Make Your Mark

The children of Layle - I'm constantly rebuking them for scratching their names into the desks with broken pencils or scrawling their initials in sharpie on the shelving unit of the office. I've also interrupted (and perhaps instigated) episodes of penning signatures across the shoulders of their football jerseys in imitation of Messi and Ronaldo. But who can blame them? They only want to be remembered - like the rest of us. They are simply trying to make a mark - some kind of mark, any mark - to affirm their existence since there isn't anyone else to affirm it with or for them.

Wouldn't you be desperate to make your mark in a parentless limbo with only two doors out - Adoption and Aging Out. It's not like the game shows where you get to choose. Somebody else - people you don't even know and might never meet - make that decision for you as they sort through referrals, searching out the imagined perfect fit. Flat out: no child is a perfect fit - including the ones you give birth to. Every child must make choices and adjustments based on how the family unit they live in functions. You can't pick if your child will have ADD or depression, so is it right to discriminate against another child who is also not responsible for the condition you find them in?

My little sister, for example, never received consistent formal schooling until Layla House because her school was too far when she lived in the village in Shashemane and besides her help was needed at home. Even then (entering 1st grade in the Layla school at the age of 10) her first formal schooling was not much help as it required Amharic and English, two languages she had never spoken and barely heard. Now 12, despite a work ethic that puts Benjamin Franklin to shame, Masho still struggles along in school. Is that any reason to discriminate?

Having been through what they have been through, having seen what they've seen, how much more do these children need us than your "average," "ok," "normal" teenager? At least these ones give a crap about their future and have enough self-respect to see school as an opportunity, a chance, a foundation for the future. No, we can't know what parts are broken ahead of time, but we can't with our own biological children either, and even when we can, it isn't our place to make a quality-of-life judgment anyway. A human's personhood, their being, is a separate entity from the physical body in which it dwells. The body merely houses the spirit and soul - it houses the

To paraphrase my dad's view of it, the more a child is broken, the more he needs love and security - and yet he is the least likely to receive it. What's really "broken" - that's what we aught to be "fixing." That is where time and attention aught to go. That is where the medicine will do the most healing. Jesus said it himself in Matthew 9:10, those who are well have no need of a doctor, but those who are ill.

Desperate to be remembered,
because what if nobody picks me?
Tell me something,
Does that mean I don't count?
Valuable? Because?

This is my name.

I will mark it on the walls,
On the sills, in the dirt,
At the well, by the gate,
In the paint.

Will anyone remember me?
Will anyone even notice?
Or am I just another name
Decaying

Out of your sight - not in your mind.
Denial won't make me disappear.

My name is everywhere

But I still might be decaying
in another 20 years.