After that incident on Monday with Somsi, the girl with anger management issues, Nikaela, another volunteer and I confronted the directing team about her hitting people, more specifically Aing. She had been put on the router to look after him about once a week, and now she's off the router all together. Yes, I felt really bad, especially when the founder of the organization talked to her and subsequently provoked her to cry by herself for hours. She's not being sent away, but I personally don't have the devices to handle someone like her and the organization obviously doesn't either. The concept of special education just isn't within the capacity of the staff here...never mind that special education is an extremely progressive concept. The staff's rather reluctant to even let her work in the kitchen because they're scared of her holding things like knives. And of course, her story is tragic. It starts off with her mother dropping her off at the door of a shopkeeper when she was a baby, and then the shopkeeper handing her over to us. They tried putting her in government school, but that definitely didn't work out. They tried the vocational school on site, but that also wasn't working. When she doesn't want to do something, she has this tactic of standing completely still and acting completely non-responsive...and she's suffered a lot for it, whether she realizes it or not.

In the States, we are told at a really young age that we can be anything we want in the future. It doesn't matter if you spent recess bullying kids for their lunch money and dunking heads in toilets. You can still be president when you grow up. It seems like here especially, you start off with limited options and doors keep shutting in every direction before you even hit puberty. There aren't many chances to redeem oneself.

Maybe I've spent a little too much time here and I've become desensitized to the corruption and misfortune in these people's lives...but she's not the only person with a sad story to tell and I don't feel any worse for her than I do for any other kid living on site. The other kids are good to her. They might be afraid of her, but they treat her just like anyone else on site: as a sister.