids to say grace at around 5:15, and then we head over to breakfast. All the meals here consist of cup of hot milk, a plate of black beans with a fried egg on top, and a thick tortilla. It tastes pretty good, is agreeing with my stomach, and seems to be pretty predictable, so I can live with that. There is some variation, but for the most part you can plan on seeing those black beans every day.

I am excited about what this summer will hold. I found the first week difficult, but now the kids are getting to know me better and it's becoming easier to get to know them. I'm realistic about the challenges that I will face here, the least of those being the language issue. While this orphanage is good place to grow up, it's no substitute for one's own family. Learning how to help kids deal with that may be the hardest part.