So many days I am reminded that the kids at the home are just like any other kid, but there are other times when I am reminded of the uniqueness of the hogar, this space that we have been so blessed to share with everyone here. Sometimes these reminders are painful, or sad, other times they are wonderful and funny.
My favorite story revolves around a little bug we like to call the 'piojo.' In common English, better known as lice. The first stories that I heard about lice have to do with a little girl named Margarita. Sister Bernadet, in the evenings, would flip up her veil and Margarita would jump on her back and start looking for piojos. One day, Margarita came up to me in the hallway with this excited look on her face, she wanted to give me something she had found, she opened up her hand and gave me... a piojo. The girls used to have a carpet in the living room, but there were so many resident piojos that you could be entertained by watching the jumping contest.
Now one might ask, why can't they get rid of the lice?! The biggest obstacle we have is that about 1/3 of the girls go home on the weekends to spend with their families. There is lice in the homes, and they bring it back to the Hogar. The battle becomes insurmountable. We just do not have enough control over the kids' environments.
The part that seemed so surreal about the whole thing is that the kids talk about lice like they're talking about what they ate for breakfast. Sometimes it's borring, sometimes it's exciting. The other day I was picking out nits from Connie's hair. It's a great time to talk with the kids because it can take quite a while and the mini-head masssage is kind of relaxing. She started telling me stories about her neighborhood and how funny one of the neighbor kids is. She claims that she has a circus in her hair. She has named all the big trapeze artists, and they do backflips and swing from hair to hair. Kind of makes the whole story you heard as a kid of flea circuses make sense at a whole new level. When you hear the girls tell their stories, and just be kids, it doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all. And in all the funkiness of living with hundredes and hundreds of piojos, it's just another day at the hogar, loving these amazing kids.
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