Rich in Love: When God Rescues Messy People by Garcia Irene & Johnson Lissa Halls

Author:Garcia, Irene & Johnson, Lissa Halls [Garcia, Irene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adoption
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2014-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART 3

rich in love

chapter 12

a new journey begins

2004

When I answered the phone, I recognized the social worker’s voice immediately. “I have a four-year-old little boy who has never been in the system. He was picked up from a meth raid, and he’s pretty frightened.”

I looked over at Domingo, and he nodded. “Of course,” I said to the worker. Not long after the call, we opened the door to the social worker, who was escorting a little boy with pure white hair down to his shoulders, rotten teeth, and a filthy mess of dirt caked on him. He had on some sort of water shoes, and he stank. I don’t know what I had expected, but I was shocked. The excitement of bringing in this child left, and fear took over. For a moment I didn’t know what to do, but then autopilot kicked in. “Come on, let’s go take a bath.”

He just looked at me, eyes wide. He didn’t say a word. Turns out he couldn’t talk well. Not only did he not have a very big vocabulary, he didn’t seem to know how to go up the stairs. He fumbled and looked confused and frightened at the same time.

I helped him get up the stairs to the big bathtub in our bedroom. I turned on the water, stripped off his clothes, and got him into the tub. He started to shriek and wail in a high-pitched sound so penetrating, our neighbors (whose homes are a distance from ours) could hear him. They said it made their blood curdle.

“Shhhh,” I said quietly, soothingly. “It’s okay. You’re safe here.” I slowly ran the water over his body with a washcloth, going deaf from his shrieks.

I thought I saw something crawling on his head and called, “Mingo! We need lice treatment.” Domingo went to the garage to the stash we had on hand and brought me a box. I had put on gloves and wrapped a hair-cutting drape around me to protect my clothes from the water and pesticide. Once the little boy’s hair got wet and flat, I could see a city of lice in his hair. I have seen a lot of scalp problems in my years as a hairstylist, but this was by far the most disgusting, disturbing thing I have ever seen.

I was dying inside and started to feel bugs crawling up my arms—whether they were or not. Throughout all the screaming, I kept bathing and rinsing, bathing and rinsing, five or six times, as well as giving him the lice treatment.

Then I saw something weird on the side of the tub. Looking closer, I screamed, “Domingo!” and added my shriek to the poor little boy’s as I watched lice crawling up the sides of the tub.

Domingo came quickly, looked at where I was pointing, and, as I wrapped the boy in a towel and helped him out, cleaned it up.

I wanted to pick the boy up and hug him to comfort him, but he was so infested that I held back.

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