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April 08, 2011
What do we mean when we say the word orphan? UNICEF estimates that worldwide there are 210,000,000 orphans. What is more sobering is that according to government and private listings, 90% of children deemed as orphans actually have one or both parents living. It is impossible to confirm or deny these numbers, just as it would be perilous to account for the number of people killed in war. At the very least, these numbers suggest that the problem of being an orphan goes far beyond our traditional Oliver pickpocketting his way through the streets of 19th Century London. Though we can debate the meaning of the word, create new classifications or dispute causes and responsibilities, we can say with a fair amount of certainty that after China, India, the U.S. and Indonesia the fifth most populace nation in the world has no name, is without boundaries, and sings no anthem. Its citizenry, though, is easily recognized. We see them everywhere, mostly in city streets when we are stuck in traffic or waiting for a light to turn green. They approach our driver’s side window with an outstretched hand, palm facing the sky, a ludicrous assemblage of rags for clothes. He might offer to wipe your windshield, or blow a wisp of healing incense into your car, or she may have a baby in her arms, its eyes plucked out. If they could vote, if they had purchasing power, if they had arms they would have a seat at every table. Instead for the most part they are pitied and then forgotten, put into holding tanks, or outright ignored. But don’t underestimate them; they are indeed very powerful, more powerful than military and wealth. They are the abandoned, vulnerable and homeless children of the world, and if we are not careful, without warning they will take our future away. Not all orphans are unfortunate. Thousands are raised in progressive orphanages in much the same way as a family would. In fact taken as a whole a sizeable amount of orphans are better raised than children of a healthy nuclear family. There are those children who were luckily abandoned, plucked from the trajectory of a stunted life and given new horizons. Going by the broader understanding of orphans as I've defined above, look at some of the famous orphans in history and our understanding is further hued: Alexander Hamilton, Ingrid Bergman, Bessie Smith, Aristotle, J.S. Bach, Leo Tolstoy, Herbert Hoover, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Louis Armstrong, Marylin Monroe, John Lennon, Ella Fitzgerald, William Wordsworth and John Keats were all in our broadened sense of the word, orphans. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama grew up in the orphan’s shadow. Moses himself was an orphan. Once we begin to debate the condition of orphandom, we soon find ourselves wrestling among philosophers and ethereal and often volatile notions of human existence. Who raises a child? Who is responsible for a child’s welfare? Do we own our children? Does it take a village to raise a child? Can two people of the same gender raise a child? Should everyone have the right to have children? Should poverty stricken people be discouraged from having six, nine, twelve children? Should prisoners be allowed to have and keep children? People with defective chromosomes, diseases? What human rights do children have? Does a child have the right not to be born into misery? Is every life sacred? If so, then who provides for the orphan? If we are not careful, no matter what our beliefs we may find ourselves slipping down the slope of social engineering or even fascism, but equally we can find ourselves placing children at the mercy of negligence and cruelty. This is why for the most part we wish the problem of orphans away, it touches upon too many divergent beliefs, and fingers are pointed in every direction. So instead of choosing sides and making pronouncements and accusations, instead or narrowing the field in an attempt to understand it, I take a step back. Now I find myself wondering if orphans even exist, or rather if perhaps we are all, by virtue of being born, embarking upon the orphan’s journey. What is an American, after all? From the outcast pilgrims to enslaved West Africans to famine burdened Irish to persecuted Jews to poverty stricken Mexicans to war weary Afghans to political refugees from China and every other displaced citizenry in the world, who in America can claim not to be in a manner of speaking orphaned? Even Native Americans are orphans in their own land, sequestered on reservations or outcasts among the conquering culture. From here the field broadens even more. There are 43.3 million refugees in the world. Are they not in some fashion orphans? What about victims of racism, those who live with prejudice, minorities, handicapped, gays, elderly, or those who isolate themselves from others, living at the end of their cul de sac or behind the walls of their compound, their gated community, their church or island bungalow or forest retreat. And now you see the path is cleared for the rest of us, sinners and wayfarers, divorced and rejected, excommunicated and fired, those facing death and those searching for their own meaning in life. Who is immunized from the plight of the orphan? Who is not driven by the desire always to know what cannot be known, to reclaim what can never be found? I have lived with orphans. Real ones in Afghanistan, the ancient crossroads or “heart” of Asia, home to bloodlines from Macedonia to Shanghai, from Moscow to New Delhi. I lived in a Kabul orphanage with seventy girls whose ages ranged between 5 and 16, a veritable melting pot, Pashtun and Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek, Nuristani and Kuchi and Kabuli. Their stories are wide and varied. They are often full of heartache but also a prevailing determination. I cooked with them, cleaned laundry with them, watched television with them. I taught them English, drama, photography, but also how to spit watermelon seeds, how to have a proper water fight on a blazing hot summer day. There were boys, too, in another orphanage just down the road. For two years I was a part of their family. Now I am back again and sometimes I wonder if I will ever leave. As my relationship with them deepens, so too does my awareness of their strength of character. What it takes to be who they are I can never know, but something alchemic is occurring. If you have ever known an orphan you might know what I mean. Ask the child about home and it seems never to be a place she has been, nor even where she is, but rather where she is going, a constantly changing definition. It may not even be an actual place; it could be an idea. Home for the orphan is, though he may not articulate it, the world. The result of spending a lengthy amount of time with an orphan results in a transference that occurs without our even knowing it, but sure enough you yourself begin to feel like an orphan, and the orphan, skipping away to the next horizon has somehow found the will to go on. In this frame of mind I think about all the orphans I have known. From Snake Alley in Manila to a Zen garden in Kyoto to a subway in San Francisco, from a cabin on an island in Alaska to a lonesome stretch of highway in Oregon to a tar factory in New England, and from the top of a pyramid in Egypt to an underground strip joint in St. Petersburg to a Parwarishga full of children who are victims of war in Afghanistan I have encountered orphans of every fiber, every culture, every age. Some I have known for only one evening, others I knew for many years, before they disappeared, before they moved into some other future, before they left for home. Their stories are not all so easy to tell, there is pain, a lot of it, and there is embarrassment and shame. There are orphans who lost their way; some became even dangerous. Others were angels who seemed to be half in this world, half in the next. All of them reflect upon me, and I carry them at the end of a stick like an ever-growing bindle full of sorrow and love as I wander toward my own twilight years, every step one step closer to accepting that perhaps I too am one of them.
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