I just got back from El Progreso, Honduras, where I spent a week for my spring break. I went with a friend to visit the Center for street kids, called Los Flores, where she's spent every Summer for the past three years. It was a short trip, but in six days I learned why one of the laziest girls I have met in college thus far (I love her, really! But this girl orders food to eat in her bed, will not walk the one minute it takes to check her mail, and sleeps for hours in the middle of the day) is willing to wake up at 7am and stay outside in 90+ degree weather for up to 12 hours a day with sixty 8- to seventeen-year-old boys who have no attention span whatsoever.
I will admit that on a few occasions, I did fall asleep on concrete steps without warning from sheer exhaustion from long hours and heat (my eating at school hasn't been the best this semester, either; I'm not coping well with the no-meat thing) but at the end of the week, I had tears running down my face because I did not know whether to be grateful to return to the air-conditioned, sedentary (sorta) life of academia or postpone my degree as one volunteer for Los Flores did and return to stay for at least six months of every year.
I live in the richest country in the world but have traveled to some of the poorest. I've seen the world's largest favela in Rio de Janeiro and fed the homeless in Prague and Bogota, but never have I met and hugged and fallen love with the lowest of the low and had to remind myself each and every day of their situations. These are boys whose families are either dead, in jail, or put them on the streets because they couldn't afford to feed them. They all have scars from bullets or knives; some have their initials branded into their chests by gangs. An eleven-year-old has red where the whites of his eyes should be from huffing glue his entire life. Yet they learned my name, became obsessed with my digital camera, made fun of my spanish, and hung all over me all day long, covering me with more physical affection than I have ever experienced in my life.
A part of me is always needing a little bit for someone to touch me. I get confused sometimes and turn cold, as my mother tells me frequently, but inside I am still jittery and something doesn't feel right being far from another body. At Los Flores, for these seven days I have possibly received more affection than I bargained for, but I wouldn't take back one second of it. Though we only knew each other for a short time, the kids enlightened me to what we should ALL show each day: pure joy to see another human being who cares for you and share the warmth that comes from wrapping your arms around that person and CHERISH THEM. I think I miss them so much already because I've never had anyone cherish me and just now realized that the vitality it rewards is more than can be expressed in words.
