Children's home

Deze keer een spontane bijdrage van een van de buitenlanders over een eerste bezoek aan Anna Home, recht uit het hart.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but given the experiences that these children had been through and on the assumption that a human being would at least have to have arrived at some degree of maturity to have survived living in a hole in the ground for several years then I suppose I was right to expect to see a few hard nosed and hostile teenagers skulking about. A pack of wild kids, constantly getting into trouble with the hostel worker whilst struggling to adjust to the basic rules of living in a house again. And who could blame them? Who wouldn’t have been affected by these experiences. Abandonment on its own would be enough to fuck you up for life. But then add into the melting pot, living in a sewer, stealing for food, being shunned by locals, exclusion from schools, playgrounds, shops and cafes, regular harassment from the cops including arrest and beatings. So I suppose it was likely that they’d be a bit messed up by now. Living the lives of criminals and yet their only crime was that they’d either ran away from home because it was safer to live on the streets than it was to share a house with their own father, or else they’d woken up one morning or come home from school to find that their mother had left them entirely alone without saying a word.

I walked in to the ‘home’ with my friend Maarten and immediately all my preconceptions were blown away. My first shock was the age of these kids. They were tiny some of them. Absolute tots, pre-school. Most of the little ones had been abandoned with their older siblings who were now looking after them. (Some only a few years older than themselves). The second was the amount of them. There seemed to be dozens of them. There was actually 25, but as the place was quite crammed, it seemed that there was twice as many.

I couldn’t help but imagine the mental scars that these children would have to carry with them for the rest of their lives. Although they were now attending school, it was hard to imagine that some of them would ever catch up. Prospects aren’t great even for your average Mongolian, so what chance did they have. Maybe some of the older ones had already sussed that they’d never have an equal chance in anything they ever did again. Maybe.

I don’t know for sure, because instead of being eyed suspiciously or warily when we walked in, my third shock was to experience the warmest, most joyous, most heart lifting, totally elating greeting you could ever, ever, in your wildest dreams hope to receive. These kids were full of love and the joys of life. Bright eyed, excited, cheeky, laughing, smiling, everything you could possibly hope for in a young person.

They held our hands and gave us a tour of their little home. They showed us the pictures they’d made, and each of their little bunk beds. They showed us their few belongings as if they’d just been showered with gifts by 100 Santas. The looked like they were telling us that they were the luckiest most privileged children on God’s earth. One little boy showed me a table that a local carpenter had made for them. Just an ordinary table but he was as proud of it as if it was gilt edged and gold plated. The best thing ever. Another boy showed me the ladder leading up to his bunk bed, and how carefully the rungs had been made and how they fitted neatly into the uprights. Just ordinary stuff. But it was their stiff and someone had gone to the bother of making it especially for them. This was stuff that they had never imagined they would ever have again. Everything was completely tidy. The place just looked so snug and the kids were so very happy with it. All of the beds had little teddies and all manner of cuddly toys. The place was just the cosiest den ever.

However, most of all they were now safe and warm. They were being fed every day, and also going to school. They were being treated like human beings, some of them for the first time in their lives. The fact that grown ups were looking after them and caring for them and building them tables and bunk beds seemed to mean more to them than all the toys and pocket money that they could ever have.

Maarten and some of the other vols visit them at the weekends and deliver some extra lessons, cook pizza, bring toys, pens, crayons, teaching material and generally give a hand with the running of the place or just hang out with them for a while. The kids love it. They sit next to you and hang on to you like they’ve known you forever. It’s classic text book stuff. If you get up to walk around, they follow you, or take you by the hand to show you something. When you’re sitting with them, then there’s usually one on either side of you leaning on your shoulder with their arm locked around yours. They’ve rescued a small kitten and they look after it like it was their own baby. There’s always at least one of them cradling it or rocking it off to sleep.

They were so proud of their new home. Apparently they don’t really go outside to play. They just like running about inside, playing games or just laughing and shouting, helping with the cooking, tidying or just resting on their little beds and chatting. The place is pretty basic. The girls have a bed each but the boys have to share because they outnumber the girls by 3:1. They’re all pretty squashed but it must be like a palace or Willie Wonka’s Chocolate factory in comparison to where they’ve just come from.

I couldn’t imagine a more desperate extreme from what they’d known before. And then I saw something on one girl’s face. Maybe something in her half smile. A little glimmer of what she’d been through perhaps. A sadness, or possibly fear, I’m not sure. Maybe she’d just remembered something; maybe in the excitement of seeing visitors, she’d just relaxed a bit and let her thoughts wander off carelessly. To a life somewhere in her past with other grown ups. Vague memories of grown ups who had sometimes wiped her tears or sang to her, or held her when she was sick, or laughed with her when she’d said something funny, or had ran to her in a panic when she’d toppled over trying to walk, or who had watched over her when she was sleeping, or had told her that she was the most important special girl in the world and that nothing, absolutely nothing in this would ever keep them apart. What ever it was, it rocked me to the very centre of my being. And to my shame I walked outside, crouched down on the snow where no one could see me. And cried my eyes out.

But why? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Despite their background, these kids were now safe and well looked after. There was a lot of hope for them. People had taken an interest in them at last. They had lots of hellish memories yet despite that, this was the happiest place I’d ever been to. These kids could only dream of the upbringing I’d been privileged with. And had taken for granted. Maybe it was that that had hit me so hard. Or the shame that it had taken me 17 months to take an interest in them. And now all I wanted to do was to leave the place and get back to my own life and forget them.

Later that night after going to bed and switching the lights off, I just lay there in the dark thinking of it all over again in my head. The look on their faces as they welcomed us and the excitement in their eyes as they gave us a tour of their amazing home. And how lucky they felt. Their gratitude for having been plucked to safety by a random young guy who had decided he could no longer delude himself that leaving these kids in their holes and shifting the responsibility of their care to someone else wasn’t also a crime. Perhaps a greater crime. In-action was a crime as awful as the crime of a mother abandoning her children in an empty house for a life in the city without a word of explanation. Or a crime worse than a father routinely beating the shit out of his children every drunken Friday and Saturday night.

Maybe in their young lives, strangers are more reliable than parents and relatives. So, I suppose it makes some kind of sense that instead of being wary of us when we arrived in their home today, they chose instead to shower us with a welcome so warm, that it touched me to my very core. And that I’ll never forget it. Maarten, they had good reason to welcome. Without him, their new home would still be a pipe-dream. But me, they had no reason to welcome at all. And yet, still they displayed an act of unconditional love for me that shamefully and tragically they themselves have never known. For perhaps only the fifth time in my entire life, but for the second time that day, I cried my eyes out.