Her eyes were big, brown, and serious. Immediately images of my own daughter’s big, brown eyes flashed in my mind. She forcibly was trying to tell me something, something I could not interpret. “What is she saying to me?!” I’d questioned Walthair, one of the boys in our home for abandoned boys who taught himself English.
“Llévame contigo. Llévame a casa contigo,” she sternly said with hints of desperation in her voice. She couldn’t be more than seven years old. She was beautiful with her Peruvian skin, her black hair long and messy, thrown into a ponytail with a scrunchie. She was skinny. Too skinny. Her shirt, picturing a Disney character, was outdated, faded, and worn- an obvious staple piece for its impoverished owner.
I work for Kings and Queens International. We have a church plant and our own home for abandoned boys in Iquitos, Peru and were there with a mission team. We had been doing outreach in Belen, one of the poorest areas in Iquitos.
Belen is an area filled with floating shacks; they rise and fall with the river. And in every direction you turn, there is poverty. Often times poverty in the United States looks like Welfare, WIC, Medicaid, nonprofits with food and clothes pantries, homeless shelters, government housing, free public education, free and reduced breakfast and lunch at school, a car to live in. That’s not what poverty looks like in Belen, in Iquitos, in other parts of the world. Poverty in those places looks like hungry, starving, and malnourished children, shacks without walls, without indoor bathrooms, without air conditioning, without beds. It looks like children walking barefoot through the trash that covers the streets. It looks like sleeping on wooden boards. It looks like street children who steal or prostitute themselves in order to survive. It looks like zero education because there is no free education available.
That kind of poverty looks like the little girl who had followed me down several streets to where I could find a mototaxi, because cars aren’t even common- cars are owned by drug lords. It looks like the little girl who after Marissa, Walthair, and I slid in the seat of a mototaxi pulled herself up onto the platform and stood by our feet, looked me dead in the eye and pleaded, ““Llévame contigo. Llévame a casa contigo.”
“Take me with you. Take me home with you,” Walthair translated.
I felt like I had taken a blow to the gut. I wanted to lean out of the mototaxi and blow chunks. At the same time, I wanted to grab her in my arms and get her out of there, take her home with me. I knew I couldn’t do either.
“I wish I could take you with me, but I can’t. I would if I could. I am so sorry. I love you, and there is also God who loves you. Believe in him, trust in him. He will never leave you. You will never be alone.” I emphasized every word.
Walthair told her what I said. She would not accept it. She began to argue with me. She pleaded, on and on for me to take her.
"Lo siento. Lo siento. Te quiero." I muttered almost breathlessly. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you.
And I could say no more. I just stared into the beautiful, begging eyes of a little girl who did not choose to be born into Belen, into poverty, into darkness. She didn't choose to, but she was. But now she was trying to choose me.
She wouldn’t get off of the mototaxi. Rosa, the house mother at our home for abandoned boys had to come over and make her get off. The mototaxi pulled out. I could not look back to see the damage done in whom I had left behind. I asked kind Marissa, my teammate, to look back. She did; she told me what she saw. That little girl stood in the middle of the uneven dirt road, eyes fixated on our backs, our bodies getting smaller and smaller as we rode away. I knew she would be doing that; that is why, like a coward, I could not make myself look. We rode to the home with lumps in our throats, fire in our spirits, grief in our hearts, and tears silently striking our laps.
I do not know her name. In fact, I have no recollection of her until the instance on the mototaxi. Walthair, I’ve known him and the other boys since I started coming to Peru in 2012. But her, I don’t know her.
We spent three hours one morning going shack to shack inviting kids in Belen to a program with our church. Over 150 children showed up each day. Only about eight mothers showed up escorting their kids. No dads came. Five year olds would carry their one year old sibling up concrete steps to meet us. I’d say eight in ten kids had teeth rotting out of their heads, painful to even look at much less endure. Many had lice. Their clothes were often outdated, faded, stained, torn, and somehow still unbelievably beautiful against their skin. We gave them candy, snacks, and drinks. Chaos erupted. It was like they never knew when they would eat again, so they pushed and shoved and jumped and cried out… begging for you to place the gift in their desperate hand. It took all of the Peruvian workers and boys to ensure them we had enough for everyone. Finally by day three they somewhat understood the concept of a line. We played games with them. We danced with them. We had Tigger and Donald Duck perform for them. We taught them bible lessons. We prayed with them. We loved them. We told them about Jesus.
My Spanish is decent enough to have basic conversations, but I’m not close to being fluent. I remember sitting in a team devotion one afternoon, after we had only been serving in Belen for two days, bending over in my seat, placing my right hand on my forehead and muffling sobs as Marissa recalled, “All Emily did was bend down, ask them their names, ask how old they were, ask them their favorite color or if they liked to play soccer, smile at them, give them a hug… and they loved her. They chased her down the street.” The same was true of Marissa. The same was true of every team member. With urgency and joy we all poured our hearts and souls into these kids. I’m not the only team member who a child, a stranger, asked to take them home.
It had been a day from hell. An emergency had taken place that morning. And I didn’t know at that moment sitting in devotion that it would only get worse that very night. Another emergency would happen. And sandwiched between those emergencies and in the middle of our trip was Marissa basically saying that all these kids we had been serving needed was love, attention, and someone to get down on their level and show them they care. She was dead on.
What I did wasn’t heroic. It was not outrageous. It did not deserve an award or notice. It was incredibly small. It was basic. It was normal. It was a common response to seeing kids in need. And everyone who went with us did that. If you went with us, you would too. At some point, in the midst of talking to and hugging 150 kids, spending just a few seconds with each of them over the course of three days, what I had done was enough of an impression to a little girl to make her willing to leave everything she knew behind. It was enough for her to want to leave her family, if she had one. To leave her shack. To leave her street corner. To leave her world. She was so eager to leave. So eager to go with someone who didn’t even know her name or speak her language. She was so hopeful that with me it could not be any worse than what she had now.
The interaction lasted a couple of minutes, but the impact, for me, will last a lifetime. Three days of outreach won’t change Belen. One mission trip won’t make the biggest difference in the world. But love will. God will, if He wants to.
Andy Andrews wrote the book The Noticer. It is not the best book I have ever read. It is not the most interesting or the most well written. Yet, I remember lessons learned from it more than any other book other than the bible. There is a character in the book who notices things about people. He notices their wants, their needs, who they are. And then he tells them about themselves. The things that they don’t even notice because they don’t have the same perspective. They change when they are introduced to a new perspective.
I do not notice enough. I would like to notice more than I do. Furthermore, I do not act on half of what I do notice. But Andrews writes in The Noticer, “Consider that even the simplest actions you take for your lives matter beyond measure… and they matter forever.” And I think he is right. I think they do matter forever. The simplest actions, taken after noticing, mattered to that little girl.
Andrews goes on to say, “In desperate times, much more than anything else, folks need perspective. For perspective brings calm. Calm leads to clear thinking. Clear thinking yields new ideas. And ideas produce the bloom… of an answer. Keep your head and heart clear. Perspective can just as easily be lost as it can be found.”
I’ve been thinking about perspective. About that little girl’s perspective. About mine. About Walthair’s. About Marissa’s. About Rosa's. About President Trump’s perspective on Haiti and Africa. About people’s perspective of me. How sick of me they probably are for fundraising for our non profit like crazy. Their perspective about those of us who are so passionate about Peru yet when someone asks us, “How was your trip?” we feel immediately exhausted and a little jaded because there is no way anyone can possibly understand what we witness and experience each time we go. And sometimes we do not even feel like trying to get them to. What will people's perspective be of this little girl who wrecked my heart but whose life is more wrecked than they could ever imagine?
I did my absolute best to comfort and hold more crying boys ages four to eighteen this last Peru trip than I have ever had to before. Boys in homes for abandoned boys. Grieving, broken boys. Boys yearning for love and attention. Boys devastated by their past, their present. And my heart breaks for all of them. My heart breaks for the kids of Belen, for the little girl who wanted to go home with me. Out of my six trips to Peru, this was the scariest, saddest, hardest, most encouraging, most challenging, most inspiring, and best trip yet. It’s the trip I came home with the most perspective.
I have a new perspective on Matthew 9:35-38: “And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.'”
The amount of work to be done is overwhelming. It is unending, burdensome, emotionally draining, and seemingly impossible. But Christians are not allowed to give in to that reality. Our hope is greater than any worldly strife. And we are called to act. We are called to free the oppressed, to give to the impoverished, to help the orphan. We are called to have compassion. We are called to be the few. We are called to enter the harvest. The harvest looks different for every one of us. But it’s our harvest to tend to nonetheless. We are called to have this perspective.
Passion’s song “Glorious Day“ gives me perspective about who I used to be before Christ. It gives me perspective on who I am now in Christ.
I needed rescue/ My sin was heavy/ But chains break at the weight of Your glory/ I needed shelter/ I was an orphan/ But You call me a citizen of heaven/ When I was broken/ You were my healing/ Your love is the air that I'm breathing/ I have a future/ My eyes are open/ You called my name/ And I ran out of that grave/ Out of the darkness/ Into Your glorious day
It gives me perspective on the harvest I am called to… the kids and young men of Iquitos, Peru.. and why I am called to it. More than about myself, it gives me perspective on what so many of these kids in Iquitos really need, and it is not to go home with me.
*This blog was written by Kings and Queens International's Sponsorship Coordinator, Emily Reeves.Photo Credits: Brandon Brown/ Fox and Arrow Studio/ Kings and Queens International Photographer & Videographer*