FARM LIFE WAS SO ACTIVE, WITH SO MANY SEPARATE DEMANDS FOR OUR individual attention, that my family and I usually split up during the day and focused on the people and activities that most appealed to each of us.
Aside from helping out wherever and whenever she was needed (doing dishes, washing clothes in the laundry, baking bread), Traca’s pet project on the Farm was yoga. In the West, yoga is a relatively new phenomenon, a trendy fitness alternative complete with designer clothing labels and recycled earth-friendly mats. But India is yoga’s birthplace, with roots that go back five thousand years or more. It was created as a spiritual practice, a way to open the body and still the mind in preparation for meditation and, ultimately, enlightenment. For a long-term practitioner like Traca, a trip to India was nothing short of a pilgrimage, and in her spare time, she scoured the Internet, hoping to find the perfect ashram for an authentic Indian yoga retreat. She also shared her passion with the orphanage, introducing yoga to a pocket of India that found it either comical or, in some cases, blasphemous.
After purchasing some yoga mats in a nearby market, an item so rarely requested that they had to be imported by a local shopkeeper from a contact in Nepal, Traca led a daily beginners’ class in the Small Girls’ courtyard. Each day before dinner, young children, older staff women, and an assortment of Farm girls came to stretch, laugh, and—well, mostly laugh. All the strange poses were pure comedy for most of those in attendance, and while there wasn’t a lot of enlightenment going on that I could see, Traca didn’t mind at all.
“I’m just planting seeds,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”
Her efforts did manage to attract the attention of a guest preacher who stopped by the Farm one Sunday morning. The man was in his late twenties, Indian, wearing a carefully pressed shirt, a perfectly cinched tie, and a fresh convert’s zeal. Though the impromptu chapel at the back of the dining hall was hot and the preacher was visibly sweating, it didn’t stop him from tossing a bit of fire and a dash of brimstone on the seeds Traca had been planting.
“Some people may try to bring yoga to you,” he warned, staring directly at me. “But beware! This is the first step toward the Devil!” I’m sure he feared some kind of nefarious Hindu infiltration, but that was never Traca’s intention. She was just trying to share some of the joy yoga had given to her, a joy that positively bubbled out of her at the Farm. I’d often see her walking slowly across the grounds, holding a child’s hand in each of hers, with many eager hand-holders following in her wake. At these times, she seemed to be perfectly at home, at peace—and she said she felt it, too. “I could run an orphanage,” she confessed to me one night, almost wistfully. “I get this.”
Unfortunately, not everyone in the family felt so settled at the Farm, at least not at first.
Logan and Jackson led their own lives at the orphanage: making friends, helping out, playing games with the Small Boys and Girls. And though it all might have looked harmonious to a casual observer, I know it wasn’t always easy for them.
Logan’s biggest hurdle was the Older Girls. Coming from Thailand, where girls his age essentially bowed at his feet, swooned over his every antic, and openly adored him for simply being white and alive (and cute, no doubt), the Farm girls were a tougher crowd. For one thing, they spoke excellent English, so relationships based on mere swooning and fawning were—much to Logan’s dismay—no longer necessary or available. The Older Girls were also, in spite of their Farm isolation, more worldly and complex than their Thai sisters. Perhaps as a result of being abandoned, many of them abused, they were no pushovers and initially they teased Logan as he had never been teased before.
“Hi, Shy Boy,” they would say. Or “Good morning, Shy Boy.” Or, the double whammy, “Why are you so shy, Shy Boy?”
At first, Logan didn’t know how to handle them. He’d push back when he was teased, trying too hard to prove them wrong. But acting bold when you’re not really feeling it was a posture the Older Girls saw right through.
“Shy Boy. Shy Boy. Shy Boy!” they hounded, driving Logan deeper into his shell.
“Are you enjoying the Shy Boy game?” I asked him one afternoon when I found him hunkered down in his room in the middle of the day.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, looking up from a book. “I think it’s nice.” And by “nice” I could tell that he meant “terrible.”
On the opposite side of the shy scale, Jackson struggled through a few obstacles of her own, most of them involving a seventeen-year-old girl named Jeevana. What Jack had done to piss Jeevana off was a mystery.
“Maybe it’s the way Jackson rolled out chapatis?” one of the Older Girls speculated after Jack helped out in the kitchen one day and Jeevana rudely rejected every flattened ball of dough Jackson offered her.
I didn’t think that was it. In fact, the more Jeevana huffed around, ignoring Jackson’s repeated requests to talk, the more I thought the cause of the rift was something much deeper, some intangible insult that Jackson represented more than anything she had actually done.
I often wondered what we looked like to the children on the Farm. On one level that was both true and false, we probably looked rich. Though we had taken out a loan to finance our trip, the Farm kids knew and cared nothing about home equity lines of credit or mortgage refinancing. With our stories of other countries, our American roots, our freedom and resources to come and go, we must have appeared to be privileged beyond measure—and I suppose we were. On another level that was probably even more powerful, we were a family—the one thing every orphaned or abandoned child yearns for and by definition does not have. As father, mother, son, and daughter, I wondered if we shimmered like some dream come true as we strolled across the grounds. Maybe we reminded Jeevana of the family she’d lost, the daughter she would never be, the father and mother she would never have.
Or maybe she just liked a bit of drama.
As it is for high school girls the world over, drama was the juice—along with lip gloss and talk about boys—that kept the days on the Farm interesting. As far as Jackson was concerned, the drama meter spiked as her fifteenth birthday approached. Jeevana said she was not going to attend the party, and she repeated this to me every time we met as if I had zero short-term memory. Then, for no apparent reason, another Older Girl, Vari, jumped on the birthday boycott, proclaiming that she, too, was staying in her room on the night of the big bash. I asked the girls about this but they wouldn’t answer. Whether they had a legitimate gripe with Jackson or they just enjoyed the power their refusal gave them, I never did find out.
Thankfully, the vast majority of girls were excited about the party and—on their own—got to work: making a Happy B-Day banner, baking a cake, assembling snacks and gifts, and creating what I’m sure will go down as the most memorable birthday celebration of Jackson’s young life.
My personal favorite part of the party was the way Traca and I were treated. Rather than relegating Mom and Dad to some place at the back of the room or banishing us entirely from the festivities, as would happen at most American parties, the Older Girls set two extra seats at the head table. Jackson sat beside April (a Farm girl with the same birthday), and Traca and I sat on either side of them like honored guests. Leave it to orphans to know how to treat parents.
Like most birthday parties, this one had singing and presents and plates of food—though there was also end-of-the-world rain falling outside and a bat circling the room looking for insects and a way out. To make things even more interesting, as soon as I took my first bite of cake, the lights went off. This was a fairly typical occurrence. Most days, multiple times per day, the power would simply stop. Sometimes it was off for only a few minutes, sometimes for hours. In the heat of the day, no power made you appreciate the fan that had been spinning above your now-sweating head. In the sweltering night, an outage made sleeping all but impossible. At the party, it plunged us into total darkness. The space filled with the shrieks of the girls, and everyone moved to the exit, where a generator light was still shining.
What followed was the kind of party event that you simply cannot plan.
One by one, the kids ran out into the rain. Water from the roof drain came down like a fire hose and Logan took it on the head, grabbing girls around him and pulling them into the deluge. He looked so happy, so alive. Beside him, Jackson danced in the deafening downpour, splashing in shin-deep puddles. Traca and I were standing off to the side, dry beneath a protective overhang, when Jeevana and Vari walked past us. I wondered if the two of them, the only birthday party holdouts, had come to make some further protest … but they hadn’t. After a brief stubborn pause, they raced into the rain with the others, hugging their sopping friends, hugging Jackson, all of them laughing directly into the monsoon’s face. Whatever magic was in the air, it washed all lingering drama away for good.
Logan won the Older Girls over that night as well, not by being brash and bold, just by being himself. “We’ve cured him of his shyness,” one of his worst tormenters said to me the next day, and perhaps they did help a bit. Either way, Logan definitely made an impression. Three of the Older Girls told me privately that they were in love with him. One even had a dream that she married him and they had twin baby girls. Another, who was only thirteen, worried that she was too young for him.
“Not a problem,” I told her. “When Logan’s twenty-four and he comes back here, you’ll be twenty. That’ll be fine.”
She laughed, but her smile showed a bit of relief as well.