At nine years old, a girl in Panama was sent by a judge to a custodial facility to serve the term of her pregnancy plus six to nine months post-birth to learn how to take care of her baby. Nine years old. Possibly raped by a father, stepfather, or uncle, any of these or other reasons are possible.
She is put into a facility that houses around twenty girls between her age (9) and up to eighteen. They sleep in two large rooms. One for the pregnant girls, and one for the new mothers and their babies. Think of ten girls with young babies sleeping next to each other. I always wonder just how much sleep they could get in those conditions. In the morning, exhausted, they care for their babies, clean the room, and carry on with a day learning, hopefully, how to sew or do other menial tasks, “preparing” them for life after they leave the facility.
The facility is surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire to keep the girls, pregnant or recently birthed, from climbing out and running away. Most don’t bother to try because the only place they have to go is back to the sexually abusing father, stepfather, or uncle. Her mother cannot protect her. She can only provide a familial roof.
One morning, a young mother woke to discover that her baby was silent. All the other babies were waking and crying or otherwise rising for the day. This baby was dead. The mother had rolled onto the baby during the night and suffocated her.
Suddenly, there was howling and sobbing, and the police were called along with an ambulance. The (dead) baby and mother were taken away, never to be seen again. The remaining girls, shocked, simply were expected to get on with their day. Thankfully that day included a group session with a therapist. The therapist was not warned or informed about what happened and arrived planning to hold a session on building self-confidence and reinforcing the bond with their (many, most times unwanted) baby.
The volunteer therapist, a professionally trained Sophrologist, was a volunteer providing support to the girls. The home was not funded to provide anything other than the most rudimentary support. Anything other than basic food and shelter was paid for by donations and volunteer labour. The state provided the barbed wire and remote-opening gate, a cook/house mother, and a director.
Many of the girls were terrified of the coming birthing process. They feared giving birth in conditions that could kill them or their baby. Some felt no connection whatsoever with the baby growing within them. Part of the therapy was preparing the girls mentally for what was coming and building a bond between mother and baby.
Many of the new mothers were full of love for their babies, while a few still hated these creatures forced upon them and felt neither love nor even basic motherly “instincts”. Yet, in a few months, they would be forced out of this utterly inadequate oasis into an even more unforgiving community.
One of the girls, about seventeen or eighteen years old, was dismissive of and disinterested in the therapy sessions and, in her first group session, was verbally abusive and disruptive of the session. She was told to leave. If she wasn’t interested, she did not have to be there, but she was not to disrupt. She left, but the following week, having missed a couple of sessions but seeing the impact on the other girls, she chose to join (warned again about disruption). She shined. It took a while.
One day, the director spoke with the therapist and said how pleased she was with the girl's progress, and that she, the director, was afraid of this girl. (The girl had taken to greeting the therapist with a hug – completely not allowed by the therapy protocols, but hey, and calling her “profesora”.) After all, she had been sent there because she had stabbed her seventeen-year-old boyfriend multiple times and was the lead girl in a gang in one of the worst areas of Panama City. Oh, and the boyfriend was a young novice hitman for the gang.
I’ve invented none of this.
Many days after sessions, including with the nine-year-old and the day the baby was suffocated, the therapist came home and cried. She is my wife. What she did for those girls, in the two and a half years she helped, saved lives.
Where were the good “Christians”? Who? None of them came near the facility. None of them would even consider hiring one of the girls after they left the facility, even as a cleaner, because they now had babies to take care of so wouldn’t be able to do their job.
Is THIS the Amerika you want?
This is the world that MAGA wants. This is the world that Vance wants. This is the world that Trump will happily lie and accept as the price of his own power.
