Like most young people at the time, Tijuana for me and some of my friends was merely a place to go across the border for a day to walk around the streets, make bargains in leather or jewelry shops, perhaps have a good meal of Mexican food, and for some, enjoy the nightclubs. But for Steve, a friend of mine who grew up in the San Diego area, Tijuana was something more serious. He was acutely aware that there was a huge difference between the economic lives we were living in California versus those living just across the border. While there certainly were some phenomenally wealthy residents of Tijuana, it was the poor and disadvantaged that he cared about.
Steve discovered an orphanage for girls run by an order of nuns and he realized that they could use his help. For example, the orphanage had a school bus that required a driver to take the girls to school, or elsewhere outside of the orphanage for some adventure or recreation, such a taking them to the beach at Rosarita. He also decided that they needed farm animals (presumably for reproducing and later eating, but that aspect was never discussed), so he built a rabbit hutch that he filled with bunnies and built pens for several pigs that he bought and housed on the orphanage grounds.
I visited him there several times, even sleeping there over night several times, and I can say that the place was really wonderful with very sweet, loving girls, and extremely admirable nuns who were very dedicated to the girls in their charge. Much later when I went vagabonding into the depths of Mexico, I was the guest of the mother house of that order in Mexico City and I also visited with the family of one of the Tijuana nuns at their house in a village in the hills beyond Mexico City, but those are stories for another time.
Not all the girls were living in the orphanage due to not having any parents. For some of them, the issue was extreme poverty; that they had parents, but parents who could not take care of them. There was one girl in the orphanage whom Steve particularly took a liking to, whose mother lived way out in the desert beyond the outskirts of Tijuana. He had met the girl’s mother one day when he gave the girl a ride home to visit with her mother. Steve realized that he could help the mother, as well.
One day, Steve suggested that the he and I go out there and visit with the mother, maybe have lunch with her. He said that it would be an enlightening experience. Always ready for adventure, I agreed to go with him there. He warned me, though, that I was going to see a level of poverty I probably had never imagined.
Where this woman lived was in a dusty, desert area that had no roads. It looked to me that the various shacks that were out there were more or less squatter’s encampments. The house was an oblong shaped cinderblock structure that looked hand-made, like somebody had stacked and mortared a playhouse. The front door was a blanket that hung across the entrance like a curtain. The woman had heard Steve’s car come up, so she came outside to greet us. She was a very attractive woman with a beautiful smile and welcomed us profusely. There was no sense of misery or despair to her at all. She held open the doorway curtain and invited us inside. I could see that the structure had been built to have two rooms, this front entryway that was to be like a living room and bedroom and the other room was the kitchen which contained a large black iron stove and a sink and some kind of water supply. I did not see any refrigerator or any electricity at all, but the kitchen did have a kitchen table and four table chairs. It is possible that she slept in the front room on the floor in a sleeping bag, I don’t know. Also I didn’t see anything that served as a toilet and shower, but outside maybe behind the structure there was an outhouse.
Also, neither room had a roof! The structure was entirely open to the heavens. The woman had already begun cooking our lunch on the stove, was done via burning wood that was in the stove, and the smoke from the cooking simply flowed up into the open air. What was being cooked smelled delicious!
Steve gave the woman some news about how her daughter back at the orphanage was doing. Steve had not told me that the girl wasn’t the only child of this woman. She also had a two other children, a boy who was the oldest, I guess he was somewhere on either side of puberty, and a girl who was maybe two years younger than the boy. The daughter who was back at the orphanage was the youngest of the three children. These two older siblings stayed home with their mother.
Both of these children were sitting down on the dirt floor of the entrance room, the boy leaning against the left wall and the girl sitting in the other side of the room, in the front corner. They both wore nothing but some kind of diaper, but not any other clothing. As I walked past the boy, he suddenly leapt up and grabbed me tight around my body with remarkably strong arms while making very loud moaning noises that were a combination of despair and ecstasy. In a moment I realized that he had some kind of extreme disability that nobody had thought to alert me about, but his behavior and sounds explained it all. While at first I was frightened, his moans let me realize how crucial to this boy’s life was this physical contact. So instead of attempting to wrench myself away which would have been an expected response, I hugged him back and rubbed my hands up and down on his naked back and we stood there hugging each other while he cried with noises I had never heard before, but whose meaning was amply clear.
Meanwhile, Steve seemed to keep his distance from the girl sitting down in the corner, but the mother went over to her, gently pulled her up to her feet and lovingly hugged her while her daughter clung onto her and made her own version of wailing, ecstatic noises. What ran through me was a combination of deep sadness and much compassion.
The mother looked over at me with a expression that I read to mean “What else can I do?”, that hugging them was really the only communication possible with them. I looked over at Steve, who explained, “They both are blind and deaf, and therefore cannot speak words that they cannot hear.”
After a while, the mother let go of her daughter and the girl sank back down to the floor. Then the mother came over to me and gently pulled on my arm to indicate that I should let go of the boy now, and she took him off of me and guided him back down to the floor.
The mother then took me and Steve into the kitchen and indicated that we should sit down at the kitchen table. She then went back to preparing our lunch while she and Steve talked with each other in Spanish. From time to time the woman would say something to Steve that she wanted to say to me, so he would translate what she said into English.
The woman explained to me via Steve’s translations that her first child was the boy, she told me his name, but all this was a long while ago, so I have forgotten all of their names. Once she had understood them, she had accepted the boys maladies, his inability to both see and hear and therefore was unable to make his needs known via words. She said he was the boy that God wanted her to have and so she accepted that. She regretted that he could not go to school or ever have any kind of a life, but she loved him with all her heart and all she could do was take care of him and give him the crucial hugs that made up the only stimulation he could really have. She said that he will always remember the hug that he got to share with me, because it was a different experience for him in a life where there was very little to experience.
Then she went on to have another child, a girl, and that one, too, was blind and deaf. While she could not understand why, this was clearly God’s will and anyway, since she already had the boy who was that way, taking care of the girl was not much more of a burden. She knew how to give her the love that she would crave, like the boy.
She then went on to say that she had the third child, the totally healthy and normal girl that Steve knew at the orphanage. In my thoughts, I could hardly imagine that after the woman had given birth to two deaf and blind children that she would go on to have yet a third child, and yet look what happened, that one was not deaf and blind. So clearly there was not predicting any of it and the woman’s point of view was that it was all God’s will and she would accept whatever would come. She loves all her children no matter what they are like.
Nobody explained to me why there was no man around, and I don’t think even Steve knew. It was just an accepted fact, the man left for whatever reason, maybe just the idea of the woman having had two blind and deaf children in a row was too much for him. This woman was not someone to feel self pity or to damn the events of her life. She knew that her third child needed to have the advantages that she was unable to provide her, and therefore was thankful that the orphanage would take her third daughter in. This way she could grow up in a stimulating atmosphere, have lots of friends, go to school, fall in love, get married, and have her own full life. As far as I could see, there was great courage and acceptance for the woman to take on having to care for her two seriously handicapped children, but also have the selflessness to allow her youngest child have what was a better situation in the orphanage. I can hardly imagine how all of this must feel to this woman who is doing whatever she knows is the best for her children.
While Steve never verbalized it, I could see why he would want to help that particular woman and why he would show that to me.
Throughout our visit, the two children in the living room area had been moving around from time to time, finding different positions, but in all cases keeping along the walls. I could imagine that for them having only touch, taste, and smell as senses, the void of the space beyond the walls would not even exist to them.
I also saw that both children spent an inordinate time fingering themselves inside their diapers and along their nipples. Of course. Again, when touch takes on a greater importance, which areas of the body are going to receive the greatest attention? I felt bad at seeing them at moments that we would describe as requiring privacy, so I would look away, but they never had any privacy and the idea had no meaning to them. This was yet another aspect that I am sure their mother had to accept and maybe even be thankful for.
When the lunch was ready, the mother brought bowls of food to her children sitting in the living room, which her children happily ate--more senses to be thankfully engaged. It was a delicious lunch which both Steve and I greatly enjoyed.
All too soon it was time to leave. There was more hugging all around and then Steve and I said goodbye to the woman, telling her that we had a great time. I said to the woman I had been so happy to meet her and her children.
As we drove back toward the U.S. border, I thought about those two children. Not everybody can be a Helen Keller and have the advantage of a brilliant and sensitive tutor to help them break through like she had had. This experience opened up a deeper layer to the implications of poverty. I could hardly imagine what kind of life those children would have, almost totally locked inside of themselves with only hugs, food, and whatever their body can feel as the stimulations of their lives. We have no idea what kind of brains they have that by circumstance are locked up inside a hood and earplugs. And for their mother, except for the human love that she gives and receives, having them would be not much different from having two houseplants or a pair of goldfish swimming around in a bowl.
As we got into town, Steve saw a building supply store and said, “Tell you what, next time I come in, I’m going to buy and install for her a corrugated roof…I think four of the 12 foot long panels would cover both rooms. Those panels cost only about $20 each, that’s not very much.
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