Reality Shaking

I have spent the last few days editing summaries of each girl’s background; each fills my heart with a heavy, desperate feeling. Most girls come from families who are too poor to even afford rice, let alone pay for any education. They know a world that I cannot even imagine, and I sit with them, wondering what secrets sustain them. Most of the time, the girls seem optimistic about their lives; they are getting educations, they are well-fed and clean, they have many friends. A lot of the time, these girls are just like my friends back home in Idaho. But there are always those sometimes, when the façade slips, and reality sneaks up and grabs them hard and shakes them until that fragile optimism breaks away.

But before I get all depressing, I want to tell you about Marta, the girl on the left in the picture. Marta is one of my favorites here (shhh! Don‘t tell!). She is eighteen years old, and she has pretty good English. When she was a young girl, her father abandoned her family, leaving her mother to try to provide for her and her siblings as best she could, which really wasn’t very well at all. But you would never guess Marta’s history from her personality now. She is almost always smiling and happy, and she seems happiest talking about boys. Marta loves boys. At one point, she had three boyfriends (her now ex-boyfriend was reclaimed by his ex-girlfriend). But she is very upfront about all of it, even with her boyfriends, and this accountability makes her very endearing.

One night the orphanage was invited to eat dinner at a warung in the area. A warung is a informal restaurant with low tables; you sit on the tiled floor and eat with your hands, but make no mistake, the food is still delicious. Low tables perched around fish pools and gardens, and we enjoyed rice and whole fish, separating meat and bones. But while treating the girls to something exciting and special, this outing also served as a reminder of everything that they do not have. Most of the girls have never eaten at a “real” restaurant that has waiters, a menu, tables, and chairs; they are learning how to be the waiters, the cooks. So even this special dinner to a warung, reminded them of the restaurant they cannot eat in, only serve at, the house they do not own and will only clean, the money they watch on TV but never hold.

And after what I thought was a glorious dinner, I sat next to Marta, and we talked about discotheques. She’s never been to one and wants to go. I’ve never been to one either, but for very different reasons, mostly lame excuses. Our conversation dwindled after I used the word “sketchy” too many times. In the silence, she leaned her head against my shoulder and asked, “Why?” She could have been asking any question, but I interpreted her why as “Why was I born into a life in which I am too poor to even live with my own family? Why does money have to determine how I can live and what I can and cannot do? Why can’t I go to a real restaurant, why can you come and live in an orphanage just for an experience while I have little choice? Why why why?” It was such a sad question that it brought back the feeling from every girl’s background summary and wrenched my heart out, and all I could say is that life is just not fair. A lame, ambiguous answer, but I felt like it answered all of the questions that she had attached to that one word.

I knew that I would be living with poverty before I came to Bali. But I only knew the word, I hadn’t seen the faces, visited the homes, heard the stories. Now, I know poverty well, or at least it’s victims, children with the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like their parents. Poverty really is a cycle, from one generation to the other, and one of the few ways to break the cycle is education. So when reality comes creeping back towards all of us, I just rely on education to help these girls break free from the poverty which defines all that they can and cannot have.