Welcome to Amor y Esperanza

Orphaned by violence and left behind by poverty, Salvadoran children find two very willing parents.

By Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode
Correspondent

Rachel Ortega may be 20 years old, but she is the proud mother of 26 children. Meet the children who call Love and Hope home.
Love and Hope children at play. Many of them were orphaned by parents who immigrated to the U.S. Photo: Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode

SAN SALVADOR--None of 20-year-old Rachel Ortega’s 26 children were alive during El Salvador’s turbulent civil war. Nor can they remember its U.N.-brokered end in 1992. Inhabiting a gritty concrete compound complete with begging dogs, plenty of mosquitoes and a finicky faucet, Rachel, her husband and their exceptional brood represent both the madness and hope of this tiny country.

Brutal gang violence, rampant HIV, persistent poverty and a desperate exodus to the United States have created 22,000 Salvadoran orphans. But for the Ortegas' children, love and hope have four walls.

"This," Rachel says, "is Love and Hope."

Part of a service trip, we are here both to offer help and gain humility from Rachel and Mauricio. An Ohio native, Rachel moved to El Salvador at the age of 18 to care for the children no one else could. Several of Love and Hope’s first residents came from the landfill across the street. Many families still live among the trash, scavenging for food and constructing shelters from tires and scrap metal. Rachel's parents and her parish send money and teenage volunteers, but as more children arrive, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide for them, she says.

Five or six children pull on Rachel’s skirt, another bashfully hides in her hair. She is petite but strong; her arms look unsurprisingly used to ferrying children from one place to another. 10-year-old Shelby is by her side with a blue teddy bear bib, ready to coax one of her 12 little brothers off of Rachel’s shoulders and into the kitchen for dinner.

By now there is a crowd. Tonka trucks and tricycles lie abandoned on their sides. The swings grind to a halt, and two children fall out of a weary-looking palm tree to run toward us full-speed. All beam with the same fascinated enthusiasm.

Five-year-old Lissette's jack o'lantern smile stands out from the rest. Once begging on the streets of the capital with her mother, Lissette is now the first to hold the bat and take a swing at the Sponge Bob Squarepants piñata.

Her siblings chant, “Lissette! Lissette!” as her sturdy three-and-a-half-foot frame splits the smiling sponge in two. She dutifully passes the bat to the next child, no fighting, no tears. The Love and Hope children are used to sharing.

Between madness and hope
Ravaged by 12 years of civil war and growing gang violence, it is El Salvador's persistent poverty that most paralyzes it--59 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, 50 percent are also unemployed. In a country largely ignored, Love and Hope is rare.

A bus takes the children to school at 5:30 a.m. each day. Hospital visits, however, are harder to come by. Rachel says that one of the children probably has cerebral palsy, another, Down syndrome. But the nearest hospital is more than an hour away, and the doctors won't see them for several months.

Undaunted by the challenge such poverty poses, the Ortegas are inexhaustible, welcoming child after child into their leafy retreat. Several of her teenage volunteers press $50 bills into her palm before leaving. Rachel wads up the bills, smiles and instead envelopes an impatient child into her arms instinctively.

"This was our dream," she says. "This is God's call."

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a junior Broadcast Journalism and International Relations double major at the University of Southern California. Her studies are focused on television reporting and the international political economy of Latin America. She worked and reported in El Salvador in March 2007. She will graduate in May 2009.