What Childhood?

Time and time again, young children in the center were the caretakers for their siblings or in some cases, their mothers. 

I had an interview with a woman from El Salvador today. Her two children, 10 and 6 joined us. (She suggested they go to the daycare center to wait for her which immediately elicited tears. ‘They don’t want to be separated from me,’ she said. ‘They are scared.’) She began talking about why she and her children had to flee. ‘This is not the life I imagined,’ she told me. ‘We had a great life there until the threats started coming.’ She began to cry. At that moment, her six-year-old son pulled his chair from the opposite corner of the room next to hers. He looked at me, and with a huge smile on his face, he put his arms around his mother. Her daughter came over shortly thereafter. For the rest of the interview, they sat together, never to be torn apart.