Casa Matilde

Today was my eighth day at my new internship. 

I work at Foundation Casa Matilde, a safe house for women who suffer from domestic violence and their kids. 

It's an incredibly stressful place. There is an office in the front with a lawyer, child psychologist and a social worker. Their schedules are unpredictable and I'm still not sure what it is that they do all day when they aren't chatting and getting coffee. Office dynamics are very different from what I'm used to - there's a lot of division between the women who live in the house and the women who work there. Physically, the space in constructed so that the office is in the front and the living space is in the back, behind closed, locked doors. In the back there's a big room where everyone eats, a kitchen, a small room with a tv, a huge shared bathroom and three rooms that house more than 28 people. 

It is convivencia (living together) in its truest form. Sometimes it feels like a madhouse, with all the screaming children running around and crying and women cleaning and cooking and arguing. Sometimes it feels really communal, with everyone taking care of each other, eating together and sharing so much space. 

Normally I spend a whole lot of time with the children. Families come and go, but right now there are fourteen kids, all but two under the age of seven. 

My first day I thought I would have a heart attack. They gave me the keys to the "rincon infantil" (the kids' playroom) and I opened it and the kids went crazy - running, screaming, getting paint all over themselves and me, hitting each other, falling on the floor. For someone with about zero experience with kids it was definitely one of the Top 5 Most Overwhelming experiences in my life. I've always wanted to have a lot of kids - I had thought maybe 4 or 5, but in my first five minutes at Casa Matilde I decided there is no way I'll ever have more than 2 or 3. 

My conversations with the women in Casa Matilde are the most fulfilling part of my internship. To hear their stories of how they came to the house (an eighteen year old running away in the middle of the night from the Amazon with her one year old baby), (a mother of four who took the bus from Guayaquil not knowing anyone in Quito), (a Paraguyan woman who was kidnapped with her daughter by her husband's mother), are heartbreaking.

I think the hardest part is seeing the pain in their lives. Yesterday one of the three year olds was holding on to my belt loop and I told him "belt" and he told me "cinturón" and then went on to tell me how his dad had a really big belt and used to tighten it around his neck. In moments like that I feel totally unqualified to be in the house and I really wish I knew more about child psychology and how to respond. Sometimes I feel entirely out of my element. 

One day last week I accompanied one of the women to the hospital because she'd had an unsafe abortion and part of the fetus was still inside her, causing a huge infection. (Abortion is illegal here.) I escort at an abortion clinic in Philly and I focus a lot on women's reproductive rights while at Swarthmore, but this was the first time I have ever seen the nasty consequences of illegal abortions firsthand. 

Even though this is not the sort of internship experience I was expecting, I do recognize that I am learning a lot about lives that are so starkly different from my own, about the struggles the foundation faces and in some ways about myself. I'm learning how it feels to do care work all day and how to [try] to be infinitely patient. 

And things have gotten a little easier with the kids since the first day. More often I'm there with another worker and it's much easier with two of us. And, sometimes when I really miss home and Quito feels really unfriendly and unsafe it makes all the difference to be around these kids. They'll scream and run to hug me when I walk in the door, beg me not to leave when the day's done and all try to curl up in my lap while we watch movies. Sometimes I'm really amazed how kids who've experienced so much violence express so much love.