Christina

Christina checking names at Father Fabretto’s Home in northern Nicaragua – 1988

She was crazy then and she still is.  She’s the reason that a couple dozen orphaned, disabled kids in Nicaragua came to live with families in Milwaukee in the 80’s and 90’s  – kids who otherwise would have graduated from the comparatively high class care at Rolando Carazo Orphanage to live at Martyrs for Peace Orphanage where, like the name suggests, care was thin and spare and the kids, outfitted in cast-off T-shirts from the U.S. would lay on pallets and look up at visitors and smile.

Christina never forgot a one of them.  She remembered their names and what was wrong with them.  She carried their stories in her heart.  Long after the rest of us, the people she shepherded through the adoption process in Nicaragua, went home to the states, got our new children situated in life and school, and turned to Saturday soccer and away from the kids on the pallets, she kept the pictures in her mind.

One of her unforgettables was this little child.  So small and weak when we met her at Rolando Carazo, she could barely lift her head.  The orphanage staff shook their heads.  She would not survive, they said.  Too sick.  I agreed with them.  I told Christina, “Don’t get started thinking about this girl.  She won’t last long enough to find someone to adopt her.”

I spoke like an expert even though I really had no clue.  She sure looked awfully sick to me.

Today that little sick girl is a mother of three kids.  Because Christina wouldn’t let it go — refused to erase the picture in her head or replace it with something more promising, brighter. And she kept at it.  Until two of the most extraordinarily parents in the world came forward — people, I guess, who could see what Christina saw.

Hope.

They added this little girl to two they already had adopted from the same orphanage. Yesterday, this same girl was blowing up balloons at her daughter’s tenth birthday party and watching while her kids and all the others swung an old bat at a pinata, which, of course, Christina bought. It’s thirty years later. It’s a sunny day and we are having a picnic.

Tomorrow is Christina’s birthday.  And I want to say to her — Thank you for your hope.  Thank you for your long memory.  Thank you for being relentless and undeterred. And thank you for being my friend all these many years.

Thank God for you.  You are a blessing on this earth.  Crazy though. Still pretty crazy.

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First published in 2011. Updated to take into account our picnic yesterday.