First Person : A Child’s Replaced but Not Forgotten

We met Martha Isabel Perez, by letter, three years ago.

She was 12 years old, and had been assigned to us as our “foster child” by a non-religious charity. After a great deal of thought and discussion, my husband, David, and I had chosen this particular organization--and its approach to spending our money--as one compatible with our values and priorities. Because I am Colombian and know well my country’s poverty, our only condition was that our foster child be my compatriot.

Martha Isabel’s personal history was mailed to us by the program after we joined. We learned that she lived in a shack with her parents and three siblings in a small fishing town in Tulua, a poor, rural region of central Colombia. The family pictures sent us by the program showed a timid, skinny, little girl with big black eyes. She was wearing a light, cotton dress several sizes too small for her bony frame and a pair of black boy’s shoes.

She didn’t know how to write. She was just beginning elementary school,and her first letters to us were written by her half-brother. They were childlike and simple, but at the same time they reflected the striking realities of life in the Third World as seen by an ignorant but bright, painfully poor campesina --a peasant girl.

Her existence was reduced to its fundamentals, the family driven by daily survival. Her father, a 78-year-old fisherman who couldn’t fish because of severe asthma, passed his days in bed, complaining. Her mother, 40, worked occasionally as a seamstress, earning an equivalent of $25 a month.

Each of Martha Isabel’s letters was infused with worry and anxiety over her father’s condition. The consequences for the family from that illness ran throughout three years of correspondence.

“I feel very nervous that my father is going to die,” she wrote last year. “We are having a lot of problems. The little bit of work my mother has sewing doesn’t give us enough because she cannot charge people very much for the work. We have been selling everything we have--the animals and a bed.”

Her half-brother, Jorge, who at age 14 supported the family, decided to leave. The Cauca River was producing barely enough fish to feed all of them, and Martha Isabel told us he had tired of incessant verbal abuse from his bitter, bedridden stepfather.

“There are not many fish now,” Martha Isabel wrote us in 1987. “A factory named Carton Colombia throws a poisoned water into the Cauca River that kills every kind of fish, the bigger ones and the small ones too.”

Meanwhile, she moved through second and into third grade of elementary school, despite a bad memory and learning problems, according to a social worker who wrote to us.

Clearly, she was making progress. Her letters were now her own, scratched out in blue ink on neat, lined paper. She sometimes enclosed a drawing she had done.

In 1987, she sent us a new picture of herself, smiling, sitting at a desk at her school. She was holding a pen to a notebook. She sat next to a globe, North and South America facing the camera.

Like any child, disparate things pleased her. She loved music, and she loved to dance and sing. She liked to cook and take baths. When she could, she would fly a kite on a hill near her home. And she was hungry for news of this faceless family thousands of miles away in a world she would never know and could not even imagine. She would plead with us for more pictures--of us and our new baby--a baby who has had more opportunities in the first year of his life than she would have in a lifetime.

Curiosity About the World

She wanted to know things that seemed odd to us--what the weather was like where we lived, for instance.

“If things keep going as they are,” she wrote last spring, “I don’t think we are going to be able to finish this year at school. There are times that we have to go without breakfast, because there are a lot of people who don’t pay my mother.”

At the beginning of the 1988 school year, her letters took on a continued edge of worry. She had been thinking of not returning to school because the family had no money to buy school supplies. But she said her mother had found someone to loan her enough cash to cover immediate expenses.

We heard nothing for a few months. Then, several weeks ago we received a letter from the foster parents program that had introduced us to Martha Isabel. It told us that she would be replaced as our foster child.

“Our field office in Colombia has notified us that your Foster Child, Martha Isabel Perez, has recently married and is no longer eligible for the foster parents plan program. Martha and her family sincerely appreciate your friendship and concern. They have benefited from many programs and services . . . and they are grateful for your help during their time of need.”

Another lesson on life in the Third World. Why should things be any different for Martha Isabel because of our small help? She is married at 15, surely with a boy as young, poor and without possibilities as she. Like most peasant girls of rural areas in Latin countries, soon she will be pregnant. She married to escape the misery of her family, and in this way help to relieve the economic pressure on her parents.

Still a child and now a wife, she has begun her own cycle of poverty. It is the cycle of life in most of the Third World.

Meanwhile, we have been assigned another Colombian child. “I hope that you will consider sponsoring a new foster child now that Martha is no longer involved,” we were told in the same letter that informed us of her marriage. “I am enclosing the case history and photograph of Olga Lucia Londono Pineda of Colombia, a child who currently is in need of a sponsor.”

Olga Lucia Londono Pineda, another sweet little girl with a grim future who needs help. Why sit and think of Martha Isabel? She no longer exists. Why become emotionally involved? Give your money, salve your conscience. Martha Isabel’s letters will be replaced by those of Olga Lucia’s. We can continue to feel as if we are making a difference.

We had no obligation to Martha Isabel. We helped her because we wanted to feel that we were making some small contribution to a life in a country without hope. Certainly the program that sponsored our participation did nothing to make us feel guilty about her fate. From the point of view of public relations, it probably makes sense for the foster program to write Martha Isabel off the face of the planet. No final written farewells to her sponsors, no sentimentalities at her unfortunate future. Let’s move on to the next case.

Yet, we feel cheated. Her simple letters with their sweet dreams and sad realities brought us something, just as we hoped our letters and small financial help might bring her something.

To the program that brought us together, she no longer exists.

She still exists for us.