Kid Paradise

More from volunteer Elizabeth Niels.
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It would be hard to have more fun than the little kids have here in Carmen Pampa. Carmen Pampa is Kid Paradise for a million reasons, but I'll just cite a few. First, our K-12 school has been canceled for the last month due to a teachers' strike, which are fairly common in Bolivia. That in and of itself would constitute paradise for most children, but then there are all the adventures, too. Carmen Pampa is surrounded by perfectly magical places to explore: waterfalls, mountain paths, citrus trees and even construction sites. And we have plenty of animals here -- horses, dogs, cows, sheep and chickens, etc. -- all roaming around freely and just asking to be played with or harassed. At the end of the day, if all that gets old, there are always gringas like me around to tease. It's heaven for kids.

When I first got here, I was struck at the kids' freedom. Boys as young as four run in packs all day long and girls wander around in smaller groups. Certainly none of these kids have formal "play dates." Parents don't spend hours in the car driving them from one activity to the next and kids don't log hours in front of the television. Most of the time the kids at Carmen Pampa can be found playing with found junk, like metal bars or the lids of rusty paint cans; the other day they were sliding down the dirt hillside on an old jagged sled of metal. And the kids aren't shy about including me in their games, which makes me wonder if they’ve ever been told not to talk to strangers. I doubt it -– after all, hitch-hiking is the norm, and the older kids are pros at climbing on a moving bumper.

But, of course, it's not all good. Not having school for weeks at a time (as much as they may love it) is of course a huge academic setback for the kids. Plus, many of the kids are dirty inside and out –- many wear the same dirty, ill-fitting clothes everyday and some have intestinal worms and tooth decay. One of my favorite five-year-olds, Nathaniel, looks like he's recently lost his baby teeth, but if he opens his mouth wide, you'll see that his teeth are actually just little more than rotten numbs in his gums. His two-year-old sister's teeth are already beginning to turn brown.

Really, though, Nathaniel and the kids here at Carmen Pampa have it great compared to some other kids in Bolivia. Perhaps the kids who suffer most in this country are the urban street kids who have either been abandoned or have to work to support their families. These kids are ubiquitous in cities like La Paz and earn their money shining shoes, selling candy, or calling out the destinations of the minibuses used for public transportation. About 80 percent of them are boys, whom I've seen filthy and exhausted trying to sleep tucked away in protected city corners.

I have one of these abandoned kids in my English class. Eulogio was abused and abandoned as a child and worked on a construction crew throughout his boyhood. When his construction crew came to work in Carmen Pampa, the head of the university where I teach rescued him and started him at Carmen Pampa's primary school. Eulogio had never attended school before, and at 14-years-old he started first grade. Now in his early 20s Elogio is in his second year of the university and he's one of my best students.

But back to the kids at Carmen Pampa -– the kids who have it good. I find it fascinating that their traditional childhood experience is so foreign to me. These days in America, it's not uncommon to hear people lament the end of the traditional childhood -- lost to packed extracurricular schedules and video games. I am thrilled to have found a place childhood still exists in all its magical Peter Pan glory. And someday, if I ever have a family, I'd like to bring my own kids to Carmen Pampa to experience this wild, free, limitless childhood – the way people say childhood was meant to be. Maybe it's crazy, but instead of fear, I plan to feel pride when my kid hitches his or her first a ride on the back of a bumper.