ACCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT UNICEF FIGURES, THERE ARE somewhere around thirty-one million orphans in India alone. This statistic is an estimate, so who knows how many there actually are. No doubt the real number is higher, but thirty-one million is still a big number, way too big to imagine. Thirty-one million is twice as many people as every man, woman, and child in the six states that make up New England. It’s as if the entire states of Texas and Colorado or all of Scandinavia and Costa Rica were inhabited by orphaned children. It’s staggering to think of them all at once and easy to picture them as a faceless horde of dirty, helpless, hungry humanity. But as we discovered at the Farm, one by one, one face at a time, these kids are not only individuals, they are downright beautiful.
One of the first children I met was Cynthia. She was three years old. She talked like a cartoon mouse, laughed like a pixie on helium, and entertained visitors with cuter-than-cute improv dancing each evening at dinner. Why her mother threw her away—tossing her into a storm drain shortly after her birth—is a mystery. Luckily, a stubborn branch caught Cynthia on her way downstream, where she was rescued by her grandmother and brought to the Farm.
Not all children arrived in such a biblical manner, plucked like Moses from the river of fate. Most just came out of necessity, like Saloni and her twin sister, Shivani. When we met them, they were three months old and the smallest members of the Strong Farm family. Apparently, they were brought to the Farm by their mother when they were just days old. They were the eleventh and twelfth girls born into a family desperate for a son, and there simply was not room or love for them at home.
“You want them? Yes?” the girl’s mother asked when she showed up at the Mission gate one morning. She offered her daughters casually, like two small loaves of excess bread.
At first, Clifton refused. With resources stretched to the limit, he does not and cannot accept every child who is offered to him, and the high-maintenance care required by two painfully small infants was simply too much for the Farm to take on. But a month later, when the twins’ mother returned, her daughters now even smaller and appearing to be near death, Clifton relented. From that day on, the girls became part of the family, lucky beyond words, loved and nurtured by hundreds of hands, showered with affection from sunup to sundown.
And then there was Job.
At three days old, Job was dropped at the orphanage. Not an orphan per se, just abandoned like so many children in India. When we met him, he was thirteen and didn’t remember any of the dark days at the Farm. He was only seven when Clifton and company stormed the gates, and he was by all accounts a terror in his own right at the time. He killed chickens, stole eggs, and lied; he punched, kicked, and generally bullied the kids around him. Though he was small, Job was the leader of the Small Boys, as they were called (boys from ages nine to fourteen), and he had an intensity that all small leaders share. He also had a quick tongue, a keen mind, and a fire within him that was impossible to ignore.
The first time Job and I were together, I was with Logan and the Small Boys, hiking through the jungle behind the Farm property. The boys all spoke excellent English, having been raised with the language and taught it in school, and they were chatting away about the dangers we might encounter on our walk.
“Elephants, we can see,” one boy said with a big grin.
“And snakes and tigers,” another boy said, as if promising me a treat.
With this in mind, I was on high alert when we came across two water buffalo standing directly in our path. Water buffalo are notoriously unpredictable; they can be stubborn, they have sharp horns, they often charge. These particular beasts also had long strands of drool that stretched from their mouths nearly to the ground, making them look far from intelligent and somehow more menacing. With small children in my care, I wondered how best to continue. Should we attempt to go around the animals? Should we turn back? But before I could make a move, Job leaped into action. He grabbed a stick off the ground and dashed forward, all seventy-five pounds of him.
“Ha! Haaa!” he shouted, waving the stick like a madman, slashing the air.
The water buffalo could easily have trampled him, gored him. But they didn’t. They ran as if their tails were on fire. And Job wasn’t content just to clear the path, either. He chased them off the trail and across a dry riverbed, shouting all the while, stopping only when they were well out of range, turning to scream triumphantly back at me like a fearless warrior at the end of a battle.
From that moment on, Job acted as my protector and loyal servant, though really it was just his over-the-top way of showing that he liked me. He gave up his seat whenever I entered a room, insisted I sit near a fan if it was hot, scrambled to find me an umbrella in the rain, loved to carry my camera bag, always gave me his mango at lunch, and positively refused any similar treatment from me. Quite honestly, it got to be a little much at times.
I walked down the stairs of our guesthouse one afternoon to find Job waiting for me, holding a long, wide palm branch that he immediately placed over my head. As always, he called me Uncle, the term of respect all Farm kids use for older male visitors.
“Good morning, Uncle,” he said. “Please. The sun mustn’t touch you.” As we walked, he held the palm branch so I was shaded, shuffling along beside me.
“I really don’t want you to do that, Job,” I said. “You’re my friend, not my slave.”
“Please, Uncle. The sun is hot. Just keep walking,” Job instructed.
I stopped walking and looked down at this earnest little kid who was carefully adjusting the shade between my face and the sun. “Job. I would like you to put that down, please,” I said.
Job refused. “Sorry, Uncle. Your safety is my top concern. I cannot place you in any danger.” He was joking, of course, but he was playing out this charade with total seriousness and a bodyguard’s intensity.
So I asked him: “What can I say to get you to put that down?”
And he said: “If you love me, put it down.”
So I said it. “If you love me, put it down.” And instantly, Job threw the branch as far away as his small arms could launch it.
“Get away from me!” he shouted in mock disgust at the discarded palm. “I will never touch you again in my life!”
Then Job turned to me, smiled, and hugged me around the waist in a death grip of affection. “Good morning, Uncle,” he said.
I watched him sometimes when he was moving around the Mission—barking orders, directing kids like a traffic cop—and I wondered where his intensity would take him. When I asked him one day what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said: a soldier.
“But not just a soldier, Uncle,” he went on. “What is the highest job for a soldier in America?”
I said, “I’m not sure. Maybe the Secretary of Defense.”
“He is rich, Uncle? This Secretary of the Defenses?”
I said, “Yeah. Probably pretty rich.”
“Then this is what I will be. I will be the Secretary of the Defenses in America and when I am, I will have guards that follow me and everyone will stand to see me and I will take my own helicopter and I will fly to your house and I will give you a job that will pay one lakh every year. You would like this job, Uncle?”
One lakh is 100,000 rupees, or about $2,250.
“Yes, Job,” I said. “I would like that very much.”
These were not the orphans I was expecting at all. They weren’t the hollowed-out castoffs who needed me to fill them up, not a bunch of statistics on a regrettable and overwhelming page. They were just children—happy children, for the most part, who poured their love into me day after day, filling me up as if I was the one who was empty.
We all gravitated toward certain kids at the beginning. Jackson was fast friends with many of the Older Girls, helping them out with their endless chores during the day, then attending sweaty Bollywood dance parties in their rooms before bed. Logan was an instant hit with the Small Boys, who idolized him as if he were one of the professional wrestlers on the dog-eared trading cards they loved so much. Traca was a constant source of love around the Farm, particularly for the youngest children in the nursery, who never left her open arms empty for long.
And I had Job.
I saw him in the courtyard after the ten o’clock tea break one day. He was wearing his school uniform: yellow shirt, green pants, green tie that was just a strip of plaid cloth on an elastic band. Happy children splashed in puddles all around him, but Job stood perfectly still, like an island, looking directly at me. At that moment, I was surrounded by other children, all wanting to be seen and held. But I excused myself and made my way to Job.
“What’s up, buddy?” I said. “How’s school going?”
“I am missing you today, Uncle,” he said.
Then he wrapped his arms around my waist. It wasn’t the dramatic act of a show-off. He didn’t move or speak. When I looked down at him, his eyes were closed. His clothes were still drenched from the torrential rains that morning, but he didn’t mind, and neither did I. I just stood there in the playground with him, closed my eyes, too, and listened to the children laughing all around us.