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On The Other Side of the World

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On the other side of the world there is a city where the flat and dusty desert begins reaching for the Caspian Sea and it is called Atyrau. There is no glamor or glitz for a population that relies on the oil industry and the fish in the Ural River to eek out a day to day life. The cracked and crumbled buildings hug the edges of the equally cracked and crumbled roads as if holding in people who perhaps would flee this place if they could see the horizon beyond.

There's a place where trees grow, as our car turns onto a twisting lane that is silent as a secret from the city where it is hidden. The trees line this lane and they are large and old, brown and green, even though spring has not yet awakened. At the end of this journey there is a row of two story, white buildings perched alongside the river. Rows of doors and windows make stern faces on these buildings and an empty, gated playground bears a tiny metal slide and a row of swings.

This is the Atyrau Baby House, a place where a hundred and fifty orphans - age birth to three - live each day. Yet it seems no one is there at all.

A door opens half way and the orphanage doctor motions for us to come inside. She whispers her greeting and leads us through a maze of long and narrow rooms, connected by doors but never by halls. Each door is only open long enough for us to pass through, and each room forgets us as quickly as we go through it. The doctor walks along the edge of the rooms, next to the wall, where the hard wood is bare.

Finally, a door is opened and the doctor peers inside. A noise erupts from within, and she whispers something to someone we cannot see in words we do not understand. "There are children in here," our translator says to us, her own voice hushed. "A group of two and three year olds. They will be excited to see someone new here, please go through quickly."

We are ushered through the passage, and there are the children - about twenty of them -with shiny dark hair and glittering dark eyes that study our American faces in awe. They rise up to meet us and a little boy grabs my husband's hand as if asking if he can come along to the place that we are going without even questioning where that place might be. We are pulled from the place where those bright little souls hid, looking back at their faces as the door shut behind us.