I was there with Healing the Children, a non-profit group of surgical misfits, on another stop in a poor country where the children with malformed cleft lips and disfiguring burns streamed in to see us, expecting miracles.  I had already been with medical teams in Colombia, Ecuador, and Guatemala and had seen a lot of kids with bleak futures, no homes.  But I had never had an offer to take one.  After a sleepless night I realized I had an answer to that woman’s idle desperation: yes, I’d take your kid from this stifling life.  It was a hard comparison, our suburbanites in a frenzy about things like orthodontics and college rankings for our little Stephanies, when there were legions of kids out there with lives for the taking.

          It was a big day, American clinic day, the following year in Santa Ana, El Salvador.  The peeling alabaster hallways were filled with shoulder-high campesinos from all over the country scraping together all they had to bring in their kids with hellacious disfigurations.  Near the end of that day one little girl, alone in a plain throw over dress, stood at the door.  Although eleven, she was like a lot of kids there, stunted, appearing years younger.  She had a massive red-mottled scar flowing like lava from her chin down to her abdomen.  Her neck was frozen in flexion to where she had to lean back to merely peer straight ahead.  It was all from a kerosene stove.  I asked the nurse to get her parents.

            “Jefe, no tiene padres.”  Her parents had dropped her off at the hospital six months earlier, wrapped in wet newspaper, and never came back.  She remained a hospital urchin, the only cost being her daily scoops of rice and beans.  “Rosa Alexandra believes you will save her,” added the nurse. 

            Each morning little Rosa shadowed me, like I was her dad, on ward rounds, being my gopher for supplies.   On the day of her surgery I lifted her onto the stretcher and lovingly mussed her black hair before they wheeled her off.  In the OR the local anesthesiologist, who looked nineteen, gave her an agent that paralyzed her before he was to intubate her.  Because of her severely twisted neck he floundered trying to jam the tube into her throat causing chaos to erupt.  Through the din she lay there unable to breathe.  Just like that Rosa Alexandra was dead.  They swathed her body in a cloth and a driver took her back to her parents’ house in the mountains. 

            Another girl, three years younger, who had arrived earlier in the same clinic, virtually a bookend of Rosa.  Her name was Nancy and she had the same burn, the same wrenched neck, and I envisioned the same grisly fate.  I told Nancy’s orphanage director that she was coming to the US for her surgery.  Registered as a foster parent, I flew Nancy to Connecticut.  A hospital took care of the surgery without charge, operating twice to release her neck. 

           Nancy became a mini-celebrity in the community.  For me she was something more—a chance to be a parent.  The seed had already been planted in Nicaragua and taken root with Rosa: I wanted to adopt an orphan.  But the three months with this foster child caused me to rethink.  Despite the community’s outpouring of warmth, Nancy remained stony and cold.  After her recuperation, with teary-eyed friends, I put Nancy, with her new neck and a dozen boxes of toys and clothes, on a flight home.  As we parted I felt spent and like I hugged a mannequin.   

            Despite the self-doubt my dream was for an orphan and wouldn’t go away.  Word had it that a single man could not adopt, and then came news about China relaxing their policies.  I phoned an agency in Seattle and they said, “We’ve never done it but we can try.”  One year later, I was standing in Hanghzou when a creaky door opened and there stood my scared four-and-a-half year-old Suki.             That was nine years ago.  Suki revived me from a late-40’s life of spiraling ennui and athletic nostalgia.  Dramatic sacrifices I was warned about never happened.  Instead of giving up the things I loved, I combined them--Suki learned to sweat and grunt along with me.  You’d see me pulling or pushing her on my marathons, swims, and bike rides.  Before long my once bow-legged Suki was ripped, muscling me stride for stride. 

            She also teamed with me in becoming a denizen of the world’s back alleys and high plateaus.  Suki stuffed our satchels and mastered the trickery of long-term parking and the spaghetti waiting lines at JFK, where we headed off for unpronounceable destinations.  Without maps, itineraries or reservations, we crossed Mongolia in a jeep, hopped by jungle plane to Panama’s San Blas Islands, traversed Lake Titicaca to Bolivia in a fishing boat, and took a taxi through the barrios of Cuba.

           The lesson I drilled was the taxi driver will teach us more than the museum, even if he charges us double at the end. 

            Our trips were at times edgy, as whne we crossed a small windy sea in an Indian canoe, and at times isolating, like when we were cooped up for two days in a Reykevik ice storm, but surely missing from them were the life-altering hangovers I had with Healing the Children.  HTC had a strict policy about their teams: no children allowed.  I’d resigned myself to sitting out the years, like I was on probation, until Suki reached the magical sixteen. 

            One year, with funding from Gillette, they were desperate to set up sites in several Chinese cities.  My three trips to China with Suki qualified me, by default, as an expert and they called.  I said I’d go, but only one way, with my precious nine year-old.  Part of our charm, I guess, was our predictament.  Beyond the old fork-baller playing off his little lollipop, was that Suki had to go everywhere with me, sometimes with a friendly blind eye, from men’s rooms to emergency rooms to boardrooms.  HTC, likewise, came back with an okay.

            As we prepared for the trip I told Suki what she’d see: glimpses of her life-what-could-have-been including some orphans, people speaking to her in Chinese, and kids with split lips.  My path, with her in tow, had included many late-night on-call runs to the ER, where once Suki helped look for a missing finger, and we’d been back to her orphanage, where the director, over a free dumpling lunch, was tight-lipped about her first years.   With all that behind her, Suki looked at me dismissively and said, “Daddy, enough chit-chat, I’ll be okay.”  It’s about as much dialogue as I squeeze out of her. 

            Suki and I started out in the west in Kunming, where we scalded our tongues with their famed hot pots, worked our way across the breadth of China to Shenyang in the north by Korea, and then snaked south to Shanghai and Beijing.  While sharing Maotai at the dinner table with the President of Yunnan University and the next week with the Communist leader of Shanghai, the center of our conversations wasn’t the site approvals, but Suki.  Gentleman, let me explain, this little ambassador you can’t take your eyes off was once a Hangzhou orphan bound for oblivion. 

            After those sites were approved Suki and I showed up for duty at the Ninth People’s Hospital in Shanghai.  While I worked the recovery room Suki spent most of her days at the nurse’s station stapling papers.  One day the nurses coaxed a strong-armed Suki over to help move one of the Chinese orphans, a bulky post-op having undergone massive reconstructive surgery.  Her name was Zhang Su Xin.  Like a mummy, she was bound from the waist up in thick bandages, left only with holes for her arms and nose and mouth.  Suki was drawn in by the girl with no face. 

            When Su Xin’s hand blindly reached out for Suki, she clutched it and stayed.  Suki asked me, can you find her eyes?  I led her fingers to the impressions in the bandages.  An interpreter arrived and the girls traded stories.  At the age of ten Su Xin had nits in her hair and the orphanage aids soaked it with gasoline.  She leaned too close to a stove and was engulfed in flames.  

             Each day Suki returned to Su Xin’s bedside, helping to spoon feed and bathe her.  Su Xin, with her free hands, relied on some gestures into which she and Suki created a language of signals, bonding through their fingertips.  Suki showed Xin Su origami; they made baby swans and peanut-sized stars.  By her bed were pictures of her before and after the accident.  Once, she stood next to a small waterfall, her smiling face like porcelain.  And then the very same girl looked like a waxy creation for a Hollywood thriller. 

             The incineration did nothing to diminish hope in Su Xin.  She said she wanted to be a musician, so a guitar was found.  The last day she gave Suki her only Teddy, a furry tree trunk with three little squirrels.  Eventually, after we were to leave, she would return to her orphanage.  Suki asked, “Daddy, what will happen then?”  I told her Xin Su would become a great musician.  My answer was hollow and I sensed Suki knew it.  I saw a rare pensive moment in her, maybe my same feeling of helplessness. 

            One quiet evening after we returned to Connecticut, I asked Suki if she would like to do more work for orphans like Xin Su. She could build on it, like a project, I added. 

“A project?”

“I mean instead of just going to places and finding silly milagros toys like we did in Mexico, we look up orphanages.”

“And do what?”

“You know, help them.  Maybe you could write about it for school.  See if it leads to something.”

“I have to write about it?”  Immediately I wanted to backtrack.  She asked, “Did you have a project when you were a kid?”

         “Me? Nothing like that.”  I said, “Suki, I want you to find some focus and this is perfect.  It fits what we do.  Don’t be like me and wait til you’re forty.”

            Perhaps, at first, it was all sounding like a gargantuan term paper.  Suki is a doer, not a reader, not a planner, not a writer.  I regret those not parts, but wouldn’t change anything.  There’s something nonsensical but magical, I can’t describe it, in what she does.  She’d sooner build a brick wall as write two pages about it.  In our little family I am the idea-spinning Don Quixote she’s always poking fun at and she’s the one that fixes the squeaky bike.  

            “Look Suki,” I said, “I’ll get you there.”

            “Okay, and I’ll do stuff like with Xin Su.”             

           After a little research on orphans, Suki said, “Look, everywhere you look, there’s millions.  Doesn’t anyone pay attention?”   

            I said, “There’s a myth about them.”

           “What do you mean, Daddy?”

            “People almost think they don’t exist.” 

            Our next trip, the following winter, was to Chile via Honduras. 

            At the Parque Central in Tegucigalpa we asked about any nearby orphanages and were led to an address three blocks away.  I pressed a buzzer beside a solid door with a sign overhead, El Hogar de Esperanza, whispering to Suki, “House of Hope.”  Someone peered through a hole but the door opened immediately when I said the word, Americans.  We introduced ourselves to the director, a handsome Honduran, asking if we could look around.  He took us right to the courtyard where some fifty kids, like in a fire drill, scurried around.  Suki timidly kicked the soccer ball with them.  Many were curious about this odd pairing.  The girls were shy and needed coaxing but the boys swarmed us and threw their arms for attention. 

            The director told us most come off the street, assigned by the government.  He emphasized they all felt lucky to be there.  He showed me the various rooms and finally in the last one we noticed a woman in a Red Sox t-shirt with light hair that fell loose hiding her face.  Upon hearing my voice, she stopped what she was doing and gasped, “Finally, I can speak English.”    

            The striking woman, Julie, from Maine, treated us to lunch where she explained how she initially used vacation time from her pediatric practice in Boston to look at the glue addiction among the street kids but eventually got “a little obsessed,” finally selling her practice.  She cursed a Wisconsin shoe glue company which knowingly pockets most of their revenue from the addicted kids.  “The kids get high sniffing it, rob, and, like junkies, pay the stores or shoe guys for more.  It does something to their brain.  That’s what I’m working on,” she explained.  Julie turned her good career into a better cause, hopefully with work that won’t get buried.  Teasing Suki, she said, “She’s gorgeous.  This scares me.  I’m afraid I’ll take a few home with me.” 

            When we left the restaurant Julie pointed to some of the kids, and said, “The name for them, too bad, is los gamines.  Seven out of ten are hooked.”  Some stuck near us like lost pets, were aggressive with their begging, tapping at our elbows, even slipping into our pockets.  They danced and pointed at Suki’s eyes.

            Later, Suki and I wandered some city streets but couldn’t help tracking more kids.  I saw shoe repairman on the street and he unabashedly showed us his glue and even the plastic bags.   

           One girl always waited by our hotel door whether day or night.  She had a tattered frilly dress, her bare feet dust-colored and flattened.  The hotel doorman waved a finger at us not to give her anything.  She’d follow us into a store where the owner swatted and yelled at her like a stray dog.  Her eyes had a plastic-like sheen, what Julie said was a sign of addiction.  At one intersection we saw a shiny-ribbed boy and a rabid-looking dog tugging-war over half a chicken carcass.  Suki asked me, “What happens to these kids?  Where do they sleep?”  I told her their only hope might be House of Hope we saw.          

           From Tegucigalpa we took a bus toward Ceiba and to the Caribbean to relax.  Even in the white sand and palm setting we couldn’t rid our minds of the homeless kids. 

           In Chile our plane landed in Santiago.  As we walked through the city, I remarked how the men were all the same size, about five-five.  There was one popular strip with all shops, mostly music and clothes, not much that interested us.  The next day we had a quick flight to Temuco.  Up at four the next morning we took a bus to Puerto Montt and then another to Patagonia, the last stop in the Americas.  The bus ride seemed longer because a man with a sagging liver and jaundiced skin kept stumbling down the aisle to use the bathroom unfortuantely next to us.  Inside he emitted sounds and waves of odor.  He’d let the door fly open and other men angrily slammed it, only to hear it unlatch and fly open again.  Suki’d jab me and my stomach churned every time she spied him weaving toward us.   

            Suki and I found a cheap place and planned for our umpteenth Christmas in a strange place, this time in Punta Arenas.  Celebration was far from garish like in our country.  For Suki, who has never uttered she wanted anything, I had tucked away some gifts: stuff to make jewelry, a pass for three to the Schubert Theatre, and a picture of a sewing machine waiting back home.  We spent Christmas morning sitting at the Strait of Magellan where across in the swirling mist we could gaze at Tierra del Fuego.  This was the height of summer and yet was windy, drizzly, and cool.  We befriended a cab driver who took to the German part of town, out to a peninsula to watch the penguins and puffins, then to his own house where we picked up his three daughters.  We all had lunch at a small cafe.   

            Suki asked him if he knew any orphanages.  The driver asked the waitress and then packed us into his cab.  When we arrived at the stately brick building he went up to the door, chatted with someone, and then waved us up.  We were greeted by two nuns with clasped hands and crisp habits.  The first thing that impressed us was a large glass display case of a relief of Patagonia, icebergs and all, made by their kids.  Everything was immaculate, the kitchen without a speck, the bedrooms almost military in neatness.  The dining room had miniature chairs, and the bathrooms had cups with toothbrushes, each with a name, Enrique, Maria and so forth.  The classroom had long skinny map of Chile and drawings of Don Quixote and Panza.

             Sister Ana, a woman of regal stature, asked us, like she was holding back her pièce de rèsistance, “Would you like to meet the children?”  She took us to the playground where the kids were zipping around or else milling in small groups.  They ranged in age from about four to thirteen.  Several circled us, studying with curious stares, their manner natural, playful and engaging.  Some were affectionate with one another, maybe the best you’d rarely see in siblings.  Drawing closer they hugged each other tighter, like their security blankets.  I spotted a budding Pele, a beauty with Natalie Wood eyes, another with eyes like Suki’s they called Cheena.  One clutched her worn teddy and one girl had a scarf artfully twirled around her neck as if she were strolling on the Champs Elysee.  There was a flirt, a shy one, a boy with bravado pushing a ball into my hand.  Suki joined in their basketball game linking hands with one giggling girl.  They ran herky-jerky in unison crying in their different languages. 

            I stood with Sister Ana as she pointed out a few and told me their story, mostly with parents deceased or disappeared.  I asked her if any of the kids could be adopted and she froze momentarily.  She turned and responded, “Yes, of course.  Todo.” 

            I commented they looked so happy here, with a communal richness I’d never seen before, and it almost seemed a sin to take them away. 

            She calmly replied, “Everybody’s happy when they find a home.”           

            She asked about Suki and I told her our story.  Suki’s orphanage had one room with two or three broken toys.  She could barely hear, didn’t speak a word, four years a blank.  The sister asked, “And without you where would she be?” 

            I answered honestly and said I never think about it. 

            With that thought and gazing at the kids my pulse went up.  What happens to these kids and others like them everywhere?  Kids whose only advocate is Sister Ana?

            As one child stood close and slipped his hand into mine, his eyes saturated with innocence, I told the sister, “You do a wonderful job here.” 

           She smiled, a subtle smile steeped in the satisfaction of her own long Punta Arenas history, and one that with her seventy-year-old eyes told me she is running out of time.

            “You’re a Chilean treasure.”  I handed Sister Ana an envelope and shaking my head said, “This is such a weak gesture.  I should do more.”   

            She nodded toward Suki, who was surrounded by a dozen kids and struggling but laughing with her Spanish words, and said, “Señor, you have.”