It was near midnight in Reynosa, and I was sitting on a jungle gym with a girl my age, using broken Spanish to try to explain how my family was about to adopt a three-year-old from China.
Marisol and I had been playing for hours by then. I was sorry I was only just getting to know her on our last night in Mexico, but grateful the odd circumstances of the night had allowed us to find each other alone on the playground in the middle of the night. Normally we would have been in bed, but the orphanage manager’s wife had unexpectedly gone into early labor, and no one was paying attention to us.
Later, my mom would tell me that God planned for the woman to have her baby just before we left, so that we would be there to witness the miracle of her nick-of-time arrival at the hospital.
At the moment, Mom was too busy conversing in rapid Spanish with the other women inside to notice that I was up and about so late, thrilled to be out under the stars with my new friend.
When my church group left early the next morning, I would take away this brief friendship and five blue marbles given to me by a sweet, shy boy named Eliút, whose crush I didn’t notice until we said goodbye and he kissed my cheek. I remember wondering what toys he had left, or if those marbles were it. I wanted to give him something back, but there wasn’t time. I hadn’t thought to give anyone anything.
Most of all, I couldn’t believe that he, having so little, had given me something. I’d thought I was supposed to be the one who was there to give. During our week-long mission to the orphanage, it was my job to keep the little kids occupied while the adults worked with local men and resident boys to build a new gymnasium. In truth, my experience had been a week of fun and wonderment at a different way of life; I was a tourist through the lives of children whose experiences I could barely comprehend through my own short lens. And then this boy had given me something so precious.
That’s it, I thought, tracing my mother’s logic in my own hand. That’s what I’m supposed to learn here.
It was the first white savior story I told myself. These people don’t have much, but I, the main character of God’s story, have been sent here to learn through their selflessness: a gift greater than anything I could offer in return.
I gave little thought to the daily life of Marisol, or to the fact that I had been trying to explain international adoption to a child who didn’t have a family. I didn’t stop to wonder whether Eliút would ever regret giving me the marbles (which I still have, tucked safely in a box), and I never considered what it might be like for kids like them to watch white families from the States pass through their homes, bringing gifts and assistance and friendship, and then leave, never to be seen again.
I don’t really expect that I should have had such considerations back then. I was sheltered, homeschooled, and eleven. I didn’t yet have the necessary framework upon which to hang these thoughts, and there was no one coming to build it for me.
It would be a long time before I could step outside the world of Evangelical saviorism and put it together for myself.
You are the lesson I must learn: that there but for the grace of God go I, which means that if God liked me less or you more we would not have the lives we have. You are the reminder that I have been chosen for something great, and you are what makes my greatness necessary. You are the captive animal I must visit to feel grateful that I do not live in a cage.
