But they're just like any other baby...

It’s a well-known fact that I’ve absolutely fallen in love with my babies. I think they are quite possibly the cutest kids in the entire world, they’ve completely stolen my heart. But over the last few months in the process of falling even more in love with them I’ve forgotten the cruel worlds they’ve come from – to me they just seem like any other happy kid most of the time, but my last week Christopher gave me a stark reminder of the harsh, challenging pasts they all come from.

There are always a good handful of volunteers working at Solomon, more recently than I’ve seen almost my whole time here. When I first arrived last August I was the only volunteer and now there seems to be a surpluss – which I consider to be a great thing. However, about 90% of all volunteers at Solomon are girls – there are currently two men – one in his 20s from the US and another in his 50s from France. Juan, the French man who comes every year with his wife Vivi for 3 months, is the handyman around the house – always going from one sala to another looking for broken door handles, water pipe problems, and any thing else that needs some fixing up. The other day he was working on something in the comedor (cafeteria) while Sala 2 was eating lunch and Christopher spotted Juan and started screaming “Papaaaaaa!” with a look of pure terror on his face (just like all women are “mama” all men are “papa”). This repeated the following three days – every time Sala 2 was eating and Juan would pass by Christopher would go into hysterics. It about broke my heart. There are other men who come around the orphanage – the gardener, one administrative staff, and visitors – and I’ve had Christopher in my sala for over a year and never seen him react this way to a man before. There are some kids who have a general fear of men (especially in the newborn sala and Sala 1) – but Christopher was never one of them. The mama’s working said not to give Christopher the time of day because one day they had taken him into the sala to calm down and he didn’t want to come back out again – apparently if I held him and removed him from the table I would only be encouraging him to do it again in the future. They all said it was just due to his wanting attention, but the look on his face was one I’d never seen before, like he was having a flashback of a memory of a man who looked similar to Juan who had maltreated him in his past. Knowing that Christopher most likely had this bad memory just broke my heart. So, seeing as it was my last few days anyway, I ignored their advice, picked him up, hugged him, told him it would be okay and took him into the sala to sit with him while the others finished lunch. Maybe it will make it more difficult for the mama’s in the coming days, but I just couldn’t resist the urge to comfort him. After all, every kid deserves to be spoiled every so often.