Hugging Children in Peru

It's our first morning as volunteers at Puericultoro Perez Aranibar and the three of us have each been assigned a very small child to accompany to Tonito Silva, a neurological and physical therapy center. Before stepping on the plastic floor mats everyone's shoes must come off. My eighteen-month-old Fabien beams at me with a wide smile. He's been hospitalized for three months and doesn't walk yet, but seems rather pleased with the bright colored plastic forms and has no objection to being swung by his hands and feet. Janet's Rosa Christina wiggles her feet out of high-top white sandals and charges toward the huge container of plastic balls - a tiny bundle of energy. Don's charge Mariano has started howling the minute we entered the building and wants nothing to do with any of this. For more than an hour we follow their activities, down stairs in a room full of children crawling, rolling or climbing - then to a small dark room with lights that flash. "Rojo", "amarillo", "azul" the therapists point out. Mostly I have to carry Fabien - and he's not good at holding on, more like a limp sack of very heavy potatoes - but that goofy smile has me hooked, and I watch him stand and inch around the waiting room holding on to the walls hoping hard that all this will help him and he'll become adoptable.
This morning our team leader Edith has asked us to accompany her and the home's sociologist to check up on fourteen-year-old Darwin who left PPA six months ago and is not doing well. We drive out to the dusty outskirts of Lima where little shacks are hanging on the side of the mountain - no shade, no water, no plumbing or electricity. A discouraged-looking dog scratches in the dirt in front of the shack where Darwin lives with his grandmother. She's a dessicated. wrinkled and toothless woman who explains (in Spanish that even I can understand) that Darwin's mother has decamped and Darwin is more that she can handle. The whole area seems without hope, and I'm very relieved when we take Darwin to a recycling plant where he can work and a Catholic boys home where the social worker starts the paperwork for his acceptance.
It's a warm afternoon, and I've been instructed to pull a very large plastic wading pool out onto one of the courtyards. As we fill it with the hose, the caregivers from three of the "boxes" in Nino Jesus, the unit for children under two, bring their charges out in lines of bathing-suit clad cherubs holding hands and squealing with excitement. Thirteen children are helped into the pool, splashing and slipping and yelling. Carmen lets one timid soul hold the hose, and he becomes gleeful, squirting right and left. Then Sister Concepcion notices that Fabien is missing and charges back inside, wheeling him out in a stroller and lowering him into the water. When everyone is completely wet and exhausted, one of the caregivers comes out with a stack of clothes and towels, and each toddler is lifted out, stripped, wrapped in a towel and then dressed. Sister Concepcion explains that they are learning not to be afraid of water. I shake my blouse dry and go to work jigsaw puzzles with the three-year-olds.