Dear Adolpho, my foster kid from El Salvador

I was thinking about Adolpho this morning. It is hard to think of him and not know whether he ever made it home to his mother.

During the eighties, when we were backing horrible wars against the peasants of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and so on, hundreds of thousands of people fled those wars to come to the US. The great immigration influx was a direct result of our policies of genocide in funding and backing horrible dictators. (see the recent verdict against the then president of Guatemala, E. Rios Mott)  In Salvador, as in the other countries, the military was trained by the US at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia.

We were terrorists of the highest order.  As was our policy in Southeast Asia and is now our policy in the Middle East, we called anyone whom we wanted to an enemy. Babies, women, anyone was fair game. The scorched earth policy was among our often used actions to wipe out subversives. We went to a village, killed everyone, killed all the animals, burnt down everything including crops, poisoned the water supply and moved on.

The army met school buses and forcibly conscripted very young boys. This was a terror to all the peasant families. Then, the boys were forced to fight against their own people. Why would any kid ever do such a thing? Easy answer. The army had made examples of families where the boys didn't co-operate. In one well documented case, the military had heard a rumor that a family was hiding an army age son. When the mother left home to bring tortillas to the men in the fields, the army came to her house. When she returned, the table was set for lunch and on every plate was the head of one of her children. This was an effective warning.

This is what led Adolpho to leave home. He couldn't join the army and kill his own  people. They were not safe if he hid or stayed at home. It took him six trips from Salvador to the Rio Grande before he made it into the US. He was fourteen when he left home. During the first year of his walks to Texas, his father died in Salvador. He was a cowboy and got killed in an accident at work. Each time in the unsuccessful trips to the US, Adolpho was captured in Mexico and returned to the Salvador border.

He kept trying. It took him a year and a half until he made it into Texas and was put into a detention facility. It was a prison, but he was fed. He regained his strength and was eventually sent to our house in Marblehead, MA as a foster kid under the Unaccompanied Minor Alien Act (or something like that)

He was a sweet, attractive kid. He went to Marblehead High School were he struggled to learn English and spent night after night telling my kids and their friends his story. That was his best therapy. He told his story over and over until he somehow didn't need to tell it quite so often and in quite such detail. This was a good thing because one of the many times the police came to my house was to respond to a complaint from a neighbor that Spanish was being spoken on my deck. (What! Maybe they thought the maids has taken over the neighborhood. The police were good enough to be very embarrassed.)

Adolpho wasn't really thriving and I asked he what was the matter. It seems he missed farming and most of all animals. Some nice local woman gave him an after school job helping with her horses. Yet the real thing was that we couldn't get in touch with his family. Everything he worked so hard to do was so he could someday go back to Salvador and help his family. He was a good soul.

He proposed marriage to me one night. I asked him why. He told me that if I married him, he could move into my room and then we could get another kid in his room. I told him it was a kind and romantic offer.

He had to move to a different foster home when another refugee kid in my house made trouble for everyone. But we saw each other fairly often. I went with him to the Peace Abbey to meet Raul Julia who had just made Romero, the sad beautiful movie about Salvador in 1980. Adolpho went to community college in Boston.

We lost touch. I am certain he made it back to Salvador, but after the war his country was in ruins. I just think of him often, especially when I meet 14 year old kids here. How many of our kids could do what he did and remain sweet?