Life Angles: LIFE Acronym #11 - Loving Innocence From Ecuador

LIFE Acronym #11:
"Loving Innocence From Ecuador"

In Ecuador there are hundreds and hundreds of disadvantaged children living in orphanages. These sweet children end up in these orphanages for any of many reasons, some of which are sad and disheartening.

Sometimes infants are given up to the orphanages because the mother is but a girl herself and wouldn't know how to take care of a baby.

Sometimes it's abandonment, abuse, drugs, or political unrest that culminates in these children being sent to these orphanages.

If the children and infants do not have adequate opportunities to be held, played with, talked to, nurtured and loved, it can hamper their emotional development and leave them severely socially impaired.

There are many tenderhearted people who serve in these orphanages and do their best to fulfill the children's basic needs.

But this can be an overwhelming task, and to help them with these demands there exist various non-profit organizations. These non-profit organizations gather additional volunteers to go down there and serve these beautiful children.

I have a friend who recently spent two months in Ecuador doing service for these angelic children, and today she told me of some of her experiences down there. Hearing the stories moved me to decide to write a blog post about it.

I forgot to ask her permission to write about what she related to me, so I hope that she doesn't mind.

She told me of her first experience with the children. When their bus arrived, the children were all so excited to see them!

She said that they were all gathered there waiting when the bus pulled up, and were squealing with enraptured delight. When the bus came to a stop, these heavenly spirits in little earthly bodies all ran up to the bus and started banging on the sides of it before the volunteers could even get out of the bus.

When the volunteers exited the bus, they were met with the encircling little arms of these Ecuadorian children, as the children hugged them and smiled with innocently congenial dispositions.

Imagine it. Just imagine it. There is something delicately indescribable about the innocence of a child. The somewhat unquantifiable nature of children has a power to engender within you the most fundamentally instinctual sparks of genuine love.

That genuine love is exactly what these volunteers came to feel for these children, and mixed among the emotions of love were also feelings of sympathy, compassion, kindness, fondness, sensitivity, and warmheartedness.

Imagine the naturally-flowing feelings of sympathy that you would feel for these children. They have no families. They have no mom and no dad to love them. Your innate paternal or maternal instincts would kick in, and you would impulsively try to fill that void within them, which would in turn satiate your spirit with contentedness.

Over the coming weeks and months, these magnanimous volunteers would come to be very familiar with these children. They would serve them, love them, see them cry, see them smile, and all the while be bathed in that magical thing that is called the unconditional love of a child.

Just close your eyes for a minute and envision one of these sweet, innocent children looking up to you for answers, and turning to you for a friend. Imagine one of them looking deep into your eyes to try to find a safe place in this harsh world. You would be humbled by the lucid, authentic gaze of that unblemished soul.

As she related the experience to me, she talked about how you really become best friends with these happy, frolicsome little people.

And she told me of how hard it was to leave them. It was like a piercing pain to the heart. This penetrating mix of pure unadulterated love and nostalgic longing does not quickly fade. It is still with my friend, who spoke of it emotionally today.

And it's likely still the constant companion of the various other volunteers who also took part in this selfless service.

She spoke of the volunteers who she worked with down miles below our blessed land that we take so for granted. And she spoke of a pointed envy of some of them, who are still down there enjoying the genuine companionship of these divine little beings.

At some point, those volunteers will also leave. Faced with so much attachment and detachment, these innocent little human beings have to do their best to cope with the fact that the volunteers come, and they go. They have to try their best not to get TOO attached to the volunteers.

But they do. And you become their best friend.

They are so humble and meek. She told me of going "off-site" to some of the rural areas where there's real poverty, and visiting with the children there. They are so excited to see you, and so kind and accepting.

They happily take you into their little homes, and are not embarrassed about the cockroaches that are crawling over the dishes, or of the toilet that has not been flushed for two weeks because the water is not working.

Life for these children means something different. Unlike many American children, life for these children in Ecuador is not about the video games, the animated movies, the carnivals, the malls, the candy and the ice cream cones.

It's about living. They are so happy to just be themselves. They're happy to have what little that they have, and they have no idea how much more we have here in the richest nation on Earth.

From 2002 to 2004, I served a Spanish-speaking mission for my church in Dallas Texas, and the President of our mission once told us missionaries a story that has stuck with me.

Prior to serving as a Mission President, he was a dentist. He and some other dentists had at one point gone down to South America to do some service for the underprivileged people there.

He told us of encountering a beautiful little girl of about 5 years old who was homeless along with her mother and other siblings. They were all separated out within seeing distance of each other, and begging on the streets for sustenance.

He gave her a Jolly Rancher, and her eyes lit up with wonder. She was captivated by this treasure that she had just received from a tall, generous stranger. She told him that she was going to bury it in a special place and save it for later.

Then he leaned down and said, "If there was one thing in the whole wide world that you would want more than anything else, what would it be?"

She replied, "A ribbon for my hair".