Me and Rene
Rene is beautiful. Big brown eyes with long eyelashes. 10 years old and can dance like you wouldn’t believe. He and his brother, Marcelo, came to Puerto Alegria after a neighbor kept finding them unsupervised in their house for weeks at a time.
It was close to the time that we (the team) would be leaving Puerto Alegria. I was giving my last Bible lesson and the boys were absolutely horrible. Teaching former street children is hard enough in itself. But this day was especially hard. And Rene’s behavior was one of the worst. By the end of the class, he was laying on the floor in defiance.
I pulled him up off of the floor. He wouldn’t look at me, his body limp in defiance and defeat. I sat him next to me on the bench and put my arms around him. I told him that I loved him and that there was nothing that he could do that would make me not love him. I told him that God loved him in the same way, but so much more. Still not looking at me, he put his arms around me and laid in my lap. He stayed there for a good while.
These boys experience loneliness that is beyond what I or most people can imagine. As Willy (the in-house disciplinarian) shared with me, the nights are the worst. They go to sleep with no one to tuck them in. No one to remind them to brush their teeth. No one to make sure they have clean pajamas and a teddy bear. They go to sleep lonely and wake up lonely. There are days that the loneliness turns into an anger that they carry with them throughout the day. I think this day was one of those, perhaps exasperated by the knowledge that we were soon to be leaving.
When I try to imagine the loneliness they feel, I become thankful for my own times of loneliness. Not only does it give me a bit of an understanding of what they feel, but it is also a vehicle for God to communicate his ever-present message: I am enough for you, Kate. And the more I learn this, the more I am able to believe it for them. I am not there to wrap my arms around them and to tell them that they are loved. But God is. And He is enough.
PS–He wears that thing on his head because he INSISTED that I give him a haircut instead of the worker there who usually cuts their hair. He regretted it for the rest of the week. 
