Rosa and Other Children of Mexico: A Story and A Poem

Rosa was an orphan left alone in the hills of Baja...

-

When my children were small we traveled to Baja California to an orphanage. The story of how the orphanage began is full of both God's tender care and human evil.

I once traveled to the orphanage with the lady who was the founder and she told me the story. The lady lives in North Hollywood and her husband was a fireman. She read in the newspaper of an old theatre in Baja and felt the Lord telling her that she should go and find it. So soon with her husband and another couple, she set off on a quest.

-

They had all kinds of problems including getting lost and running out of gas, but finally they found the theatre. There was an American women living there and she and her son were supposedly taking care of some orphaned children. I write supposedly because in reality that was not what they were doing.

-

The lady from North Hollywood along with her church, started helping this woman and the children, finally bringing the children to a church camp in the United States.

And then, because the children were with adults at the camp who could speak Spanish, the terrible truth emerged. The American woman who with her son was supposedly taking care of the children, was selling the little girls to the army camp close by.

The Lady telling me this story, said she foolishly went back to Baja and told off the woman and then left intending to come back and take care of the problem. But when she came back the woman had loaded all of the children in the back of her pickup and dropped them off one at a time in the hills of Baja.

They never found all the children. But they did find some of them including Rosa; she was living in a chicken coop. I could never tell this story without breaking down in tears. So I wrote a poem for Rosa and all of the other children. Before I post it I should say that in that place of darkness the Lord provided a home for many children with many caretakers. The last I heard about Rosa she was working for the telephone company and finally married and had her own family.

Some will find this a strange poem, but I was taking a class in Mexican History at the time so that I could better understand the people I visited with in Mexico.

Rosa and Other Children of Mexico.

Winds of the mountains blowing,

Like whispers through the caverns of your eyes.

Drained like the waters of Baja,

the genes of Montezuma are flowing away.

Cortez descending the pyramids of hell

has carried your vision below.

Encircled by a Madonna,

surrounded by Huitzilopoti,

while carried with anger by myriads of patriots,

you stand now deserted in the wasteland of man.

Better a chicken coop than altars of stone?

The feeding tables of gods all lacquered

with blood and the human condition,

unknown terror of children replacing

unknown terror of children.

Returning no more to containers of refuge,

valleys of darkness, or mountains of fear,

you gather about the hole of the asp,

waiting for the peace of the wolf and the cow.

Quetzalcoatl will come,

and the Kingdom of God, which is His, the lamb's;

but, it is given to you, the children.

(Poet News Sacramento's Literary Review February, 1990)