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| Hanging with Boro |
My friend Boro thought everything I did was hilariously inept, and he made sure I knew this. His sense of humour was sharp and dry, and I
looked forward to seeing him each morning at the school where he lived. Boro had
the aura of an old man, chuckling at his own latest joke. Once he saw me trying
to run up a hill, and “FUGIT, SANEY FUGIT!” (run Janey, run – the kiddos called
me Saney) was the next few days’ joke.
Boro, and the other
kids at the school, had been adopted from the state orphanage across the road. The
orphanage was still full of 2- to 17-year-olds; at 18 they’d transfer to care
homes for the elderly. Summers 2001 and 2002 I worked mostly in the orphanage,
helping look after a dozen younger kids who rarely left the single room where they
ate, slept, and lined up, rocking, on potties for hours at a time. The nurses tied the most disruptive kids to
the radiators. Most were not technically “orphans”, but had been taken into, or left in, state care. Often, because of medical problems or disability, or a harelip,
or because siblings were starving and the orphanage fed kids daily, or because
of life-threatening domestic violence (doll play in the orphanage sometimes
involved some harrowing re-enactments).
Institutionalisation can cause symptoms of autism, rendering kids non-verbal, self-stimulatory, unable to communicate. In 2001, I worked so
hard to coax words from the kiddos, sometimes hearing a heartbreaking “mama” after
several weeks.
