Life Lessons from Some Snatchy Little Boogers

I'll be honest: The kids at the first place we're visiting are some snatchy little boogers.

Our very first stop on this volunteer mission is a state-sponsored daycare center where parents must pay a fee of 75 cents a day for their kids to attend while Mom and Dad - or often, just single moms - attempt to scratch out a living.

The kids are sweet enough, smart, good-looking. Most of them, we're told, had dressed up in nice new clothing especially for our visit.

The children are clearly comfortable with visitors. They sang and danced for us. Many of them crawled up on our laps and shoulders, hanging on like little monkeys to a tree branch.

And as far as they're concerned, there are no language barriers here. Throughout our morning visit, they're chirping like birds, asking us questions we certainly did not understand in rapid-fire Spanish. Conjuring up my best espanol, I tried to tell the young'uns that I spoke English and couldn't understand what they were asking me. And just like plenty of American adults I know, they'd just stubbornly ask the question again, still speaking their same language but this time a little slower and in a raised, slightly-frustrated voice.



In the end, it all just sort of worked itself out. The looks on our faces and the interest we showed in them hopefully spoke volumes. They could tell we were charmed.

You can relate to children regardless of what language they speak. They make it easy.

But boy, are these litle devils snatchy! It's the only word I can think of to adequatey describe them. Without any advance warning, they'll quickly grab stuff from right out of your hand. Everything from toys to candy to digital cameras are fair game. The kids assume that if you have it out within their reach, they can paw at it. It's all a little disorienting to a guy with very little experience handling large groups of young'uns.

Exhausted already, I needed a short break. I decided to take a walk around campus and look around.


Everything appeared to be neat and clean. All the bathrooms were tidy and smelled fine. The classrooms were brightly decorated with all sorts of instructional cartoon drawings. Posters of El Salvador's well-coiffed first lady hung on the walls.

So who are these kids? Where do they come from? In the overall scheme of El Salvador's economic system, I wondered, where do these kids and their families rank? This being our first official stop on the volunteer trip, I had nothing else to compare it to.

Once the classroom festivities were over with, it was time to head outside to let the kids take turns beating a pinata. The whole pinata party deal at first seemed like such a patronizing latin cliche, but it turns out such rituals are still a highly-embraced element of the local culture. Salvadoran kids always have and always will love a good pinata party.


Just moments after someone finally knocked the candy-filled monster into the dirt, I noticed a few of the women gravitating toward a nearby room. It was here where my dear wife discovered some toddlers who absolutely stole her heart.



Right when it was almost time to go, we began to lighten the load of our donation-stuffed suitcase. The daycare workers sifted through the loot, setting aside what they thought would be useful for the kids and toddlers here, and leaving the rest for us to bring to our next stops.

After watching them sort through the clothing, I glanced around what seemed to be a pretty nice daycare center. Ever the cynical bastard, I silently wondered how badly they needed our donations. Are they used to seeing a busload of white folks roll up with handouts and a pinata party on a regular basis? They seemed to be.

I'm ashamed to admit that I had these thoughts. What the hell is wrong with me to be thinking these things? After much thought, I have concluded this disgusting cynicism is the likely result of the purely American mental environment I left behind.

I knew what was waiting for me back in Austin. My television will tell me twenty times per day that I need to purchase a new car. My e-mail will once again hit me up to earn a college degree from home while purchasing a case of wholesale Viagra at a considerable discount.

On my telephone voice mail at work, I'll inevitably hear from a childless married couple who will be in desperate need of a 5-bedroom house with at least 3,000 square feet. My mailbox will be stuffed with tempting offers to get myself into much further debt. And while I sit in my car waiting for a traffic light to change, I'll fiddle with my cell phone in a lame attempt to ignore the beggar on the corner who probably has his own apartment somewhere in town and is just looking for beer money.

In the U.S. everyone from the street begger to the corporate media baron is hustling us around the clock. Nearly all possible forms of human connection has been co-opted by profit-seeking middlemen. We don't go to public parks or community centers anymore. Instead, we seek to cure our lonliness by crawling into air-conditioned cars and going shopping. We're enthusiastically encouraged to do so by the media, our peers, and even our own president. If we don't shop, the terrorists win. All of it is the worst kind of empty noise, and I'm convinced it has done something awful to us, even to the majority who either don't realize what our consumer culture has done to them, or are unwilling to so much as acknowledge it. I know it's done something awful to me.

The kids at this daycare, even the older ones, don't seem to be as afflicted by the brand-conscious consumerism commonly found among even the youngest Americans. Poverty, I suppose, will have that effect. I would later come to understand that at this modest but apparently well-run daycare, they did need our donations.

And even more important, they really just needed us; for someone to simply show up and let them know that someone gives a crap about them and what's happening in their lives. If you stop to think about it, it's what all of us humans crave but don't always get. So why did our attempt at this basic human-to-human connection seem to be especially appreciated here in El Salvador? I have thought about that question many times since returning home.

We came to this daycare expecting to come face-to-face with unwashed, unwanted children living in astonishing poverty. It's not exactly what we found today, although it will appear in spades tomorrow.

Still, what we did find here deeply touched our hearts. Michele will never forget holding that baby -- the one with such a haunting look on her face, who for nearly half an hour wanted nothing more from my wife than to be held and spoken to.

And now months later, I'm comfortably ensconsed behind a keyboard in my air-conditioned monstrosity of a house, only beginning to truly understand what our visit with these pint-sized daycare runts and the harried mujeres who try to keep up with them helped me and Michele to learn about ourselves.