Shy little girl’s face lit up

By Grant LaFleche:

When she thought no one was looking, the little girl quietly slipped her bright pink shoes off.

Sitting on a lonely stone that rests in the middle of the small plot of land owned by her family, Orillia carefully dusted off the red dirt from the treads of the little shoes, decorated with multicoloured hearts.

The shoes were new, and Orillia was trying to keep them as pristine as she can. It will be an impossible task. Orillia lives in the mountains of Jalapa. Her feet never touch a clean floor. In her home, as it is outside, the sandy ground is the only floor she has.

But the shoes were new. And new clothes is not something she, or her family, see often.

Before I left for Guatemala to join a volunteer team with Wells of Hope I put out a call for donations for the children of Jalapa. Born into crushing poverty, the children play a deck that was stacked against them before they were born. Creature comforts are all but nonexistent in the mountains. The basics of dental hygiene, for example, are hard to come by. Could my friends spare a few items for the children of Jalapa?

The response was overwhelming. Boxes of toothpaste and toothbrushes, simple toys, hair brushes and clips for little girls and several pairs of new shoes.

I had met Orillia on Monday when we first began work on building her aunt Carmen a new home. The entire family lives in two small, mud brick houses. The new building will provide Carmen and her three children a place of their own right next door.

When we returned to the work site Tuesday, I brought the donated shoes and some toys with me. Orillia and her cousins all needed new shoes. Their toes were bursting from the shoes they did have, which were hand-me-downs from their older siblings or cousins.

A tiny pair of pink shoes fit Orillia perfectly, and the shy little girl’s face lit up. I also gave her a cloth doll, which she clutched with an iron grip.

She skipped away, giggling, to show her mother her new shoes.

The rest of my morning was spent with the Wells of Hope team hauling hundreds of the 30-pound mud bricks that would eventually become Carmen’s home.

When we returned later in the day, Orillia was still running about in her new shoes.

“Hola, Orillia. Como estas?” I said.

Orillia did not say anything. Instead, she ran up to me, and jumped into my arms. It was nothing less than a pure expression of joy.

Later she sat alone on that rock, happily cleaning her new shoes, fighting a losing battle against the red dirt in which she lives.

Orillia is a kind, exuberant, beautiful child. And it can be easy to pat oneself on the back for bringing donations to children like her because they made her happy. Because they made a difference, even if only for a fleeting moment.

But shortly after we finished work for the day, and climbed aboard the rickety Wells of Hope truck to return to camp, we got a glimpse of what Orillia’s future will likely be.

We passed by a woman and her two children, huddled in a ditch on the side of the road. The mother was cleaning mud from her infant’s face, after having obviously come to the ditch for the region’s most precious commodity ­— water.

This was no basin or watering hole. It was a ditch where a slow trickle of mountain runoff pools. The likelihood of that water being clean is nearly zero. But she probably had to walk for several kilometres to reach that ditch, which is probably the only source of water near her.

The sight is not uncommon in Jalapa. It has repeated for generations.

And that is the tragedy of it. That wonderful little girl doesn’t have the opportunities Canadian children do. Orillia faces a future where, as likely as not, will be a mother, washing her children with a trickle of water from a ditch.

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