Me

up.”
    “But, sir!” I said to him. “If it was a matter of cleaning her up, I would have done so myself a long time ago. What I need is for you to examine her and tell me what she has. I need you to check her eyes, her ears, her temperature . . . whatever you have to do to tell me if she is ill or if it’s an infection—just tell me what it is!”
    But he still wouldn’t touch her.
    “It’s just that I don’t know . . . ,” he said.
    “Look!” I said, this time more firmly. “I have antibiotics that I brought with me from the United States. I can give them to her. But I am not a doctor, and I need you to tell me what it is that she needs!”
    “I don’t know...,” this man who called himself a doctor kept saying.
    I couldn’t take it anymore and I said, “You know what? We don’t need you. Please leave.” He turned and left shamelessly. He simply grabbed his things and rushed out the door, thanking me as he left.
    I couldn’t believe it. I had always believed that a doctor’s duty was to save lives, all lives that needed saving, but this “doctor” was apparently only a doctor to those he felt like being a doctor to. According to the caste system in India, those girls and their mother are labeled “untouchables” (the lowest caste), and even in a life-or-death situation, that doctor was not going to touch them. The hierarchy of the castes is a concept that is deeply entrenched in Indian culture and has a reason for being, despite the fact that I cannot understand it. That’s how it is. I am not judging it in any way. It’s just that because of the way I was raised, and the many things I have seen in this world, I just can’t comprehend it.
    We managed to get through the night, and early the next morning the doctor from the orphanage center arrived and he, of course, had no problem examining her. He looked at her eyes, he took her pulse, and after checking her thoroughly, he said, “The only thing this girl has is a stomach virus.”
    “How can that be?” I asked, surprised. Most of us get sick when we eat a piece of chicken that hasn’t been cooked through, or poorly washed seafood, but these girls . . . these girls were born on the street and ate anything that crossed their path. Their bellies had to be made of iron! God knows what she must have eaten to become so ill!
    “I’m telling you,” he replied. “All she has to do is take this medicine and in a few hours she will be just fine.”
    So she took the medication, and within two hours that little girl was running from one side of the room to the other, climbing all over me. She grabbed the television’s remote control and kept asking what everything was.
    That day they slept in my friend’s hotel room. The next day we took the three girls and their mother to the orphanage, which isn’t in Calcutta proper, but instead about an hour’s drive outside the city. It was beautiful, because when we arrived, the rest of the girls came out to welcome us. They all looked so pretty, dressed in their uniforms with garlands of flowers around their necks. They also placed garlands around the necks of those of us who had just arrived.
    To this day, those three girls live in that center, where they are very happy. Later on, they were joined by their older sister, who had run away at the exact moment we’d picked the girls up. She was afraid because she didn’t know what our intentions were, but once she came to visit her sisters with her mother, and saw how well the girls were doing, she decided to stay there as well.
    The mother, however, went back to the streets. A Spanish woman who had heard about the situation gave her an apartment in order to get her off the streets, but after just one week of living there she decided to return to her corner, where she could beg. “I am happy here,” she said. “This is what I know. Leave me here. I don’t need anything else.”
    And even though she is in the streets, she is nevertheless an amazing mother. She visits her daughters on the weekends and maintains a relationship with them. Although they live apart, she seems happy to see that her daughters are living under better conditions than the ones she had to offer them.
    Today I am the three youngest girls’ sponsor, so I have been able to contribute to making their lives a little better. They are happy, but what they don’t know is that they have given me so much more than I could ever give them. They give me strength, they give me hope,