In Which TJ Discusses Behavior

Not every detail of every kid gets put into cyberspace because of privacy concerns, but here I try to be as close to an open book as I can be. Each kid we have is deserving of his or her own post. The kid I’m talking about today is probably deserving of his own site dedicated to all the goofy stuff he does.

The kid I’m talking about is Jose. For people that have ever been to the orphanage in the last year and half, you know who Jose is. Jose is all of 3 feet tall (1m), and we registered him as being 7 years old because that’s how tall he is. In reality, Jose is about to turn 13 but has the mind of a 5 year old. Aside from having the body of a seven year old, he has problems with physical coordination, can’t count past two, and has a speech impediment that makes him slur all his words and unable to pronounce at least half the sounds he needs to communicate.

I blame his awesome Gene Simmons-esque tongue.

Jose is here with his older brother Jordão and his younger sister, Dorca. While Jordão is also learning impaired, he is physically normal and has adequate skills. A large part of Jordão’s learning disability, I believe, is that he never attended school until last year at the age of 14. Dorca is 4 and we honestly have no idea if she’ll exhibit the same problems as her older brothers.

Undoubtedly the greatest gift God has given Jose is an uncrushable attitude. He is by leaps and bounds the happiest, cheeriest, most joyful kid here. That is why we can continually laugh at the things he does, because we’re laughing with him. He is the biggest source of entertainment we have here. And I’m being very serious when I say that he is NOT being treated as a sideshow or as comic relief. He truly is a member of our family.

The reason he deserves his own website is because I could fill it daily with the stories of the goofy things he does. Yesterday, we looked over and he had his head submerged in a bucket of (clean) water. We watched for about ten seconds and just when we worried something was wrong he pulled his head out. He looked like he’d been bobbing for apples. We asked him just what the heck he was doing. He said he was thirsty and wanted a drink of water and the cups were too far away. He started laughing. We started laughing with him.

When I was laid up sick a month or so ago (I’m 100% better now) I sat around one afternoon watching him remove weeds from our dirt/sand soccer field. He had a garden hoe and every time he walked up to a weed he’d stop, lift the hoe over his head, and shout “In the name of Jesus, be healed!” Then he’d drive the hoe into the ground. He was imitating something he’d seen in church. It was just as amusing the first weed he pulled as it was the hundredth.

Jose’s favorite song is the Mozambican national anthem. They sing it every day in school (he’s in second grade). Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows more than the first two lines. They just hum the rest. Jose sings only the first line, and he doesn’t even do that correctly. Because of his mental/speech/ hearing problems he mispronounces more than a few words. And it is really, really funny. The first line of the anthem is, “The memory of Africa and of the world...” Jose, however, thinks the first line is, “The animal of Africa is big.” That’s OK, though. My family thinks the last line of the American national anthem is “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

What strikes me about Jose is the way he looks after his siblings. Its interesting to watch, because they came from a horrible, horrible situation where Jose was dancing on the streets for change and people were just laughing at him and then he’d go “home” to a horrible abusive grandmother. They lived with their grandmother because relatives say their mother was mentally retarded and nobody knows who the respective fathers are. Coming from that situation, Jose has assumed the role of protector and always makes sure that his brother and sister have eaten enough or are drinking enough water or ready to go to church each Sunday.

Whenever a kid arrives in our orphanage there is usually a good amount of “re-teaching” that takes place. Teaching kids that stealing is not good, they don’t have to fight other kids for their meals, they’ll always have a bed to sleep in, I could go on.

For Jose, the re-training looked a little bit different. Because Jose survived by begging for money on the streets, he would imitate a witchdoctor dance. People thought it was hilarious and would give him money. When he arrived here, any time he heard music he was up doing his witchdoctor dance. This was particularly embarrassing during church.

As weeks turned into months, the dancing and fighting with other kids slowly gave way to other habits. Instead of dancing all the time, Jose would be singing songs from church all the time. Instead of clamoring to the front of the line to get his food, he would realize that we don’t pass out meals till we pray for the food. As a result, Jose is always the first to volunteer to pray for our meals. It is also a humorous highlight of dinner. Because of Jose’s condition his prayer is usually, “God, we are going to eat. Name of Jesus. Amen.” Technically its more of an announcement than a prayer. What is great though is that he is completely sincere in his prayer. It’s like Jesus said: “The kingdom of God belongs to these [the children].”

But every now and then these old habits creep back in. A song will come on the radio or people will start singing in church and Jose starts doing his witchdoctor dance. If he doesn’t think a game is being played fair he will start swinging fists. If he sees something interesting and somebody else with something he wants (calculator, tennis ball, shiny object) he’ll go into their bed and steal it later.

I was thinking about why he does those things. When he first arrived here, it seems like he was slowly replacing these bad habits with good ones. We hoped that after enough time he would eventually just forget the bad ones altogether and only have the good habits we were teaching him. This is all complicated by Jose’s mental capabilities and that, more so than other people, he truly doesn’t understand why stealing clothes or witchdoctoring is bad. For whatever reason, these last two weeks have been especially difficult with Jose constantly fighting and other kids losing patience with him very quickly.

I finally stumbled on an idea when I was thinking about some of the other kids here and their actions: How much of their change in habits (read: repentance of sin) is a result of behavior modification or trying to fit in and avoid punishment and how much is a result of Jesus truly changing their life? Is the desire to steal or fight or lie gone from them or are they just behaving when they know eyes are watching?

The truth is we have a mixture of both. Some kids you can see how Jesus has truly changed their life and they no longer have the desire do act the way they did before. For others, they just have to get smarter to avoid getting caught.

With Jose, as with myself, my prayer is these bad habits and actions (aka sins) would not just be pushed to the back-burner as other things take over, but that they would genuinely be removed, put to death on the cross, and replaced with new, good desires.

Serving Jose (and all the other kids here) is truly serving “the least of these.” Most kids here, like Jose and his family, have been discarded by relatives who saw no value in them. If you’re looking for ways to pray for us (myself included), you can pray that while we give them physically what they need (food, clothes, shelter) that they would accept what we are giving them spiritually.

Pray for us, because anything less than a complete transformation of their lives would be, well, incomplete.