Hogar Elisa Margarita

by Lisa LaLonde

Of all the places I loved in my 3 ½ years in Mexico, there is one that still comes charging into my dreams more nights than I am prepared for. It is A Place that I knew would be hard to leave. A Place that had claimed part of me, insisting I leave that part of my heart behind. A place called Hogar Elisa Margarita. A home for girls.

I wish I could take you back with me, not just to the place, but to the time. To the very first day I walked into the quiet courtyard that would soon be swarming with 85 girls for whom this was home. My friends and I had had a polite interview with Sister Rachael, one of the eight nuns who headed up the home. Sister Rachael was polite at first, then grew friendlier as she realized we were just there to find a way to help them. We were foreigners living in Mexico City searching for a worthy cause. As soon as I took my first photographs of the five-year olds in their class on the roof, I knew I didn’t have to look any further.

Mexican children are typically very friendly and curious about strangers, but I wasn’t prepared to be disarmed by the joy and life in these tiny faces. These were girls taken out of abusive homes or taken off the streets. Their tiny faces were marred by broken teeth and discolored scars. Their eyes had seen things I couldn’t even think of , but they were smiling at me and practicing their English and loving the camera. I had been away from my own country long enough to be in love with Mexican charm already, but the children here made me forget that there were any countries, that there was any language barrier, that all children didn’t laugh and squirm and pinch each other and giggle. I didn’t realize that I had found something I didn’t know I was looking for. I was home.

It would take me several visits to realize that. I was always welcome, and each visit the girls grew more at ease with my camera and I grew more at ease with my Spanish. Sister Rachael would always greet me with her soft smile. The other sisters would watch us very protectively (until we proved we were friendly) but Sister Rachael always seemed at ease with these foreign ladies who pushed their way into her world. In our interviews with her, when we asked about their specific needs, she was very forthright. They needed to pay the phone bill. They needed a wall built to keep the rats out from the neighboring yards. They needed a bathroom up on the roof for the littlest girls. But each time we came through with a request, whether it was for food or for a bill to be paid, I remarked to myself that it was as if Sister Rachael already knew that it would be done. And her confidence was not in us. I started to think about what kind of a woman of faith she must be. She never knew when we would show up or bring food. When we brought a feast, I considered that the day before had been a famine, and famine was likely to return again. The economics of running a home for 85 destitute girls were staggering. The home was run on faith and very little community support. The community was already poor enough. I reached the conclusion that I was observing a miracle of God in the flesh. This home should not be able to run as it did. It would never add up.

But something else was happening. A miracle of another kind. I was falling in love with the girls, that was no surprise. Always one to collect children around me, I thrived on pouring whatever I had into my visits. I enjoyed seeing the transformation in them as they got used to my visits. Often I would go alone even though none of my other friends could go with me. And I was welcome even if I brought no food, no candy, no money to pay the bills. Just myself and my camera. That was enough for them. It was then that I began to realize that each time I entered the courtyard, it was like I was coming home. Like they had been waiting for me. Like they understood all along that I was also a little girl needing to be rescued, needing to be taken in by the woman who walked through each day with faith enough to see into tomorrow. I didn’t realize God was setting me up to learn a very valuable lesson.

I remember well the day I was introduced to the real tragedy behind the girls’ lives. Linda and I had gone to visit, and Sister Rachael, with a new somberness in her face, took us aside into the garden and took one of the girls with her. She began to slowly unravel a story, the story of 85 girls who can’t go home. Many of the girls were there because the police had taken them out of abusive situations at home. But they still had their families and some would go to spend vacations with them. Many returned with more scars than they left with. She looked down into the young girl’s face and asked her to tell us what had happened when she was with her family this past time. The girl was about eight, and I recalled she was a very outgoing bubbly and friendly one. Her voice started low but rose up in anger as she described the hot fork her mother had repeatedly burned her with. And then she showed us the scars.

How can you explain to an eight-year-old girl the indignation that rises up in your own throat at the sign of injustice? How can you comfort her? Now try to imagine it in a language that is not your own. I felt like I was being given an opportunity to be a fine human being, showing comfort and giving love to a hurting one, but all I could do was cover my own indignation and try to let my eyes speak for me. Fortunately, Linda’s comforting Spanish was better than mine. I know we were both horrified, and it was only a small comfort to us to hear Sister Rachael say, “At least she will never have to go home again. We have proof now.” How many more returned with no physical proof? The haven of Hogar Elisa Margarita looked more and more like not only a home for the girls, but a shelter from the storms.

If I seem to be idealizing the Hogar, it is because it was a place of refuge for me as well. I was happiest taking photographs of the girls, and feeling their acceptance as I tested out my Spanish. They were amused one day to discover that my birthday was the same as Dia del Nino, “the Day of the Child” in Mexico. The courtyard was decorated with banners and bright colors, and I think it was the first time I heard Sister Rachael laugh. I was politely invited to come back for the celebration, a few days away, and I was sorely tempted. But somehow my American sensibilities would not let me come to be celebrated on a day that was meant for the children. I didn’t realize that I was just as much a child, and they would have welcomed me as one of them. So Dia del Nino came and went and I did not go to the home. It was a decision I still regret.

I knew the girls of Hogar Elisa Margarita for almost three years. Which, of course, meant that I knew Sister Rachael for that long as well. I have already stated that I was impressed with her quiet faith, but there was something else about her that I soon realized made her very unique and aptly placed as the head of a girls’ home. In one of our many conversations, we asked each other where we were from. I tried to describe New York to her, but not the New York of the skyscrapers. Instead I tried to tell her of the New York of the Finger Lakes and the Catskills, the Erie Canal and the Long Island Sound, and the farmland and the Great Lakes. In exchange for my efforts (all in Spanish!) I was rewarded with the discovery that she was from a little town called Angangeo, deep in the Michoacan Mountains, and home to one of the Monarch butterfly reserves. What delight for me to discover that one of my favorite Mexicans was from one of my favorite Mexican places! I had been there recently enough to talk about the town I had fallen in love with, and the beauty of millions of butterflies clinging to the trees, the mountains, the very clouds. I suddenly saw that she was very much like Angangeo…. solid, permanent, beautiful, home to the weary traveler, whether it was a tiny child picked up off the streets of Mexico or a home-sick foreign woman who didn’t know she was lost and needing a home.

I think it must have been from that time on that Sister Rachael showed her finest human feature to me. She started to open me up, gradually uncovering those things that were lost about me, those parts that were hurting and why I came running for shelter to the Hogar. Bit she didn’t do it as a counselor, asking questions and offering advice. Instead she opened me up by placing me in the sun and watching me respond. She didn’t use words, she used the Hogar. In fact, I think we shared no more than a few sentences about my situation. But it was enough. I think I was surprised because I didn’t see her doing it. And because I didn’t notice it happening at first. But in hindsight, I realize that I was in the hands of an expert. Any woman who lives day and night with 85 hurting girls of all ages must know how to read the next hurting one she finds returning to her doorstep. And exactly how carefully to soothe the wound so she won’t run away, but draw near to those who can offer her help and comfort.

Soon after this I discovered that my time had come to leave Mexico. Somehow I had to say good bye to the place that had been a very strange sort of refuge for me. As is so typical, when we reach out to help someone else we take so much more benefit away. Don’t think that my dreams aren’t haunted by the needs of the girls in the Hogar, that I don’t think about the tiny girls running down the stairs from the roof and tripping, that I consider the dangerous neighborhood the Hogar is in. But when I wake I know that somehow it is still a refuge for them. Statistically they don’t have a great future. They may be able to enter the workforce. They may become maids for some well-to-do families. They may return to the streets. I would go and rescue them if I could. In fact, my father and I often muse about how we would help those girls if we came into money. Dad says it best: “Those girls would be taken care of.”

Through a strange vagary of the Hogar systems, Sister Rachael is no longer there. Every six years the sisters get moved around. Perhaps it seems cruel to us, to have the girls lose someone who has been their rescuer, but I suppose it is so they won’t get too attached. It only took me three years. Imagine what could have happened in six! As I mused on all these memories of the Hogar to share with you, I came to a new and startling conclusion. I don’t need to worry about the girls in the Hogar. They had six years with Sister Rachael. Six years of watching her wait on God to meet their every need. Six years of watching her quietly unfold the hurting places in them. Six years of watching the woman from the Butterfly town rescue children from the dark streets and the dark homes. The girls are supposed to move on to another home when they reach age thirteen, but there were several who had passed that age and were not going anywhere. “Hogar” means “Home” and home it is to them, and will be for as long as they need it. Their six years with Sister Rachael did more for them than any of my poor American dollars ever did. But I also believe in the laws of multiplication. That God can use my poor American dollars and meet more than I can see.

Before I left Mexico, I packed up my belongings. With each item I asked, Do I need this? Do I want to move this? When I came to my mixed up collection of stuffed animals, I paused for a long time. Each one held a memory. The year my grandfather painted this dog. The silly giraffe from a college roommate. The cats and sheep with fur so well matted that you knew my young hands had loved them. The bears, the cat with the music box inside, the bunnies and frogs. A decent collection of memories, but I suddenly knew I didn’t need them anymore. How could I ever look at them again, knowing that at the Hogar, there was one doll per bed, and often two children per bed? I had already taken my comfort from these toys. So I did what you all hope I did: I packed them all in a big bag and went for my last visit to the Hogar. I know you want to hear about the squeals of delight as the girls with no toys opened up my bag of goodies, but that’s not what happened. Sister Rachael, in her quiet way, looked in the bag, and smiled. Then she told me “We’ll save them for a special day.” And the bag went away, with no little hands groping inside….yet. I like to think that the littlest girls soon had two toys to every bed. And that some of the toys were set aside and saved for the day when a new little girl found her way to the Hogar and spent her first night sleeping in a huge room with twenty-five beds and fifty girls. Perhaps she snuggled up to my toy and knew she was safe.

I will probably never be able to tell Sister Rachael all that I have told you. She is off somewhere unknown, helping another set of lost and hurting girls. But I know that she doesn’t fret over the girls she left behind at the Hogar. I know she knows the great investment she made in them will pay off. And that she gave them the best of herself. She, like me, believes in a God who is bigger than the need at hand. I learned it first-hand in Mexico.

But sometimes when I wake up from those dreams of Mexico and the Hogar, I lie awake and think of Sister Rachael. Does she know that she helped me, did she have a clue? We often have no idea that what we are doing is keeping someone from falling. So I send up my prayers for the girls in the Hogar, and for the inimitable Sister Rachael. I think when she sleeps, she sees children laughing and dancing in the courtyard, like the butterflies flying in the mountains of Angangeo. And I think it makes her smile in her sleep, that quiet soft smile of a faithful heart.

© 2001 Lisa B. LaLonde