Something is holding me back in Nicaragua and I want to share it with you here.
The boys watched us as my aunt, uncle, Carlos, Karla and I sat on a bench in la Parque de Poets taking funny faced pictures. It was our off day during the Parent Vision Trip and we had been loosed on an unsuspecting Leon to eat, explore and shop for a few hours. After eating lunch we found ourselves heading to this park that Carlos, our translator and new friend, deemed his favorite. After we had taken an overabundance of pictures of ourselves sitting in the park the boys beside Carlos on the bench began talking to him. Because they were natives speaking to each other they were spraining too quickly for me to understand what they were talking about but after about ten minutes Carlos explained what they had been talking with him about.
Their names were Freddy and Alexander and they were twelve and eleven.
They had been asking Carlos about what he was doing with us and how he knew English. Freddy explained that he had been taking English classes at an English school somewhere in Leon. The classes had been being paid for by some hostel owners there in the city but when those same hostel owners lost their hostels because of drugs he wasn’t able to continue because they weren’t able to continue paying. He told us that he wished he had paid more attention. The longer we sat with them the more their stories came to the light, well, mostly Freddy’s story did because Alexander didn’t really speak that much in the beginning.
Freddy was originally from Managua but shortly after being thrown out by his mother five years ago (can you do the math for how old he was when that happened?), when she chose her boyfriend over her son, he traveled to Leon, where he still lived. He told us that he knew that he could have made more money from the tourists and Nicaraguan natives there in Managua, it was a much bigger city, but the drugs in that city reigned in the community he would have had no other choice but to be a part of and he didn’t want that life.
Freddy briefly told us that Alexander had been abandoned by his grandmother when she tired of caring for him and since then they had been together. When Carlos asked if they had tried going to the government for help, because in Nicaragua the government can place children in homes when there is no one to care for them. Freddy told him that they had but because they still had family living the government tried to return them to those homes and families. The government tries to reunite the families before they take the children to a new home. Having been beaten and thrown out again the boys did not want to try the government again. They instead had a vision of traveling to either Honduras or Guatemala. Hoping for something greater in one of those two countries.
We spent quite a bit of time with them asking and answering questions about each other’s lives finally leading to Freddy asking me why I was white. After laughing a little bit at myself for having thought he asked something about dehydration and had answered with something about water I answered him. His question wasn’t one of a wide eyed child that was asking about why the sky was blue because they thought it beautiful and wanted to know what made it what it was, it was serious and it was one he seriously was considering, I believe, because in his mind what was happening to him during the course of his life was directly related to the skin color he was born into and what part of the earth he was born onto.
I told him that I was white because it was the way that God made me. Looking at me searchingly, he asked if I really believed in God. I told him that I did and he looked at me and told me that he thought that he did too.
Before we had to leave my aunt and uncle wanted to buy them something to eat and because the boys both believed the food stand near the park to be putting a little bit of dog meat into their hamburgers we walked to a Nicaraguan cafeteria to get them both some food. Because Alexander had his slippers stolen while he slept recently only one boy could walk with us, so Freddy gave that opportunity to the silent Alexander.
As we walked to the cafeteria down the road I began to ask Alexander a few questions, trying to get him to talk a little, all of which he answered with one word answers. Finally, as we walked back to the park with the bags of food and bottle of coca cola I asked what he wanted in the future, what his hopes for the future were. His answer was a flat to not have to live on the street anymore. He knew he wanted to get out of his situation but he couldn’t see past it, it was like he couldn’t really hope to ever be able to leave so why should he ever try and dream of what could come next?
And that hurt the most, his hopelessness.
Leaving them was the hardest. I wish that I could tell you all that when we left we left things resolved for the two boys and that their lives are changed but as far as I know it hasn’t. My team and I had been a part of Unsung Heroes that month and because of that I had the contact information for a children’s home in Esteli. I gave the information to Carlos, who was going to return to the boys to try to help them after we left, but the town was too far from Leon. Carlos continued to try to help them but a month or so later the boys stopped returning to the park.
From that encounter, though, something changed for me. Something changed with what the possibilities for the future might be. For what my future may be like. That will have to be a conversation, or blog, for another time.
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