My Kids...All 84 of Them!

There are kids in my house at least 4 hours every day. One or two will stop by for last minute homework help or to get a high five starting somewhere around 6am. I am not usually awake yet, so unless it is a really important homework thing or they seem really desperate, I usually ignore them or tell them to come back later after 7. Josecito is a particularly demanding 8 year old who is usually on my porch shouting, 'Amber! Come here! Gimme 5! What are you doing? Come here! Amber! Come here! Why are you still sleeping? Amber! Amber!' ...he's not my favorite alarm clock, but he is one of my favorite kids. From 8am until at least 11am I usually have a break, 3 guaranteed hours of peace in my house while all of them are in school. About 11am they start having recess breaks and I find them stopping by for 10 mins or so on their way back from buying candy. At noon the kindergarteners are done and the rest of them finish at 1 so by 2 my little hut is guaranteed to be busy with 5 to 14 year olds coming and going. Most of the time I kick everyone out between 6 and 6:30, but have had kids come back as late as 8:30 looking for homework help.

In the last few weeks the traffic in an out of my little hut has increased somewhat due to the introduction of the toy box. It is a small basket, about half the size of a shopping basket you would get at the grocery store, that has a coloring book and crayons, a deck of UNO cards, the book 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day' in english, another book in English about large cats of the world, a sticker storybook in Spanish of The Jungle Book, a 300 piece puzzle, a set of jacks, 2 sock monkeys and a Bert puppet from Sesame Street. It is the largest collection of toys in town, and thus the attraction. I got the toys because the kids were in my house regardless, and this way, they have their own stuff. They are less likely to go through and lick all of my spices and color on my Cosmo magazines that way. Less likely.

I have a Von Maur gift bag (HOW I ended up with a von maur gift bag in my hut I have NO IDEA.) full of school supplies like scissors, glue, tape, pens, and pencils for their homework assignments, and anyone coming over to do homework gets priority over the kids playing to sit on a bucket and work on my little table while I help them. Sometimes I play music on my ipod for them. I only have 3 songs in Spanish but most of my English stuff has a good beat. And that way I at least don't have to worry about censoring it for language or content, since they can't understand it anyway!

I have ulterior motives, of course. Getting kids to read for fun would be a miraculous accomplishment, and although progress is slow, some 10 year olds have plodded through the 1st grade level sticker book. They like talking about where on my world map the cats in the cat book live. I don't allow them to use the Spanish names for the colors in the UNO game, they have to practice their English. Sometimes I share my food with them or make them kool aid, and force them to say 'Please' and 'Thank you'. When they start fighting in my house, I kick them out and make them fight elsewhere. (I can only do so much. They are going to fight sometimes, I can't help that.) I ask them about school and usually get one word answers almost always, but maybe once a week 1 kid will elaborate and tell me about the things he is doing at school.

I have kids in my house a lot more than other Volunteers, and I completely understand why they don't want their house crawling with smelly 8 year olds on hot Panamanian afternoons. They are exhausting and tattle and I can't figure out how to translate 'STOP TATTLING!' and my house is usually a disaster by the time they leave and I always have 8 other things I feel like I need to be doing. Most of the time I ignore them and let them do their thing and work in my hammock, or read, intervening when needed to prevent annihilation of my hut or the death of my kitten. But some days I play with them.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with one of my teachers at the school, who actually cares about the kids and the community. This is rare, especially in a community like mine. She told me that the biggest difference she noticed between the kids here and the kids in the developed city she grew up in on the other side of Panama is how little attention the kids get from their parents. And it's true. Parents don't parent.

Don't get me wrong. Parents love their kids. They work to provide food for them, to get them school uniforms, to buy them notebooks and pencils, they give them money to buy candy. They yell at their kids and smack them when they do something bad. They do their kids' homework for them to make sure they get good grades. They genuinely care about their kids...they just don't know how to be 'parents' in the sense that Americans define parenting, probably because they were never 'parented' themselves.

My kids are just looking for attention, something they don't get from their parents or grandparents and that with 5 teachers teaching 84 kids from prekindergarten to 9th grade, the teachers just really can't give them. So I try. I give them high-5s anytime I see them around town, I talk to them like they are just as important as the adults in the room, and I try to sneak questions like, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' into casual conversation.

The other night some Smithsonian scientists were talking with a few of us Volunteers about life out here and culture in the Comarca and, upon my explanation of my 13 and 16 year old girls who both recently give birth to baby boys fathered by the same 19 year old, asked me how that happens. There are a lot of other factors, but for the girls' part, I can totally see why. This guy was the first person to give them any kind of attention, and no doubt said nice things and spent time with them and made them feel special. In a family of 9 children with a dad that is always off working or drinking, this guy gave them the attention they lacked...for a little while at least.

For that reason I try to give every kid that comes to my house some attention because they all walk a fine, fine line between becoming an educated leader for their community or becoming another kid raising kids. It is why I haven't completely flipped out at Josecito when he comes over for the 10th time in the same day asking me to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider 5 more times. Because he lives alone with his dad who disappears for days at a time working, he has a challenge learning and therefore gets ignored by the teachers (I don't know if he is just behind or if he has a developmental disability, but for a long time I thought he was a 6 year old based on his emotional and educational level) and who the kids make fun of because he tends to smell bad and gets aggressive easily.

It is a lot of fun to have noise and commotion in my house most of the time, and every once in a while you have those awesome moments where you see a kid learning something or growing in some sense. It also helps me fill the time while I sit around in my hammock waiting for my grant to raise money...(hint, hint). Most days I wonder whether or not I am having any sort of an impact here or if my community at large actually cares that I am there. But all I have to do is walk across the town, or even just wait it out in my hammock and inevitably there will be a kid yelling my name with a big grin on his or her face, excitedly waiting to give me an enthusiastic cinco. And then even though it is really hot, they smell bad, they don't listen, they know every way to make me crazy, and they scribbled all over the Alexander book, I keep inviting them back.