Santiago's Children

I just finished up Santiago's Children. It is a book by Steve Reifenberg about his experiences in Chile living at an orphanage for two years. That is such a lame way to describe it, but you should just read it... I'll try again... it is an amazing book that takes the stories of the children and people he met and weaved it in with his insecurities about his future as well as the tumultuous political climate in Chile under Pinochet. A little better haha. I'll just some of the quotes speak for themselves.

"But I came to Chile, to Santiago, to the orphanage, and my objectivity, so stern and rational, had disappeared. Time after time people invited me into their homes and their families and gave me the best of what they had, generously,openly, with few expectations in return. Children threw their arms around my neck and needed me to tie their shoestrings or lift them up until they could touch the roof with their fingertips. There was a sense of belonging, an immediacy and urgency, the joy of a child on the first day of summer vacation when life was full of endless possibilities. I was needed and welcomed and taken in, and, yes, it was recaptured, that sense of belonging, but in a different, more complex way, with all the hardships of living with and loving so many people so intensely under one small roof...."

"What had changed the most was me. I had learned some things: that the world was a lot more complicated than I ever thought; that U.S. political decisions had reverberations in dramatic ways all over the world; that children were often incredibly resilient; and that interventions, especially when carried out with compassion and love, could make a difference. Finally, I learned to believe in the idea that maybe it was not a bad thing to have dreams, even if they sometimes fell short.”

The last part that I will share is something Reifenberg included in the book from Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke