Find it anyways

Thursday. Our afternoon at Semillas began as any other. Halfway throught homework hour, I heard a loud noise and stuck my head out to investigate. Paul the guard is running over to me. ¨Get them inside!¨ We had 60 that day. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for - they knew what happened. The noise was a gunshot. Thankfully the shooter missed and the target took off running. All of this where another man was shot and killed on our second dy of work back inAugust. All of this outside the front entrance to Semillas.

Last Monday a little girl disappeared from a neighboring commuity and turned up in Arbolito the following morning. Many details remain fuzzy, but we do know that there is a man living in our sector who pays people to kidnap children, then sells them on the black market. I soften this story by telling myself the buyers are looking for young, hard-working maids and construction workers. Then my stomach turns when I remember the way Saturday-night drunks watch the little girls playing in the street.

Walk up a block from my house and you´ll find a house much nicer than the rest. Out front is a motorcycle (neighbors have bikes) and two large, metal soccer goals (neighbors use piles of rocks). Clearly business is good. The house´s owner is pimp. All the neighbors know - even the kids - but no one turns him in because he protects the neighborhood (by force, as noted by the bulge where his back meets his belt). He has made an implicit agreement not to ¨sell¨ in the neighborhood, which neighbors say he keeps. Besides, no one wants to get on a pimp´s bad side. Two weeks ago, he was killed. He was shot eight times. Thankfully for us, this murder occurred in Quevedo, about four hours from here. Death is death, murder is murder, and we mourn with his family, who keep coming in from the country. But its hard to be reverent when a pimp´s brother is checking you out during the wake. Business will continue. His cousin, who was second-in-command, has likely resumed their normal activity after this little bump in the road. The workforce and the clientele keep the market afloat, though I do wonder how long this next boss will last.

Over the last few years, the electric company has slowly made its rounds through many of the poor neighborhoods, installing locked meters on all the houses to keep people from stealing electricity. Seems fair. Right? And if you don´t pay your bill, they cut you off. That´s normal. Right? Sure it is. But it´s not just. Not when the family with two bare lightbulbs pays the same as the neighbor with two TVs, a refrigerator, a stereo, and exterior lighting. They pay the same flat fee - $33/mo. - and suffer the same consequences though their households show a stark difference in both income and consumption. Also, it´s worth mentioning that this is a public company, government-owned and -regulated.

At a local public school, Escuela Simon Bolivar, where classrooms are crude cane shacks, mothers of students have been gathering more and more frequently to discuss what´s happening. The director of this public (¨free¨) school has been charging some families for tuition. The school receives funding from Hogar de Cristo for students of HdC families, and is supposed to use them to expand the workforce to reduce the 60-1 student-teacher ratio that the government supports in its public schools. The director has failed and the new teacher, who is not receiving a paycheck, protests by simply not teaching. Kids are in the classroom, so it looks like they´re learning. But their rowdy noise travels easily through the cane walls and disturbs neighboring lessons. In the end, very few children are actually learning.

Yesterday after Semillas, I sent my kids home and walked out to find Belén, who is six, walking toward me tugging an enormous pink backpack. Bringing it to Semillas to sell to another girl. She couldn´t go home, she said matter-of-factly, because Mom had gone out and locked the door. This didn´t bother Belén nearly as much as it did me. What was she going to do? Wait for her brother and sister, she said. Clarita (9) and Winky (7) (yes, ¨Winky¨...I don´t get it either) came home, but without keys. Mom doesn´t give them keys. Eventually Belén wriggles her way through a hole near the floor and they tug on it to make it big enough for Clarita to enter. I left them there, with a hug and an offer to come to my house if they needed anything.

So what does all this mean? Neglect, embezzling, corruption, prostitution, kidnapping, gun violence. This is not small potatoes. This is very, very big, enormous, chemically-enhanced potatoes. Part of me wants to write you a nice resolution that leaves you feeling hopeful. But maybe it´s more fair to make you sit with this for a while, too. Be uncomfortable with ugliness. Find hope anyways. That´s my challenge every day. Now it´s yours.