In my heart, he has a name

Here I am, sitting down again at the laptop,at the resort I am staying in, trying to reconcile the truth to how I feel…I met a little boy today who made it hard to accept…

I watched him the whole morning. He had orange hair and a distended belly under his threadbare t-shirt. His shoes didn’t match, and he was filthy. His hair was orange because he eats the food out at the dump and his belly is big because

he doesn’t get any nutrients and probably is full of parasites: he was beautiful and stole my heart…I am crying as I sit here writing this…

My interpreter and I walked over to him to talk with him. I found out he was 13,yet he looked like he was 7. Funny how my standard of nutrition and normal growth is what I thought the world would look like… I kneeled down beside him and asked him his name. I had to lean in real close and I couldn’t understand him because he was incredibly shy and had a bad stutter. That was it, I was hooked and in love: I needed to find out this beautiful boy’s story…

I called over one of the men who work there and asked him to help me. I asked him if he knew what the boy’s story was and I was not prepared for what he told me. I asked him to clarify it for me twice, because I needed to know the truth. I found out he was an orphan. His parents brought him from Haiti when he was young and they have both since died. He has no one. There is a lady who they say helps him out, but it obviously isn’t much.

He is lost. He has no memory of what life was like before he lived in that place. He is alone. No one is there to celebrate him and to cheer him on. He is hungry. There is not always a guarantee that he will collect enough bottles to be able to get some money for food. His eyes are so sad that they are able to tell their own story, and I felt lost when I looked in them.

I asked him his name and he stuttered a response that I couldn’t understand. I got my interpreter to ask him again. When my interpreter turned to me, he had tears in his eyes: “He said that he can’t remember what his mother named him”…

Well, in my heart, he has a name. In my eyes, he has an identity. To the world,whether they choose to recognize it or not, his life is incredibly valuable.