Isabel Bilma

Outside the house of Isabel Bilma her twin boys play in the trash covered street. They hang close to the door and run inside when they see us coming up the steep hill, leaving it ajar. A small but vicious dog takes their place, snarling and showing sharp teeth and narrowed eyes. Isabel appears and smacks him with her knuckles. He recoils a bit and lets us enter but remains on guard. One of the boys approaches and hits him in the same way, a swift rap with the back of his hand. The dog retreats. Put your shirt on, Isabel tells her son.

She has three children total, the two five-year-old boys who both attend the Center because they’re twins and an eight-year-old girl. Her husband works. She takes care of the children. This is all the work she can do. She says her greatest challenge is that she cannot have a job because she must care for the children.

They own the house, which is larger than the others I’ve visited with three small rooms: one for sleeping, one for cooking, and one half open and hung with laundry. The bedroom has three mattresses with sheets and a dresser. In the kitchen, the pots are hung above the stove and the dishes face down on plastic shelves. The place is clean and orderly. The backyard is large, swept, and lined with banana trees and red flowers. There is a covered area for firewood, a rope bridge that doesn’t seem to lead to or from anywhere and a well. It doesn’t seem quite so bad here.

Isabel has problems buying enough food, especially now that prices are so high. They get their water from the tap and help to fix it when it breaks. But the public tap rarely works. They use the well when the tap is off, but the water in the well is very dirty, and sometimes when they bring up the bucket there is trash in it. They don’t drink the water from the well, so they must buy clean drinking water. It’s expensive.The two boys have both been sick from parasites recently. They went to the clinic for treatment and are better now. Still, they have to be careful, she says.

The family has no books nor toys. There is a single stuffed animal we gave them yesterday hanging from one of the wires in the yard. It looks trapped, or lost. Sometimes, the children get toys for Christmas, but not often, and they usually break or lose them quickly.

When ask what would improve her life most, Isabel does not know. However, when I specifically ask if it would help her if the Center was open longer hours, she responds that yes, it would, because then she could work more. When we leave the home, there are three heavily armed policemen stepping carefully through the street rubbish, heading up the hill and into the brush beyond.