Authors: Claire Fontaine
I’m in the second day of Focus, the seminar following Discovery, and the past two days have been harrowing, rewarding, and plain old exhausting. It’s a smaller group, a handful of boys, including Jared and Robbie, as well as Sunny, Katrina, Roxanne. We’ve gone through another towel process, we’ve re-rediscovered our magical children, we’ve shared, we’ve sobbed. We’ve taken everything we did in Discovery to the next level, delving even deeper into what’s holding us back. For me, it’s how ugly and worthless the abuse made me feel.
Instead of David, we have Lou, a very little lady with a very big voice, who right now is asking us to vote ourselves and everyone else as a Giver or Taker. We tally our votes and line up in the order of the Giver votes, most to least. At least I won’t get reamed in this process; compared to everyone else, I have a decent number of Giver votes.
“Mia!”
I jump at hearing my name. Glenn whispers something in Lou’s ear. Why was I singled out? I’m not even at the Taker end of the line.
“Everyone who gave Mia a taker vote sit down. Of those of you standing, why did you vote the way you did?”
Roxanne volunteers, “I think Mia’s a Giver because she’s really unselfish, she’s always willing to listen to people and talks one on one with a lot of us.”
Sunny offers that I give really good feedback and am a good listener, and the rest of the girls basically reiterate what they said.
“Well, isn’t that interesting?” Lou muses, pacing back and forth. Then she stops about a foot in front of me and stares me straight in the eye.
“The feedback I’m hearing has nothing to do with you, Mia. So far I’ve heard nothing about what you give to others, just what you take from them. You listen? How is that giving, that’s taking in other people’s words, other people’s experiences. How often do you share in group, Mia?”
“I’ve made an effort since Discovery to open up in group.”
I see Glenn stand up in the back—this can’t be good.
“That effort consisted of sharing four times, Mia. You were real, you didn’t small talk, but considering we have group every day, I wouldn’t call that much of an effort.”
“Neither would I, neither would I,” Lou mutters. “It’s sad, Mia, because you take away from others the experience of sharing yourself with them. And that’s not what Focus is about. It’s about risk, it’s about standing powerfully as the gift that you are and the difference that you make. Your results don’t seem to indicate you want to be here.”
I swallow hard, resisting the urge to shout, “That’s not fair!” I
have
been trying lately, I’ve been curbing my attitude and making relationships. I raise my hand.
“It’s true, I have a harder time sharing in groups, but I’ve been working through my issues through letters to my parents or talking one on one with people. I don’t think it’s fair to base my progress only on group.”
Lou asks my family for feedback about this and they’re all very supportive. Maybe this will help sway her.
“Mia, notice how you create situations where others have to jump in to save you. Your family seems more eager for you to graduate from this training than you do. I experience you as being very selective about who you’re with because it gives you the illusion of control. That’s operating from a place of fear, which isn’t control, it’s cowardice. Young lady, you’re on thin ice. I want to see you get real and open up or you’re out, is that clear?”
I nod and sit down shakily. As she moves on to others, I think about what she said and start getting mad. Why is everything here based on sharing, like if you don’t publicize your life you’re not dealing? I hate how this place has this cookie-cutter idea of what change looks like. If you’re too quiet, you’re not showing up enough, if you talk too much, you’re playing show up games. You just can’t win.
Still, I’m so relieved to have not chosen out, I keep this last thought to myself.
Our final process is called our Stretch, and I’d rather face a charging bull. I have to put on glittery makeup and twirl around like a butterfly to Mariah Carey. Being Surfer Barbie would be less humiliating. It’s meant to get us out of our comfort zones by taking on the persona of the part of us we avoid most. I don’t see how making a total jackass out of myself will help me “grow.”
Jared seems equally thrilled by the idea of donning a tutu and exploring his
feminine side as a ballerina, and Katrina’s hyperventilating at having to clod around as a sumo wrestler. Watching pounds of fake flesh jiggle has got to be a nightmare for someone who panics at eating more than a piece of lettuce.
We’ve spent the last two hours creating costumes from scratch, practicing moves, and making ourselves up. The center of the floor is cleared as a stage.
Samantha starts it off as Bananarama’s “Venus.” My jaw drops when I see our dark and moody Samantha dancing and twirling around in a costume of colored paper, streamers, and face paint as she lip-syncs. She looks radiant and I cheer loudly when she dances past me, trying to get her to hear my voice over Sunny’s whooping and clapping.
When her song finishes, we watch three guys shimmy and shout as the Pointer Sisters. They were so pissed when they found out their Stretch, the only reason the words homo or fag didn’t come out of their mouths was because they knew they’d get dropped. But something must have happened in the last few hours, because right now they’d put drag queens to shame!
Then the tone changes. An ethereal melody begins to play and the lights dim. Fabric rustles in the darkness. As low lights rise, Jared and two other boys begin to move slowly around the room to the “Nutcracker Suite.” It’s unbelievable to watch, it’s not Jared in front of me in a pink tutu, but some otherworldly creature moving slowly, surely, with grace and strength. They’re all beautiful. Not in a feminine way, in a powerful, peaceful way.
Any thought of their looking ridiculous has completely dissipated. Laughing at them would be like laughing at unicorns or angels. When they glide out, there’s not a dry eye in the room.
Just as Katrina begins to sumo wrestle her way around the floor to our applause and laughter, Sasha taps me from behind and whispers for me to get ready. I’m so nervous I think that releasing all the butterflies inside would be a more entertaining Stretch than watching me pretend to be one.
Covered in a brown potato sack, I sit under two chairs pushed together (my cocoon) and wait for the music. When I hear the first few notes of the song, I take a deep breath and start wiggling my way from under the chairs and out of the sack. Sasha did my hair and makeup earlier with sparkling green eye shadow, blush, and lip gloss. Under the potato sack I wear tights, a long billowing shirt, and I tied the ends of a shimmering scarf to each of my hands. When I let the sack fall I feel naked, almost how I did that morning I woke up on Derek’s sofa.
I try to remember the steps I planned out but I draw a blank and start to freeze up. Fuck it, I already feel dumb. Slowly, I start twirling around, circling
the scarves around me and feeling completely idiotic. Then, I start to let loose and move to the music’s beat, and suddenly, I’m having fun as my body takes the lead. I’m dancing like I used to when my parents left the house and I’d closed all the blinds. I spin, I stag leap, I twirl.
I feel weightless and angelic. When I reach Sunny, I see tears in her eyes. Being a girl always made me feel weak; I equated femininity with violation. But this feeling of female beauty and grace is awesome, empowering. The song ends, the lights dim, and I’m told to close my eyes. I hear feet rustling up to me and I’m told to let myself fall back. When I do, I fall into hands that lift me high into the air and hold me there.
“…She’s a sparrow, but she’s an eagle when she flies…” I listen to Dolly Parton with my eyes closed, allowing myself to feel the support of everyone’s hands. As it winds down, I feel myself lowered and open my eyes to meet those of everyone else smiling down at me.
Everything I wanted, love, belonging, feeling beautiful, feeling wanted, it’s all here, enveloped in the arms of eighteen people I met barely four months ago.
I’m guided to the “Oasis,” a chair in the corner with a plate of fruit next to it and a wash basin on the floor. I look down and see Roxanne smiling gently at me as she puts my feet into the warm, bubbly water. Her Stretch is to serve others, which is perfect for someone who is used to being waited on hand and foot. I tilt my head back, reach for some grapes, and enjoy a foot massage.
I feel as if a new me is awakening. Or perhaps reawakening. Initially, I found my Stretch fitting in that it helped me embrace femininity as a strength, rather than a source of pain. A butterfly is able to fly precisely
because
it’s so delicate.
On a deeper level, though, it signified a transformation I’ve been undergoing. Just as a caterpillar cocoons itself away for protection, I began to shield myself from the world a long time ago. But, I had become so comfortable in it that, rather than protect me, I let it define me, stifle me. I became the shield, not the butterfly. Literally and metaphorically, my Stretch was about the shedding of a self that no longer serves me. One I’m now glad to see go.
“We’re being raided.” It’s Glenn, early on a Friday morning.
I’m sure I’ve heard wrong. “You’re what?”
“Someone said we’re abusing the kids, Claire. The police are taking them and strip-searching them. I’m going to need help.”
My hand shot up with everyone else’s as soon as Glenn asked for kids to be interviewed about Morava and now ten of us are on our way to the police station. Where did they get the idea that they starve and torture us? It’s so preposterous, we had a good laugh until the look on Glenn’s face told us she wasn’t joking.
When our van pulls up to the station, a lady from the American embassy has us wait outside. She says they’re still interviewing the previous group of kids.
“Still?” Jared exclaims.
“What are they doing in there for so long?” Roxanne asks.
We murmur in agreement, but the woman just shrugs before going back inside. Hours pass. We’re freezing, hungry, and getting really worried, but there’s also an anxious excitement in the air—the sudden change in schedule, unsupervised conversations with boys, just being outside in the world, much less riding to a police station in a foreign country.
A man loitering watches us with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The smell is making us drool. Robbie gives in and bums one; the man gives us a handful out of pity. Everything about the day is so crazy, and we’re all so nervous, what the hell.
The embassy woman comes back out and says they won’t be interviewing us after all, so back we go. When we rejoin our families back at Morava, several girls who were in the station before us are crying. They were strip-searched and photographed, with men in the room and the door open. And they accuse Glenn of abuse? What the fuck is wrong with these people!
Ten hours after Glenn’s call, I’m leaving the Prague airport in a rental car with two other mothers and a stepdad. We’re anxious and uncertain, but confident we’ll fix whatever’s wrong. We’re Americans, we’re hardwired to think everything’s possible.
We piece together what we know on the four-hour drive to Morava: a Czech employee angry over being fired for poor performance told police that kids who went to OP—Observational Placement, program-speak for time out—were physically abused.
The police showed up yesterday unannounced and hauled in the kids who had been in OP, offered them coffee, cigarettes, and plane tickets home, then interviewed and strip-searched them for signs of abuse. None was found but eight of them said they were abused (handcuffed, tied up, forced to defecate on the floor, given limited food and water). Three of these kids asked for tickets home; the other five wanted to return to Morava. The police took the eight kids to spend the night in what they said was an “orphanage.”
They brought the remaining fifty kids in, made the same offers, and started strip-searching them until the American Embassy made them stop. Police refused to interview any of them because they wouldn’t corroborate any abuse and accused the eight of lying. One group of boys was so upset at not being able to speak that they broke and threw things in the station until police finally interviewed several to pacify them. When their case manager, Dusana, pointed out that police deliberately mistranslated the kids’ words, she was threatened with arrest and forbidden any further contact with students.
On the way, we’re to meet the detective in charge of the investigation, Karel, at a McDonald’s to pick up the kids who spent the night in the orphanage. As we reach the tiny golden arches attached to an ancient building, he calls to tell us that the kids went to Morava this morning. He apparently found it amusing to send us on a wild-goose chase to the quintessential symbol of American capitalism. This is prophetic.
“Mothers! Oh, mother hug!” hits us the second we walk in Morava’s doors as fifty weepy, hyper boys and girls surround us. A few staff who speak no English move about, but the kids seem in charge of themselves. The teens range from fourteen to nearly eighteen, but in their distress they seem like
small children. Some cling and cry, others are tense and withdrawn, all are angry, saying some version of, “They listened to a few kids say they were abused instead of fifty other kids who said they were lying!”
Mia isn’t in the group, so a boy starts down the girls’ hallway to get her. A tall young man chastises him, “That’s a Cat 3, Off Area.” He’s obviously a senior boy, but the student doing the most to comfort everyone is a diminutive boy with huge dark eyes, who rotates holding and reassuring whoever’s crying. He pulls on my sleeve.
Charles speaks slowly, sometimes struggling for words. “They tried to arrest Dusana she couldn’t stop crying I had to hold her I was her only support Miss Fontaine!”
He blinks back tears, then turns to comfort a kid a foot taller than he is. A chubby Husky puppy charges out of a hallway. Gizmo! The kids race around after him. Barking, crying, hugging, reporting, it’s pandemonium.
“Mommy!”
I turn and my little monkey runs into my arms. She had no idea I was coming.
“I can’t believe you’re here! I love you! Are you going to help Glenn and Steve?”
I have a million questions, but I’m content just to hold her and listen to her voice. Her eyes sparkle again!
I recognize her voice first, but it’s when I see the mass of hair that I gasp. My mom’s here! She turns at my voice, her eyes light up, and she has just enough warning to brace herself as I practically bowl her over in my excitement.
Her smell! When I bury my face in her sweater, it’s the familiar mix of baby powder and Fracas that makes me tear up.
“Mommy, I missed you so much!” I whisper. I close my eyes so my senses can take everything in and I temporarily forget that, considering the state of things, parents showing up can’t be good. Does this mean I’m going home?
“He promised to punish Morava for firing him,” Peter says, shaking his head.
We’ve regrouped in the main office where Peter, the Czech head of staff for the boys, sits amid ringing phones and disarray. The police confiscated the kids’ files and all but two computers. He looks much older than the sweet-faced young man I met at the airport last summer.
He waves at the ringing phones. “Leave them, it’s just shitty journalists, pardon my word.” He fills us in, lowering his voice because we can hear the muffled sound of the kids listening outside the door.
The fired worker didn’t go to local police, who are very familiar with Morava and support it; he went to the state police, a more powerful, often corrupt, entity. Peter says most are ex-KGB, “Who have no more jobs spying on Czechs and who hate Americans. Of course, they find no marks from abuse, which is problem for them because now it’s on the news everywhere about how they exposed American torture school.”
State police apparently alerted the media ahead of time. Peter’s friends at the Santon Hotel told him that reporters spent the night there before the raid, “waiting like hungry dogs.”
The dogs will be hungry all week. We’ll be besieged around the clock by reporters and news cameras from all over the globe, by state police, immigration officials, local gawkers. It’s the beginning of a tragedy, and the vultures have begun circling already.
Glenn and Steve return and slip into their wing. They’re under house arrest, a gag order, and forbidden contact with the kids. What’s happening is already etched on Glenn’s beautiful face. She’s devastated and very grateful we’ve come.
We’ll soon see why. The owners will send only a single consultant, a personable man named Roger, who will be gone with officials and lawyers most of the time. Which is staggering given the following: There’s no one really running the facility, all six people who directly supervise the kids, their “parents” here, are forbidden contact with them—Glenn, Steve, Peter, Zuza, Eva, Dusana (Tyna had quit two weeks earlier); a lot of the Czech staff has already fled because they fear the state police; reporters are traumatizing the kids by crawling through bushes to film in their bedroom windows; and no one is responding to the outright lies in the press.
The company hasn’t spoken to the teens, they have no idea who was stripped, who was sent home, or that the “orphanage” turns out to be a halfway house where addicts offered them drugs. Some of the kids had sex, one with a Czech heroin addict, and the head of the investigation, Karel, stayed in a bedroom with some of them, clad only in his red underwear.
“And they weren’t boxers, either, Miss Fontaine, it was so gross!”
The company apparently hasn’t spoken to parents yet, either. Our second day there, a furious parent calls asking how the hell it’s possible his kid is calling him from the skies above his own home. We’ll be on phones 24/7 for the next week with parents, trying to inform them, console them, calm them.
The company does begin to call parents, but their information is often outdated or incorrect. For some reason, they won’t call us for correct information and they avoid our calls to them. In fact, they’re clearly annoyed we’re here and the owner is “unreachable.” This is mystifying given that we are now running their school and seeing to the emotional well-being of over fifty kids whose lack of it landed them there to begin with—kids whose lives are in their care, and whose parents are paying dearly for that care.
We’re worried their cavalier response means they’ve already decided Morava’s a lost cause. Not if we can help it. This is the first place that’s helped our kids and, despite our current dismay, we’re going to do whatever we can to save it.
Three more mothers arrive and we immediately divide up duties: recreating student files; property patrol (press and gawkers trespass continually); photographing kids and facility for documentation; police liaison; media monitor; ticketing and packing up kids already transferring to stateside facilities. Thank God one of us is an experienced travel agent, because we’re afraid it’s going to come in handy. In the next eight days, none of us will get more than ten to twelve hours’ sleep total.
We work round-the-clock trying to arrange calls between parents and kids, to reassure both of them. Most difficult for us is figuring what to say to the kids whose parents won’t talk to them, either out of indifference or because they’re still too angry at their kids. One boy keeps asking if his parents are back from vacation yet.
A fragile Asian girl whose father won’t speak to her begs me to convince him how sorry she is. He hasn’t written her once since she arrived a few months ago. She sinks to the floor, clutching my ankles, sobbing, “I know I’ve shamed my family! I want him to forgive me!” I understand now why Duane nearly blew us out of our seats for doubting their guilt. And how terrible my silence must have felt to Mia.
We have very little time to spend with our own kids, though I observe Mia from a distance as much as I can. She cries less than the others, and
then only for a moment. She often observes rather than participates, and she seems reflective, knowing. This is a Mia I have not seen before, perhaps one she is growing into.
“Are you open to some feedback?”
Sunny and I have cornered my mother for a talk. I wasn’t going to say anything but after asking Sunny to give her some papers, the look on her face changed my mind.
“Are you crazy? She’ll bite my head off!”
We steer my mom to the bottom of a staircase, away from the chaos. She looks both exasperated and amused, as if to say, I’ll go, but is this really necessary?
“Okay, Sunny, tell her what you told me.”
Her eyes bug out, then she takes a breath. “Hi, Ms. Fontaine. I’m sure you’re just the nicest person in the world, I was just a little afraid is all.”
“Sunny was completely intimidated by you, Mom!” I interrupt. “Granted, some of that’s her, but you make yourself pretty unapproachable.”
“Yeah, I can really see where Mia gets her stuff from!” Sunny exclaims before bashfully clapping her hand over her mouth.
My mom laughs. “It’s okay, Sunny, I really appreciate this. I heard similar things in Discovery and obviously they haven’t sunk in! What ‘stuff’ did you notice?”
Wow, that came out of left field. I’d made a whole game plan for how to approach her with the assumption that she’d get defensive and argumentative.
“Mostly, how much you avoid emotion,” Sunny goes on more boldly. “I know whenever Mia’s in pain, she goes into action mode to avoid it.”
“Sound familiar, Mom? Remember during the big earthquake when Paul and I ran outside freaking out and you were on your hands and knees looking for our shoes?”
“I’m doing it now, aren’t I?” she interrupts.
We look at each other a minute. She’s smiling ever so slightly and I can feel pride radiating from her, though I’m the one that’s proud of her.
Each of us gets a group of kids to “parent.” I have eight boys who are absolutely charming. I’m surprised to find that the boys are more tender-hearted than the girls. They cry more openly and when they find out I still sing Mia lullabies, they want them, too.
One boy, David, gravitates to me. He’s dark-haired and handsome,
gawky-tall the way boys that age are. His family emigrated to the United States from Russia a few years back. David is the school’s biggest run risk. He’s told Steve he’s going to run and no one doubts him—he can speak passing Czech and hasn’t formed close relationships with other students. He’s the least upset or angry of all the kids, because he has no illusions.
“State police are the same in Russia. You guys are wasting your time, they’re laughing at us.”
My mother says almost the same thing when I call her.
“Take Mia and get the hell out of there before they throw you all in jail.”
“But we haven’t done anything wrong, Mom.”
“You think that matters? You think everybody loves Americans?”