Mission in Brazil (testimony of a volunteer)

Every Tuesday morn­ing, I vis­it the chil­dren at the or­phan­age of the neigh­bor­ing vil­lage, Simões Filho, with Carmen, a Heart’s Home mis­sion­ary from Ecuador .

The more I go, the more I like it but each time it is hard! Dozens of lit­tle boys (from four to eleven years old) with­out fa­ther, nor moth­er, nor un­cle, nor aunt, nor grand­moth­er. Who can love them and take care of them? These chil­dren hard­ly count as peo­ple; they have no val­ue in the eyes of men. These chil­dren learn to sur­vive with­out kiss­es or cud­dles, to take care of them­selves, to de­fend them­selves. They trans­form a bot­tle-cap and a bit of string in­to a game. They ar­rive at the or­phan­age in an in­hu­man state…

There, the mis­sion of Heart’s Home is to love. Love means spend­ing time with others, lis­ten­ing, play­ing, tak­ing them in­to our arms, dry­ing their tears. Showing them they are valu­able. But it is dif­fi­cult since there are so nu­mer­ous. Some of them are vi­o­lent and abide by the law of the strongest. Love means grant­ing more at­ten­tion to the small­est, the most frag­ile. Love means de­vel­op­ing a “suf­fer­ing de­tec­tor” to go where the trig­ger is set and show that some­one cares. Finally, it means be­com­ing the pres­ence that makes the suf­fer­ing more bear­able.

Little by lit­tle, vis­it after vis­it, the friend­ships start to blos­som, we want to or­ga­nize some out­ings with some of them. A week­end for them to go out of their gray and closed en­vi­ron­ment, a place where they can play with other chil­dren in free­dom in the na­ture, and they will laugh.