The Orphanage

Last night I dreamt that I had been working at an orphanage in Latin America. Like most charities in the world its mission was to achieve something of good, but just like everything in practice it felt imperfect, unright, greedy from the inside.

One came upon the orphanage by driving deep into the jungle; taking the back roads, dirt-paved roads, gravel low-ways and hilly drive-ways until a rectangular, dirt parking lot, surrounded by green and brown trees was reached. A small path was cut out in the corner of this driveway with a sign indicating the destination in question at its mouth.

On walking this path, one eventually reaches a concrete and glass facility on a cliff by the Pacific Ocean. From the inside of the facility, the feeling of the Latin American jungle is quickly lost for something different.

It instead begins to feel more like a dark, cramped, too-many-tones-of-grey city orphanage in a historic, but bombed out and depressed European city. It quickly becomes less feeling and more reality when they try to leave the facility, ejected not into tropical paradise, but a set of bustling, compassionless streets.

Now these orphans are treated well by all accounts. They’re fed three square meals a day, they have beds and access to drinking water. The counselors in the facilities take regular inventory of the childrens’ well being, they’re taken on field trips to museums, and they’re taught the general navigational strategy for life.

All of the explicit letters of the law are ultimately followed, yet it’s the implicit laws of love and life which end up feeling violated.

These orphans are fed a vegetarian diet, one motivated by what feels like thrift more than anything. The counselors zip from room to room, filling out the government mandated wellness surveys with an anxious and rush and fervor that no true words spoken by the child can find their form on the form. The children are given a rigid, technical book describing the laws of life, and are instructed to study with the same fervor, but not one volunteer sits with the children to explain how the words are an imperfect approximation for what exists between the lines.

The children too, engage in performance, with their mouths and their words giving consent to this treatment, acting as if everything were okay. As if this, the last place which would take them was not just as cold and unloving as the world which they came from. As if their hope for safety weren’t finally snuffed out, as if the light in their eyes hadn’t finally been dimmed.

This suffering is hidden to the “mass of men who lead lives of quiet desparation”, visible only to those who have a spare second to listen, to genuinely care. Alas the world is empty of such men, and becoming more empty by the day. Soon we will all be one of these orphans, pretending that the life we lead is the way that we want it.

And finally, when the children have moved one, either to a home looking for a government handout or to the world, as the law had concluded that they had existed too long to receive any more help, then the volunteers again motor around mechanically down the halls, changing the sheets of the beds and writing new names on the doors as if these children had never entered the halls in the first place. The workers are careful enough to speak of the leaving children, to express false graditude, a performance to others that they too care about “the mission”. But you can always tell by how quickly their eyes shift to something of actual importance to them, their lazy husband, their enemy in politics, the car they so desparately wish to purchase that its how they were percieved, rather than the children which motivated any showing of affection.

Luckily, if any or all of this makes one feel weak, disillusioned or hopeless, further down on this path in the jungle there is a great Spanish monastery, with churches, monks and the lord’s son, cast out of wax and bleached in skin - for a dark Christ would be sacreligious to the white or even the brown skinned followers - where one can explain the incongruence in their hearts by dropping to their knees and weeping, as deeply as it takes to once again disconnect from their hearts.