I took my camera into the poor neighborhoods of Santa Cruz. I told myself that I took pictures so I could share stories with others. Maybe, too, the act of photographing people and their surroundings made me feel safer, less awkward. To photograph gave me a purpose beyond mere curiosity.
I turned off the paved main streets onto narrow, muddy paths. The acrid smells of rotting trash and urine rose in the air as I wound my way through a maze of hovels where ragged clothes hung on sagging laundry lines.
Brown runoff trickled between the houses, bearing plastic bottles past discarded rags. If every crumpled plastic bag littering the ground had been a vegetable, it would have been a bountiful garden. It struck me that these people had so little, and yet trash seemed abundant.
I thought back to the evening I’d spent with Bruce Carl in that homeless shelter, about how strange it had felt to sit with those men and listen to their stories. Now, years later, I’d become more accustomed to squalor and deprivation, but Bruce’s challenge remained: to find a way to listen and to learn about the lives of others.
On either side of me, mud-caked walls and rusted corrugated steel roofs formed homes the size of one-car garages. Waved inside by an elderly woman, I entered one of the homes. I felt more like an intruder than an invited guest.
Inside, I saw an immaculate dirt floor. A sheet hung from the metal roof to divide the cramped space into two rooms. On one side of the sheet, well-worn blankets provided a bed. Farther back sat a small iron stove for cooking. A small crucifix stood tacked to the wall above the stove, and an image of the Virgin Mary presided over the door frame. Outside, kids ran barefoot, splashing through puddles of standing water.
When the children turned to me, I saw bright smiles under lazy eyes. I saw elbows and knees with open sores. I knew that the kids ate what their caretakers scrounged for them or whatever they could steal or buy with a day’s earnings from working on the street. Throughout Bolivia, kids without access to clean water and sanitation died needlessly from malaria, hepatitis A, and toxic chemicals in polluted water. I also knew these children lacked access to even the most basic health care to set a broken bone or kill intestinal parasites.
Back on the streets, I passed packs of boys shining shoes, and a little girl—maybe eight years old—selling gum from a box that hung from a strap over her shoulders.
“¿Chiclé?” she asked.
I bought the gum and kept walking.
At night I would go with a group of Americans who gathered in the city, sang songs to embolden their spirits, and then walked down the small dirt paths to where children of the street lived. They brought with them bandages, hot tea, and bread.
We saw children lounging together in packs—their arms draped over each other, glue bottles in their hands. A boy stood next to a Dumpster reading a newspaper, casually lifting a bottle of glue to his nose with his free hand. The children drank the tea and accepted the bread. I had expected them to be voracious, but they chewed slowly, their eyes darting left and right as they ate. Most of them were high.
The volunteers bandaged wounds, using rubbing alcohol to clear away layers of grime. They replaced brown rotten bandages with fresh white ones that seemed to glow against the children’s unwashed limbs. Sometimes the kids responded when we handed them tea, and some smiled at my camera, but I’d never walked among children like these, children who seemed so much like zombies, their brains wrecked by drugs, the light of their spirits barely flickering under years of daily pain and abuse.
As I walked home one night, I found myself breathing shallowly in and out of my nose like I was preparing to fight. My body felt tense.
What’s the matter with me?
At first I thought I was angry about the street children, angry about their plights. But I soon realized that my anger was selfish. I wanted to see—as I had in Croatia and Rwanda—cause for hope. I wanted to believe that the situations of these children could be improved, their lives saved, their wounds healed.
But on these streets, I found little to hope for. Many of these kids were too far gone. Drugs had rotted their brains, and a dozen or more years of bad habits locked them into cycles of misery and addiction. Miracles were possible, but it seemed that only a miracle could help kids in this corner of the world.
In the Mano Amiga home, though, it felt different.
“Here,” Caroline explained at the beginning of a lesson, “we teach art—music, painting and sculpture, and dance.”
Eddie ran by, holding a paper plate that had been glued with construction-paper arms and legs and a head to make a monkey—his favorite animal.
“Why do you teach so much art?” I asked. “Why not just basic reading and writing? Or math?” I loved the arts and loved seeing these kids work so earnestly on their crafts, but when I remembered the squalor outside, it felt smarter and more practical to give them skills they could convert into productive lives.
“I want them to see that there are beautiful things in the world,” she told me. “And that they can create them.”
Kids like Adolpho and Eddie were incredibly intelligent. Some had survived for years on the streets, and I often saw in their narrowed gazes an emotional maturity that far exceeded that of most American children. Yet these kids had never had someone who believed in them enough, loved them enough, to teach them that they had value, that they could create beautiful things in the world. They had never learned what they were capable of. Until now. It was a small spark of hope.