On Location

Charmed at Pimpollo
By Diane Johnston Hamm

"Echale, echale!" Step on it, step on it! the little boys in the backseat command my husband. Five hundred feet ahead of us, a smoke-belching, dilapidated school bus carries seventy-five other kids from the Pimpollo children's home in Juchitan, Oaxaca, and it is getting away. Our rental car eases down off the twenty-third speed bump in twenty-three minutes. Jeff trounces on the gas. Like a clown car in a circus, we lurch forward.

The boys squeal-Josue, who is four and has a little sister riding in the car following us, and the five-year-old twins, Geraldo and Pablo, who were dropped off at Pimpollo at birth in precarious health. Next to the window behind Jeff, three-year-old Ali sits in the lap of his teenaged mother. Both she and her husband are former residents who continue to work at Pimpollo.

The Pimpollo kids are not adoptable, though my son, who has spent three months working here, would like to envision a future with Josue. Some, abandoned like the twins, lack papers relinquishing parental rights. Others have parents struggling toward better times so they can bring their children home. And some come from poor towns where education is so spotty their parents have no hope for their children's future if they remain there.

Madre Estella, the director, says of those who no longer have parents, "We don't know what kind of homes the children would be going to if they were adopted, what motive people would have for adopting them." I think she fears they would be treated as servants, otherwise abused, or even sacrificed for the harvest of body organs.

The truth is, if these children cannot be with their own families, Pimpollo is not a bad alternative. They have more freedom than may be good for them, on the understaffed campus, but then they are not oppressed, either. They look healthy, are independent and generally good-natured. Though they sometimes bully each other, they look out for each other, too. They are affectionate and up to age nine or ten crave a good snuggle or hug. Even the teenagers like one-on-one attention. Like many teens, some are unclear about what comes next in their lives.

This is our fourth day here. We have read with the kids, drawn chalk pictures together on the concrete, handed out jump ropes and decks of cards, purchased nets for the basketball hoops. We have eaten with them in the dining room, where corn tortillas are used as scoops in place of silverware and dishes are washed in cold water by the older children.

Following the vision of Pimpollo's founder and overseer, Padre Pancho, each young person must give three years of service to the Pimpollo community: one year after seventh grade, one after tenth and another after graduating from high school. During a service year the kids do not attend school. Besides kitchen work, they do laundry and cleaning and help with farm projects.

Once in a while everyone gets to go on an excursion. Madre Estela has told the children at breakfast today to leave their shoes at home so they won't be left behind at Ojo de Agua, the natural springs where we are headed now to swim.

"Que numero es este?" Jeff asks, as we lumber over another speed bump. "Veinte-ocho!" says Pablo. Twenty-eight!

"Mira la primaria!" Geraldo points to a brightly painted grade school on the left.

"Mira el toro!" Josue sees a bull on the right. Their voices chime like little bells in my ears, charming me with their sweetness. I brace my arm against Jeff's seat to keep them from tumbling forward in their enthusiasm. No car seats, too small for seatbelts. Some of the kids suffered broken bones last summer when the Pimpollo van was run off the road by a careless driver, who sped off without stopping. The van was left inoperable.

We spend the day at the springs, Jeff in the water with the kids, me anxiously keeping an eye on the little ones and the more vulnerable of the school-age kids. The teenagers are watching at the other pools, as are two supervisors and some of the kitchen staff, here to cook lunch. Over and over I count, Uno, dos, tres! so the girls and some of the boys can have an audience for their daring jumps into the pool. Ten-year old Alicia, sister to three brothers also at Pimpollo, has no need for an audience. With the exuberant self-confidence of a preteen she nets minnows using the skirt of her swimsuit and pours them into a jar.

At my feet the little ones have managed by hook or crook to acquire plastic inner tubes and have formed themselves into a little flotilla. Round and round the seven ducklings paddle, all linked together in perfect contentment, no one excluded. From time to time a shivering little body struggles out to sit in my lap and be warmed in the shelter of my arms—or is it I who am warmed?

On the way home, hours later, the little boys are mute, but wide-eyed still, until they can no longer hold up their eyelids or their heads and fold, totally spent, in the seat. All but little Ali, whose mother engages him in a learning chant. "Tree," she says, nodding toward the window. "Tree!" says Ali. "Bicycle." "Bicycle!"

Together they name the world outside the window and then the world of Pimpollo: "Sylvia." "Sylvia!" "Emanuel." "Emanuel!" Their names chime vespers to a perfect day—if I should die tomorrow, I shall not complain.

I don't die tomorrow, but it is our last day at Pimpollo. Little Geraldo, whose favorite chore at Pimpollo is looking for missing dishes, wants to know if I saw the dead cow on the way home. Yes, I tell him—did he see that bulldozer? Yes, he did! We have traveled a road together, he and I, lost in wonder.