Annada

journaled 8 november, 2006

i wonder what she’s thinking and i want to hear her story. she’s one of the older girls of the orphanage, 13 she tells me, and in the 8th class. every meal she helps serve us and our water glasses never stay empty for long. with her long braids hang behind her, her dark eyes always observing and i want to know her story.
we were done working for the day and unwinding before bed. i heard the children singing on the other side of the wall and couldn’t resist sneaking over to watch. i pulled up a trunk and took in the scene. there are 9 boys and 25 girls; this is intentional. C.H.I.L.D. wants 75% of their children to be female for they are often the ones left alone or abandoned. sons are celebrated; daughters despised. sons inherit. they bring parents wealth, a dowry worth as much as four years of a bride’s family income. a son is also essential in a hindu family to light a parent’s funeral pyre and open the way to heaven. daughters bring financial hardship, then leave to become servants of another family. some female infants are killed: smothered beneath the placenta, fed poison or abandoned in the wild. more often, they simply get less than their brothers of the food and medicine needed to survive. among children younger than five, the death rate is three times greater for girls than for boys.

the boys were lined up along one side of the wall and the girls sat in rows, filling the rest of the room. class by class they came up and led the rest of the group in song. annada was selected to oversee. she sat next to me and we enjoyed the performance. all songs came accompanied with actions, indians were created to dance. the littlest ones were my favorites… they usually are. together, they all sang a song i’ll never forget.

‘your mother may let you down, your daddy may let you down
your mother may let you down, your daddy may let you down.
the men of the world will let me down, my Je-us never fails.
the men of the world will let me down, my Je-us never fails.
Je-us, never fails. Je-us, never fails.’

i could have sung those same words with them, but they wouldn’t have had the same meaning as they do for these children. could i ever really imagine what it would be like to be an orphan? to be so young with no family to care for me? my western mind cannot grasp the thoughts.

before coming to the home, one of the youngest was left home alone while her mother went to work. one of the neighbors found out and he became a daily ‘visitor’ while mom was working. thankfully, she’s in safe hands now. another was pledged to be married at 12 and on a village visit, begged the C.H.I.L.D. founders to let her study. after much petitioning to their Father and to hers, she and her younger sister were allowed to enter the children’s home. the older has begun nursing school, the younger, not yet 16, has left to be married. some are still caught stealing, others cheating in school. before new methods can be learned, the old ones must be unlearned and it is a slow process. all under 18, they have known more heartache than i can even imagine yet their faces cannot hide their newly found joy.

s the children prepare for bed, annada and i climb the stairs to the roof to watch the stars. amidst the laundry strung around and the mosquitoes flying about, we lay on the concrete and count the twinkles. we know we won’t be able to number them all, but we still enjoy trying. i tell her about my family, of life in the states. i tell her about the parks we have and how fun it is to jump on a trampoline. in her broken english, she tells me part of her story as well. when she was 3, her mother died giving birth to her younger brother and her father died of cancer a couple years later. she’s really never known what it’s like to have parents and what a real family looks like. but she loves it here. lalitha and samson have become her mommy and daddy and she has more brothers and sisters than she ever could have imagined. someday, she wants to be a doctor. i do not question the seriousness of her ambition. she’s already been through so much, a medical degree will be a piece of cake.

i was in junior high when i first heard of the high abortion rate of girls in china. with the one child law, many parents preferred their lineage continued through their sons. i decided then to adopt one of those little china dolls for myself. perhaps she’ll have an indian sister.