More girls

Well, as promised, I'm back on my next free day (I do love them) to give you more wee bios about the girls I'm working with. Someone did point out to me that it might not be such a good idea to give out so much information about people, so rather than giving you their actual names, I'm going to call them girl number 1, girl number 2 etc. Slightly more impersonal but hey-ho!

Girl number 1 (!) has been at the home for coming up to two years now, and is so one of the girls who might be seen as having been more settled. However, often it seems to only take one thing to shake everything up and for a lot of issues that seemed to have been resolved to come back to the fore. Because of various issues that have been going on at school, that I don't really know about, she's been feeling a bit shakier lately. This is the main reason why the girls are kept out of school for a bit when they first arrive at the home, because of all the things that come up there which are precisely the challenges they are facing: mainly things like drugs and boys. These are not, after all, girls who have managed to have any kind of healthy relationship with the opposite sex. She does get on well in school, and seems to be really intelligent: I was helping her with her English the other day. She has some of the character defects that thirteen year old girls everywhere have i.e. the tendency to be a wee bit of a whiner, but then, didn't we all have that tendency at some stage? Or was (is) that just me? She is also one of the three girls who sometimes goes out in the afternoon to accomplish various things. They're not allowed to go out alone, for obvious reasons, so sometimes its been left to me to go with them when they go to study with their friends and things like that. I do understand the reasons why they don't want to leave them alone, but it is also slightly awkward being in a situation where you know that nobody wants you to be there.

I recently had the challenge (!) of helping girl number two with her school work when the school was closed for the day. Another one of the younger ones, she’s probably the one I have the most difficulty understand: not only because she speaks Spanish at quite such top speed, but also because in so many ways she is so closed off. The teachers who come into the home are really close to refusing to teach her anymore because she is so disrespectful to them and, as I learned, when she doesn’t want to do something, she will just close off entirely and refuse to do it. When I was working with her, she refused to admit that she even knew how to read (she does) or that she remembered anything of a story that we read less than a minute ago. Like the other little girls, she has a background in sexual abuse, although in her case I’m not sure if it was in the family or in school. She has a great sense of fun which is always a good thing, but, like some of the others, she doesn’t seem to have the capacity to know when to stop. For me it is very difficult with all of them to know where playing stops and fighting begins! I would really like to be able to talk with her more, because I hate the idea that people are already giving up on her when she is still so young, even though I understand how difficult she can be.

Girl number three recently wanted to leave the home, to the extent that Salustio took her all the way back to her parents house before she decided that she wanted to come back. She told me a bit of her life story when we were washing clothes together – I can’t say that I understood all of it, but enough to know that she used to regularly run away from home to go to the street, where she was part of a prostitution gang. It’s always hard for me to imagine the girls as prostitutes, minus a few, because it just seems so unlikely! She was in school previously, but she was pulled out because her behaviour was so unstable. Shes a lovely girl, very affectionate etc, but I would say that her main real flaw is a tendency to be lazy and to form cliques that exclude other people – certainly a strong sign of insecurity in a young girl.

Girl number four has one of those ‘bright lights big city’ stories that will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched television: she came to the city to get away from her family and to find a job, and ended up being forced into prostitution. Her pimp was unhappy when she fell pregnant, and so sent some thugs to beat her up, to get rid of the baby. It was so bad that she ended up having to have an almost total skull reconstruction and can now feel nothing on one side of her head. She’s only just stopped wearing headscarves because her hair has started to grow back in. Like many of the others, she does have a front of just getting on with life and being happy, but you can occasionally see that her past does come back to haunt her and bring up issues in the present. She also has a four year old son who presently lives with her mother, and may at some point be coming to live in the home.

Significant events of the last week:
1. I have a friend! News indeed. A Bolivian girl called Sandra has also come to work at the home, and I already feel like its making a difference to have someone my own age around. Well, she is eight years older than me, but it still kind of counts as my own age!

2. There was a meeting with the girls relatives (some of them) last weekend, which seemed to go pretty well, and its always good to touch base with them.

3. I went to my first staff meeting yesterday and the chat was mainly centred around the problems that are coming in finances through the lowering value of the dollar, and the poor quality pound to dollar exchange rate. They’re losing a huge amount of money not because their support has gone down, but because the support that they have is worth less. On top of this, because of the credit crunch in the uk, people are becoming much less likely to give. So, for those of you that are into prayer, it would be really good to pray about that!