Common Problems Associated with Having a Heart

 
Yesterday the US Under-17 boys basketball team, in town to compete in the U17 world championships, visited an orphanage in Kaunas, and I was fortunate to be able to tag along as an extra photographer and minder from the embassy community.  It was a beautiful event.  The American guys were friendly, funny, patient, generous, thoughtful, and the Lithuanian kids, shy at first, eventually lit up like flood lights.  The thing that stays with me though, is what one might call the American guys' honesty.  What do I mean?  I mean that in their natural teenage indifference, I think the guys on the team intuited something that's easy for those of us with overdeveloped senses of empathy and other such molten emotions to run right by: the fact that these orphan kids were more kids than orphans.  Put another way, the American kids didn't care that the Lithuanian kids were orphans.  They cared that they were kids.  And what do kids do?  They goof off with round rubber spheres.  They don't need to tell themselves stories about themselves to do it.  They just play.  This is a blessing.  Because for all the adults, it's maybe a little too easy to look at the orphan kids and see nothing but heartbreak.  (One of the coaches asked if the kids at the orphanage had mostly lost parents to accidents or illnesses or some such; the answer was no, they were mostly just abandoned--my God, what a brutal, unbearable word!  Abandoned!)  To view the kids this way, though, obviously denies them the full measure of respect due them as individual humans.  They don't want to be orphans, they want to be people.  To hell with our pity and clichés.  True, one or two of the tricky, manipulative ones (let's say 'opportunistic') might have caught on that he or she can milk the whole poor orphan thing for some pretty sweet goodies, but even such conniving is a sign of a unique mind at work.  More power to it, I say.

And so here's to the American guys who didn't prejudge, or assume really anything, who just played, and thereby let the Lithuanian kids develop more fully into their own personalities and roles: leaders, observers, hustlers, doubters, clowns, stars.

As for me, I'm such a putz--I stood there with tears in my eyes, wearing my sunglasses the whole time so nobody would know.