Meeting Maicol

In ten years of sponsoring Compassion kids and writing letters and sending pictures and praying for them, I’ve never actually met my child. Until today. Today we drove to a small village on a sugar cane plantation an hour or so from Santa Domingo.

The homes were ramshackle and small, with peeling paint, patchwork boards, and rusty metal. The project was mostly quiet– we were arriving during school time. But here and there people sat in white plastic chairs under palm trees, staring at us as we drove up.

First on the agenda we visited the children in their classes. The preschool class was just adorable. Just look at these little faces!

We had fun asking the kids questions about their school, listening as they sang to us (at eardrum-popping levels), singing ‘Deep and Wide’ with them, and even doing the chicken dance.  (OK, must confess –  I am not so much in love with the chicken dance.  But Melanie and the kids had a blast at it.) In another room we sang the ABC song in English, and the kids countered with a cute  A-E-I-O-U song in Spanish.  When class visits were done, Steve, Melanie, Jennifer and I grabbed our gift bags out of the van and then headed to meet our kids.

My little Maicol (pronounced Michael) is eight years old and is just learning how to read.  One of the first things I showed him was a letter that my 10 year old son had written him.   He listened as the translator read the letter to him.  Then, utterly engrossed, he painstakingly sounded out the letter for himself.

Eventually we looked at the pictures, and his new soccer ball, and his new shirt.  But I think that the two biggest treasures to him in that backpack were the letter from my son, and the handful of suckers that I had tossed in at the last minute.

After the initial meeting we headed for my little guy’s home to visit with his grandmother.  She was an exuberant elderly Haitian lady, pouring sweat on this brilliantly hot day, and exclaiming to me excitedly in Creole. Thankfully our wonderful translator Augustin turned out to know a little French along with his English and Spanish, and we limped through our meeting with at least some level of understanding.  Amazingly enough, this woman is the mother of 10 children.  What are the chances that the guardian of my sponsored child would be a mother of ten, just like me?

When the grandmother was asked what she hoped for her grandson, she pulled him over to her and asked him to answer the question.  To be a baseball player was his answer. Proudly displayed on the wall of her house were high school diplomas from two of her children.  I hope that with his strong interest in reading that little Maicol will do well in school and be able to graduate from high school as well.

During the rest of the day, as we visited other areas of the little village, ate lunch, attended a school presentation, and took pictures of the children, my little Maicol bopped back and forth between me and his playmates.  He’d run off to play for a few minutes, then come back to check and see if I was still there.

He sat on my lap or next to me during the school presentation, wore my watch for several hours, and talked me out of my camera at least different five times.  By the time I left, he knew how to zoom in and out, turn off and on the camera, and toggle back and forth from picture mode to view mode.  Smart kid.

It was really hard for me to say goodbye to him, not knowing if I’d see him again in person.   One thing that visiting my child did, though, was to make me resolve to write him often.  He’s old enough to remember my visit.  But that is not the only impression I want to make on his life.

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–If you would like to sponsor a child, click on the Compassion graphic in my sidebar. 

–If you’d like to see more wonderful pictures from the trip (most from Keely), check out Compassion’s Flickr stream and click on the Dominican trip link.

– If you’d like to read more stories from the other bloggers, read Compassionbloggers.com