Children’s Home: Where You’re Not Supposed to Leave Your Heart
One year and two months. That was the stretch of days when I visited the Home once a week as a volunteer.
Japan’s school year begins in April and ends in March. The two weeks between them are our spring holidays, and volunteers also take a break. When I returned after that brief interlude—on the first day of the new term—, the absence struck me before anything else. Sakura and Sumire, who shared the room with Arshleen, were gone. A child I had never seen now sat at Sakura’s desk. Arshleen told me her name and grade. I introduced myself to the new girl. She only blushed, in silence. It was understandable; she was only in second grade, six or seven years old.
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With Sakura and Sumire gone from the three-person room and an unfamiliar face added, the atmosphere had changed completely. That alone was disorienting, but what weighed on me more was that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to them.
Why hadn’t Tsubaki-san, the staff in charge of their room, told me? Had I known, I could have left them with something—some small keepsake to carry forward.
Yet, Tsubaki-san, unaware of my feelings, passed me in the corridor with his usual greeting and said nothing about Sakura and Sumire. And at the Home, time flowed on as if they had never existed at all; the children returning from school, homework spread across tables, the quiet hour before dinner, the brief freedom afterward.
For the next two months, I went about my days with the conflict weighing heavily on my mind.
When I told Tsubaki-san at the end of May that I would be quitting, he said “Oh,” swallowed whatever words followed, and then bowed deeply.
“Thank you very much for being with us for so long.”
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Only then did I realise that to him, fourteen months was long. To me, it had felt short.
When Arshleen learned I would no longer be coming, she would surely be angry. I had promised to see her off at the entrance when her mother recovered and came to take her home so they could live together again. I had given her my word that I would stay until then.
I handed Tsubaki-san the drawings and test papers I had been keeping for Arshleen tucked into a popular anime-themed clear plastic folder which my daughter had once given to me. All the children had wanted it, but I had only one.
When I added “I wish I could have given Sakura and Sumire something, too,” he murmured “Ah,” vaguely, and again said nothing about them. Perhaps it was due to confidentiality. But I wasn’t asking about the circumstances of their departure or who had taken them in. I only wanted the chance to say goodbye to the girls I had seen nearly every week for over a year.
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If one day Arshleen were to vanish from the Home just as suddenly, I might miss the opportunity to give her back her drawings and papers. Then, I would never be able to make her believe that I had been keeping her work safe.
There was a story why her drawings and papers had ended up with me.
She loves to draw, but she never kept her work. Her pictures drifted through the room like fallen leaves, mixed with abandon among school notices and worksheets. When Tsubaki-san told her to clean the room, she would crumple everything including her drawings, and throw them into the trash. That was how she kept her desk tidy.
I keep a selection of my own daughter’s childhood drawings. Children’s essays, pictures, marked exam papers—things that become memories—are what parents preserve as records of their child’s growth. So when I found one of Arshleen’s drawings in the trash, I picked it up and took it home.
“I’ll be here until the day you leave,” I said to Arshleen. From then on, whenever she got a test back, she began leaving it in my care.
She is gifted. When she drew in front of me and I told her so, she said, “You can have it,” and handed me the picture. I told her then that I had some of her discarded drawings at home. At first she didn’t understand, then didn’t believe me, and finally demanded proof. “Bring them with you next time.”
So I did.
She stared for a while at the drawing she herself had thrown away and forgotten. Then she said, “You can keep it.”
I replied, “You did a wonderful job, didn’t you? I’ll hold onto it until the day you leave here.” She frowned, looking skeptical. “But you’ll quit anyway, won’t you?”
Volunteers come and go constantly. Except for Ayame-san, a university student who sometimes showed up when I was there, no volunteers lasted more than a month. Ayame-san moved on two months before me, at the end of March. Apart from Ayame-san, university students majoring in early childhood education would come to spend two weeks with the children as part of their coursework for credit, only to depart again. This cycle repeated itself endlessly.
“I’ll be here until the day you leave,” I said to Arshleen. From then on, whenever she got a test back, she began leaving it in my care.
To be continued…
Image Courtesy: AI
Mayumi Yamamoto is a writer and academic based in Kyoto, Japan. Her poems have appeared in Literary Yard, and some opinions in Indian Periodical. She authored several published books in the Japanese language.
