Ami Tomake Bhalobasi
I had a major "oh my goodness, I feel like a mom" moment the other day. As I was sweeping my apartment, I glanced up to find one of the boys bouncing a volleyball on the floor. Without thinking, I put my hand on my hip and said, "Timothy, you know the rule…no bouncing balls in the house. Take it outside if you want to play with it." At that moment, I fully registered what I had just said and then, glancing up in shock, busted out laughing. I had just spoken the exact words one of my parents would exclaim when my siblings and I would try to chuck a football or volleyball through the living room. As a kid, knowing how irritating it was to take our sports games outside instead of playing indoors, I silently vowed that I would definitely let my kids play sports in the house. Then here I was…ten years later…sounding exactly like my mom.
This experience has been one of many over the past couple of weeks, where I have caught myself using my own parents' communication techniques with the kids. I am in no way their mom, but there are so many children at this orphanage that the caretakers' jobs here, for the most part, don't extend past making sure the kids are alive. Further attention and love are usually left up to the missionaries to provide, and some kids (especially the girls) are so desperate for a motherly figure that I have found myself performing tasks that would typically fall under the parenting category. The other day a teenage girl asked me to feed her with my hands. At first, I was shocked by this request because I had never fed anyone with my hands before, let alone a full-on teenager. This girl explained that in Bangladesh, mothers hand-feed their babies and that she never had a mother to feed her this way as a child. Hand-feeding her was honestly one of the strangest experiences I've had here so far. Still, it was an eye-opener to the voids these older kids have in their hearts due to their needs not being fulfilled as a child. This vacancy in the kids' hearts from not having a firm motherly figure manifests itself through immaturity in the kids' actions, especially the older ones.
I came here expecting to play with sweet little kids all day because I prefer playing with younger kids over teenagers. However, I now understand why everyone says to "expect the unexpected" when taking an SM year because, ironically, the kids I hang out with the most are girls only a couple of years younger than me. And to be honest, I wouldn't describe these teenage girls as sweet. They are so much more than that. They are intelligent, assertive, and strong, which can appear pretty intimidating. These girls are also so fast; it's incredible! When we play tag, and they pick the student missionaries to be it, it's basically game over for us because it takes a million years to catch all of them. One of these girls' favorite games to play is let's see how many nicknames we can give the student missionaries. Although some of the names are brutal, they can honestly be quite funny. A select few that they've named me are snake eyes (because they aren't used to seeing people with light eyes), ghost (because I'm so white), fat (they call everyone fat), and stylish, even though I have absolutely no style in this country. These teenage girls do have a soft side to them too. Many of them didn't get held as babies, so they constantly want hugs and to hold my hand throughout the day.
These teenagers love the student missionaries that come and want so desperately to be loved back. However, because the kids don't know how to verbally express the desire in their hearts for support/attention, their desperation is masked behind their actions towards the student missionaries. Each kid has a different method of asking for attention, and I have realized that this is due to each child having a love language that they have been longing to fulfill their entire life. An accumulation of all the kids expressing their love languages can be overwhelming, and I've been struggling with trying to effectively meet the kids' attention needs.
A couple of the kids constantly give me gifts because they feel they will "win" my love by buying me little presents. (The number of hair clips I've accumulated that the girls have gifted me is pretty insane, lol). Some of the kids are very clingy and constantly need to be by my side. A couple of them continuously want to help me with my laundry because their love language is acts of service. Those whose love language seems to primarily be words of affirmation need the student missionaries to say "I love you" to them constantly. Also, of these kids who are more inclined to express their feelings verbally, many of them write notes to me, and I now have an entire section of my suitcase devoted to keeping all the little notes that I have collected.
While many of the kids are respectful in how they treat the student missionaries, a select few tend to resort to more obnoxious behavior to express their need for love. It is these kids that I've struggled dealing with the most here. For example, some girls resort to teasing me and taking my things as their way to get attention. One girl constantly pinches me and twists my ear, then laughs and proceeds to do it five minutes later. I've been slapped on the cheek before, used as the tug-of-war rope between girls, and have my hair yanked daily. Most recently, I had cake icing smothered all over my face, which was a 10/10 experience, especially since I was still in my sabbath clothes. If it were one of my siblings, I'd hit them right back. Yet, I obviously cannot do this, so instead, I've been grappling with an effective method of disciplining them that recognizes the underlying cause of their annoyances while conveying the idea that hitting me is unacceptable. For awhile, I was perplexed with how some kids could be so harsh in their treatment of the student missionaries when we have devoted this time of our lives to helping them. Then it struck me that I think the kids expressing the more irritating behavior have the love language of quality time. And since there are so many kids here fighting for my attention, these ones resort to almost violent measures so that they can get personal attention from me, even if it's in the form of me sitting them down and explaining to them that it's not ok when they hit or pinch me. Keeping this in mind, recently, I have made an effort to deliberately try to spend more time with the ones who disturb me the most because I know that deep down inside, they're desperate for love, and if I make more of an effort to spend individual time with them, they will cease using more painful methods to try and get my attention.
When the older girls aren't around, I hang out with the little ones, and wow, the small kids here are absolutely adorable. They haven't learned English yet, so to me, they all sound like the little minions from Despicable Me. We honestly live our best life when we hang out. Our favorite activities include coloring, giving high fives, playing nine square, and taking videos on my phone. The little girls also love to pick me flowers each morning on my way to class which is very sweet.
Recently I have been making more of an effort to hang out with the little boys here because there are significantly fewer boys compared to the girls, and so the girls can overpower them when it comes to competing for attention. Also, the student missionaries that come to Bangla Hope are female and end up spending the most time with all the girls here instead of the boys. These little boys are literally so cute and are also incredibly funny. One time when I was sitting next to the boys at worship, there happened to be tons of mosquitoes in the room that kept landing on the boys' heads, so I kept gently flicking them off. The boys saw what I was doing and began to look for them in their friends' heads to flick them off. Soon the gentle flicking off of the bugs escalated into all the boys full-on whacking their friends' heads every time they saw a bug. They thought it was hilarious. I tried to be the mature one and prevent them from partaking in this activity, but the sad thing is, to this day, my siblings and I unfortunately do the exact same thing when we see bugs on each other.
At night time, many of the kids will not go to bed until they hear the words "I love you" or, in Bangla, "Ami tomake bhalobasi" from one of the missionaries. As humans, it's very easy to get carried away with how loosely we use the word love, but when I tell these kids I love them, I want it to be genuine. I've been racking my brain trying to come up with a concrete definition for love, but the meaning is so ambiguous that it's nearly impossible to put one label on it. Then the other day, I was walking outside, and one of the little girls (her name is Janette) saw me from afar and came running as fast as she could toward me with a smile. Once Janette reached me, I scooped her up and rocked her in my arms as she silently laid her head on my shoulder. It was at this moment that I genuinely felt love for this little angel of a girl in my arms, and I realized that love doesn't always have to be a bold feeling. Often love is best shown in the little moments shared, and it takes some zooming in to discover the love that extends beyond the verbal assertion of it. I've realized that it is the moments such as me taking the time to record the kids' performances up front, braid hair, or even hand-feed them that I'm really saying, "Ami tomake bhalobasi." And I believe that this lesson extends beyond the gates of Bangla Hope. Sometimes it's necessary to hone in on the more minor day-to-day actions because often it's the habitual tendencies that, although often get overlooked, express love the best.
Here are a few big events that took place over the last couple of weeks!
PATHFINDER CAMPOREE
All year the kids spend time preparing for their annual pathfinder camporee. This year it was in a village about an hour away from the orphanage. This camporee consists of many marching drills, great food, singing, craft making, and hiking. And when I say hiking, I mean we literally woke up at 4:45 a.m. each morning to get our hikes in, so when it comes to exercise, these guys don't joke around. The kids slept in giant tents, and I slept in a different tent each night with the girls, which was fun. Friday night, we had a bonfire, and before they built a fire, I imagined us all sitting around the fire, singing songs and talking like we do in the US. Nope…everyone danced and sang as loud as they could around the campfire for hours, and it was honestly a fantastic experience. Saturday night, they had a talent show, and kids got all dressed up and performed all sorts of acts. Even the teachers participated, which was neat. This was by far the longest talent show I've ever been to, though. After an hour, I was expecting it to end, but this thing went on for over three hours. By the time it ended, half of the audience was asleep. However, the kids' performances were great, and I loved watching them. Overall, I really enjoyed the pathfinder experience and felt like I got closer to some kids that I usually didn't talk to on a daily basis.
HARVESTING RICE
Last week there was no school because they devoted the entire week to harvesting the many rice fields we have on the Bangla Hope campus. Because rice machinery is too expensive, their method of harvesting is to give each kid a giant knife and send them out to cut the rice stalks. Although there were no severe injuries, the kids frequently cut their fingers, so many band-aids were needed out in the fields. Harvesting rice is such a big part of the kids' life here that many of them don't realize that people in other countries don't partake in this activity. Some kids asked me how I harvested the rice at my home and what my technique was. I had to explain to them that in the US, most of our rice is shipped instead of grown within the country. Finally, understanding that I had no idea what I was doing, they showed me how to use the blade, and once I got the hang of it, it was super fun. After all the rice fields were cut, we tied the bundles and spent days carrying them to another site where they stored all the rice. It was an all-week-long process, but it was an amazing experience.
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