Behind the Walls

Photo by J. Malcolm Garcia

Behind the Walls

J. Malcolm Garcia

        Seventeen orphans died the year Hogar de la Casa Corazon de la Misericordia (Home of the Heart of Mercy) opened in 1995. Nothing its founder, Sister Sandau Izabele Hernandez, could do. The children were too sick with HIV/AIDS when they arrived. She drove them to a private clinic for medicine but it was too late.
        In that sad time, Sister Sandau buried the children in plots in the public cemetery for the unidentified dead. The children had names but were unwanted and they had died of a terrifying disease. That put them on par with people whose names no one knew or cared to learn: gang members, victims of gangs, drug addicts, and homeless people.
        The cemetery stood on the south side of the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, about a 30-minute drive from the orphanage. Gangs controlled the neighborhood. Sister Sandau would visit the graves before nightfall.

 

        Over the years, attitudes changed. In 2010, the Ministry of Health began an HIV/AIDS program at the public hospital. Now, the orphanage’s twenty-five children have their blood tested every two months, no charge. Every one of them is HIV-positive but healthy.
        Also in 2010, a private cemetery donated 200 plots to the orphanage. It provides a sense of family, Sister Sandau believes, to know she can bury the children together rather than scatter them among the unclaimed, unnamed, and unwanted bodies of the public cemetery. Of course, she does not want to see any more deaths.
        She will never forget one boy, Angel. He was eighteen months old when he arrived at the orphanage, abandoned by his family because he was HIV positive. He loved nature and animals, especially cows. He was very affectionate. Whenever he walked outside, he’d pick flowers. “Here you are,” he would say to Sister Sandau, and give her a daisy.
        He got so sick his doctor decided he could no longer help him. “Remove Angel from the hospital,” the doctor said. “There is nothing more I can do.”
        “Tell us what you want to eat,” Sister Sandau told Angel as she drove him back to the orphanage. “You can have whatever you like, no restrictions.” Angel prepared a menu every day and Sister Sandau and her colleague, laywoman Maria Laura Donaire, fulfilled his every whim: Ice cream, spaghetti, watermelon, hamburgers, anything he wanted.
        Angel lasted two months. When he understood he was dying, he became very afraid and wept throughout the day. He was just a child. What did heaven mean to him? He fought for each breath. “Go,” Sister Sandau told him. “Don’t worry. Let yourself go.” He’d stop breathing, rally and come back gasping for air. He looked terrified. He looked like someone drowning. Sister Sandau held his hands. He struggled to live. Then one afternoon he let go for the final time. He was nine.
        “I still feel his fingers around my own,” Sister Sandau tells me.

 

        Sister Sandau is 48. She grew up with both her parents, but they worked, and as a child she was often left alone. She and her older brother would have long talks. “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to gather all the lonely children in the world in one place?” she’d ask him.
        At 16, she joined the Sisters of Mercy, drawn to the order because of its work with orphans. As a novice, she volunteered in hospitals and earned a nursing degree. When the HIV/AIDS crisis broke out in Honduras in the mid-1980s, she noticed an increase in abandoned children exiled to the street because of their disease. Sister Sandau helped out at a house for HIV/AIDS-afflicted children. She realized one house could not provide for all the HIV children in need. With the support of the Sisters of Mercy, Sister Sandau raised money to open Hogar de la Casa Corazon de la Misericordia.

 

        Like the children in her care, Sister Sandau knows loss. Her younger brother was strangled and shot in 2009. He was driving a bus and some men, presumably gang members, stopped him and kidnapped him. His tortured body was found later that day on the street. Sister Sandau has no idea why gangs would target him. Perhaps he refused to pay an extortion fee.
        A year later, Sister Sandau’s sister was kidnapped. She has not been seen since. Sister Sandau cares for her sister’s daughter, now six.

 

        Gangs have made Honduras one of the world’s deadliest nations. It is estimated that about 23,000 gang members are involved in turf wars and almost daily shoot-outs with police. Sixty percent of the country’s gang members are concentrated in San Pedro Sula. Within the city, gang allegiance is split fairly evenly: about 51 percent of gang members, some 1,034, belong to Mara Salvatrucha, known as MS, while the remaining 1,001 form part of another gang, Barrio 18. The capital Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula have the highest murder rates in the world outside a war zone.

 

        I arrived in Honduras to interview Sister Sandau in June 2016 as a freelance journalist for The National Catholic Reporter. On my first night in San Pedro Sula, I ate dinner in an all but empty Chinese restaurant across the street from my hotel.
        In the morning, the desk clerk warned me against taking a bus to Hogar de la Casa Corazon de la Misericordia. As an American, I would stand out, she said, and attract the attention of gangs. She recommended a cab driver she knew, Juan Carlos Diaz.
        Juan Carlos pulled up in a small white car about an hour later. He was crisply dressed in slacks and a polo shirt. He knew the orphanage. A very good lady, he said of Sister Sandau. He asked if I’d had a pleasant night. I said I had and mentioned how so few people were in the Chinese restaurant.
        “What time did you go?”
        “I don’t know. About six.”
        “That explains it.”
        Cab drivers like himself, Juan Carlos said, pay a daily fee to taxi companies for the use of their cars. They usually earn enough money before noon to cover the fee. Whatever fares result afterward the drivers keep. Gangs know that by five or six drivers have a lot of cash. Most cabs stop operating before then to avoid being robbed. People who rely on them finish their business early, too.
        “In San Pedro Sula, the restaurants are empty at night,” Juan Carlos said. “HIV is not the only thing that kills here.”
        MS demands a weekly payment of an $85 “war tax” from cab drivers. Most drivers establish savings accounts to cover medical bills should they be shot. The money also goes toward a “holiday tax” of nearly $200 the gangs charge the week before Christmas.
        Juan Carlos has not had trouble with gangs. Every afternoon after work, he drives home using a different route so gangs can’t anticipate his routine. He calls his wife and tells her he is on his way. She watches for him, raising the garage door at the exact moment he pulls into the driveway so he does not need to stop, get out of his car and open the door himself. That would take too much time. He doesn’t know who might have followed him.
        In 2012, before he began driving a cab, Juan Carlos owned a small clothing business. Two members of MS approached him one morning when he dropped his two daughters off at elementary school.
        “You have a house,” they told him. “You want to keep it?”
        They demanded an eighty-five dollar “initiation” fee followed by weekly payments of fifteen dollars.
        They were children, Juan Carlos said, of the two gang members who extorted him. Fourteen, fifteen years old at most. They rode bicycles. Of course, they had been sent by someone else. Older but not much older. The principal knew the boys. They used to be students but dropped out. They had asked the principal about Juan Carlos. The principal told them when Juan Carlos drove his daughters to school. It was tell them or get shot.
        Juan Carlos knew a boy who attended parochial school. He belonged to MS. His mother asked Juan Carlos to pray for him. He’s with the wrong crowd, she said. He disappeared and a while later the police found his body. He died when he tried to collect money in Barrio 18’s turf. Eighteen years old.
        Gangs often approach families and demand a child, a daughter most often, to use in the induction of new gang members. If a family refuses, they will be killed and their daughter kidnapped. Juan Carlos worries about his oldest girl. She is 11, almost a teenager. The young men of MS may notice her.
        One man Juan Carlos knows lost his thirteen-year-old daughter to MS. A handyman. He used to help around the house. Then he stopped dropping by. Two weeks later he returned. He looked awful, haggard and unshaven. MS had taken his daughter, he said. When they finished with her, they sent him a message. Come pick up your girl. She was dead. In pieces. The handyman wept. “My girl torn apart,” he said. “My girl torn apart.”
        He showed Juan Carlos a photograph of her before her death.
        “Attractive girl,” Juan Carlos said.

 

        “Gangs have always been a problem,” Maria Laura Donaire tells me.
        She prefers her middle name and asks me to call her Laura. She has worked at the orphanage since it opened. She volunteered at another HIV home for children years before and it was there she met Sister Sandau. Sister Sandau told her she was starting her own orphanage and offered her a job.
        “The children know all about violence,” Laura continues. “They’ll come back from school and say, ‘On the bus we looked out the window and saw a dead guy.’ Or, ‘We saw someone shot.’ Or, ‘We heard a man was found dead on the street.’ It’s the talk of the day.”
        Despite the problems they pose, Laura believes the gangs respect the orphanage. Perhaps they know someone sick with HIV/AIDS. Perhaps they are afraid they’ll get ill if they come too close. Whatever the case, gangs have never attempted to break in.
        Not long after Laura started at Hogar de la Casa Corazon de la Misericordia, Sister Sandau noticed that the orphans sometimes returned home from school depressed, especially around the holidays. Their teacher might say, “Make a card for Mother’s Day.” Who would the orphans make cards for? They needed, Sister Sandau realized, a parent. She told Laura to attend all school and sporting events, help the children with their homework, and to take them shopping.
        Do all the things a mother would do, Sister Sandau said. You will be their mother.
        For more than twenty years, Laura has filled that role. She has seen children come and go. One girl, Alva, about twenty, works as an accountant and attends college. She visits often. She still calls Laura mother. Another boy, Milton, moved out at thirteen. He works at a gas station and has an apartment. He also visits every week.
        “Momma!” he shouts when he sees Laura.
        When she takes the children shopping, a fruit vendor always stops her.
        “Are all these boys and girls yours? Really?”
        “Yes,” she says, “all mine.“
        She has to be careful where she and the children go. Gangs operate at the entrances of every district. A boy will hold a banner of MS or Barrio 18. The “scout” notifies the gang by cell phone of unfamiliar cars entering their turf. Laura and the children take buses. So far, the gangs have taken no notice of a middle-aged woman with a half-dozen boys and girls.
        Laura insists she has no favorites among the children. However, she admits a few of them have stolen her heart. One boy, Michael, was so small and undernourished when she first saw him, she didn’t think he’d survive. His mother abandoned him to his grandfather. His grandfather didn’t know what to do with him and turned him over to the orphanage. He had a skin infection from not being bathed. He drank one ounce of milk at a time.
        A year later, when his grandfather visited, Michael didn’t recognize him. The grandfather took Michael from Laura and held him, and Michael cried and the grandfather got very angry. He did not understand the bond between Laura and the children.
        Michael is nine now and doing very well. Too well. He is the most mischievous boy, Laura says. He has problems at school. He doesn’t pay attention. He doesn’t study. He’ll say he’s doing homework, and when Laura looks in his folder, she sees only blank paper.
        Then there’s Kenia and Johnny. They had no birth certificates, nothing to identify them. Laura approached the mayor of Comayagua, her home town, and explained the situation. He allowed her to register them under her name, Donaire. Laura told him that although they were not her biological children, they were children of her heart.
        Johnny had been abandoned by his family. He was very affectionate. He could not walk until he was five. He would fall asleep in school. Kenia would wait for him until he woke up and they’d leave class together.
        Laura met Kenia’s mother when she brought Kenia to the orphanage. Her mother was very straightforward. She worked as a maid and had to support three children and felt she could not afford Kenia. She said she’d turn over her other children, too, but never did. She visited Kenia twice, and then Laura didn’t see her again for three years. They ran into one another on the street one day and Kenia’s mother invited Laura to lunch and asked about Kenia. She said she had not been by to visit because she was sick and busy with work. She needed stomach surgery. “I know my girl is in the best hands,” she told Laura.
        Laura never heard from her again.
        “Kenia is doing so well,” Laura says. She is twenty and will leave soon. The children can stay at the orphanage as long as they want providing they attend school. When Kenia finishes her studies at the University of San Pedro Sula, she will move out like Alva, the accountant.
        One boy’s mother visited him a year after she gave him up. She appeared very weak and seemed very cold toward her son. Maybe because she had no energy. Her son was too small to recognize her. She got very ill after she left. Two of her sisters asked if they could take the boy to visit her. She was dying, they said, but the orphanage did not have permission from the courts to release him to the family, even temporarily. Laura shot a video of the baby instead and gave it to them. The mother’s sisters showed her the video and then she died. For a long time after her death, the boy called, “Anna, Anna.” Perhaps that was his mother’s name. Or maybe he was calling, “Momma, Momma.” Did he sense she had died? Laura doesn’t know.
        No child has challenged Laura. No child has said, “You’re not my mother.” The other children tell new arrivals that this place is their new home. And in this home, we call Laura mom.
        Sometimes, while the children attend school, Laura contemplates a mural of a tree on a wall near the kitchen. The leaves of the tree hold the names of deceased orphans. One leaf holds Johnny’s name. Another, Angel’s.
        Their deaths were so sad. Laura was very attached to them and to a six-month-old girl who also died. Laura and Sister Sandau went to the hospital to help care for her at the request of her doctor.
        “Look after this girl,” the doctor said. “She is very sick with HIV. Her mother died. We have too many patients for our nurses.”
        The girl recovered but then got worse.
        Laura held her, sang her lullabies. The girl sought Laura’s breasts for milk. Laura tried to feed her with a bottle, but the girl rejected it. Her last night, the child appeared to be in agony. Laura told her, “Let go. You’ll be in a better place. Your mother is calling you and you need to be with her.” The girl was in pain a long time. Tiny, little thing. Laura thinks the girl knew her mother was gone and was looking for her. So Laura repeated, “Let go. Your mother is calling,” and the girl died.

 

        Kenia has lived at the orphanage longer than the other children. Many of the girls come to her for advice. Eleven-year-old Dulce Rodriguez often speaks to Kenia. Dulce’s grandmother brought her when she was four. Her grandmother told her, “This is your new home.” After her first day, Dulce adjusted. She felt OK but she still missed her grandmother. Her grandmother visits twice a year. Dulce knows little about her mother. She died in childbirth. Her name was Gladys Maribel Castillo Hernandez. Dulce knows nothing more.
        “Maybe that is all you need to know,” Kenia told her.
        Although she never knew her mother, Kenia feels proud of her. Laura told her she was very brave and hard working. That she loved Kenia very much. In moments of solitude, Kenia thinks about her mother and wonders what happened to her. Is she alive? Is she OK? Laura has told her that she looks just like her mother. Kenia does not know how to imagine this. When she observes herself in a mirror she does not see her mother. Only herself.
        Over the years, Kenia has seen many children leave. Some were adopted. Others rejoined their families. One girl dropped out of school and ran away. It’s sad to see them go. Her best friend left to live with her family. They’ve known each other since infancy. Kenia hears from her from time to time.
        When she was six years old, Kenia became friends with Johnny. One day at school some children didn’t want to be around them. They said they were sick. Kenia told Laura.
        “Tell them they don’t need to be afraid because you take medicine,” Laura said.
        Another day after school, Johnny wet himself. He needed a diaper. Kenia changed him and calmed him down. That was a long time ago. It was the first time she had helped someone. No one asked her to change him. She just did it. She remembers when he died. He was sick and crying and then one afternoon he stopped crying, stopped breathing. He was nine.
        Kenia plans to be a journalist and cover health issues. She wants to live by herself for a while and be independent. It feels odd to think that one day she will leave the orphanage and Laura will no longer be there to remind her to take her medicine, eat the right foods, avoid the influences of gangs. She does not need to be reminded, but Laura can’t stop being a mother. Kenia understands. She imagines her own mother would behave the same way.

 

        At night, I follow Sister Sandau through the orphanage as she does a security check. She stops at the front gate. Locked.
        Interior corridors connect the orphanage’s three buildings so no one has to walk outside and risk confronting a gang. She looks up, squinting through her glasses at the concertina wire stretched along the top of the walls.
        While the gangs have never approached the orphanage, they have stopped some of the children at school and offered them candy, snacks, anything to lure them into their orbit. Sister Sandau doesn’t know what she’d do if a gang member confronted her. Call the police? No, gangs pay off the police. The police are so corrupt, what good would it do to call them?
        In March 2016, just three months before my arrival, internationally renowned Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres was murdered. News reports found that a former soldier with the U.S.-trained Special Forces units of the Honduran military had included Caceres’ name on a hit list months before her assassination.
        “If the government can kill Berta, then no one is safe,” Sister Sandau says. She does not want to be shot but it might happen. Look at her brother, her sister. Look at Berta. How long will Sister Sandau live? In Honduras, who can say? Only God knows.
        If she had her choice, Sister Sandau would work only with newborns. Infants are a blank slate. Older children come to the orphanage distressed. They’ve lost their family, friends, and home. Relatives rarely if ever visit them. They scare Sister Sandau with what little they know. They drink bath water as they would bottled water. They don’t think to change their clothes. They speak in slang. Long before they came here, they had been denied a proper upbringing.
        Some of the children return to their families. These reunions do not always work. One time, a mother wanted to regain custody of her son, but the courts turned her down and placed the boy in Hogar de la Casa Corazon de la Misericordia. Over time, an uncle arranged to care for the boy and the orphanage released him. The uncle returned the boy to his mother. Months later, the mother was shot. Sister Sandau does not know what happened to the boy.

 
        Sister Sandau looks in on the dormitory for preteens. There thirteen-year-old David Ulloa sleeps. He has been at the orphanage since he was two months old. Sometimes, his grandmother and aunt visit. They haven’t come by for a while now. He knows nothing about his parents. His mother died giving birth to him.
        At first, when Sister Sandau told him he was HIV-positive, he didn’t understand. He didn’t believe he was sick. He seems to understand now. It scares him. “Can I live a normal life?” he asks. “Will I ever leave here?” He feels fine, yet he knows the virus could kill him. Sister Sandau tells him, “As long as you take your medicine, you’ll be fine.” Still, his eyes tell her he is afraid.
        Two of David’s close friends, Carlos and Carla, left the orphanage to live with their grandmothers. David misses them. He told Sister Sandau he feels their absence. Like ghosts. They are here but gone.
        Sister Sandau glances in a dorm for children fifteen and older. Here Rebecca Pineda sleeps. She’s twenty. She has been at the orphanage since she was five. Some aunts visit her once a year, no one else. Her mother died years ago. Sister Sandau has no idea about her father.
        Rebecca told Sister Sandau that she worries about leaving, about facing the world alone. Something may happen. She may get hurt. People get killed.         “I’ll miss the love I get here,” Rebecca said.

 

        Sister Sandau finishes her rounds by looking in on her niece. Sound asleep. In the morning, she will attend the public school with the other children. Like many of them, she does not remember her mother although Sister Sandau talks about her all the time. Perhaps one day this information will feel like memories. To the girl’s questions about what happened to her mother, Sister Sandau can only say, “God called her away.” Sometimes Sister Sandau dreams of her brother and sister. They come to visit the orphanage. They wait outside for the gate to open, then disappear.
        Sister Sandau kisses her niece on her forehead. Hours from now, the sun will rise and with it the possibility of new orphans. Sister Sandau gets very little notice. The police or a family just show up with a child. Some of the children will be older, others mere toddlers. Sister Sandau will embrace them all. They will call Laura mother and will look to Kenia as they would an older sister. They will live and grow behind the walls, spared for now the troubles outside.