Stories of Love

How Can A Life Be So Transformed?

To get to Badi School in Panama City, you drive through litter-strewn streets, avoiding potholes, past ramshackle homes in disrepair with bars on the windows, behind high walls and gates. But when you enter the school grounds, there's an island of green, with flowers, and well-kept, freshly- painted buildings. Children practice recorders, guitars and violins or are busy studying or making art.

Just a few years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Torrez started the school as a kindergarten in the carport of the trailer where they lived. Now it serves several hundred children from kindergarten through high school with a full academic curriculum and nationally recognized award-winning programs in the arts and music. The Torrez's have embarked on their next phase of development — to add a two-year teacher training program that will eventually become Badi University.

In one of our early visits to the school, Mr. Torrez brought a little boy to meet me. He was seven, but so small, he looked like a four-year old. He was shy, dressed in worn out clothes and hung his head like he didn't have enough energy to hold it up. I gave him a hug and took his picture to make him happy. Then Mr. Torrez introduced me to his parents. They were a wonderfully radiant couple who manned the “cantina” — a little room made out of corrugated tin sheets — where they sold snacks to the children during breaks.

Mr. Torrez told me the parents had come to him the year before, unemployed and without any money, begging him to take their son into the school. He did, of course, and then hired the couple to run the “cantina” for him.

The couple invited us to visit their home and we went the following day. A few blocks from the school, hidden behind some bushes and not visible from the street was a one-room structure made of cinder blocks. Inside was a single bed, one burner to cook on, one kettle, one pot and a few clothes hanging on a nail in the wall. That was their home.

I have thanked the person who provided the scholarship to that little boy a hundred times because I sawwith my own eyes that it not only saved a child — it saved a whole family.

Two years later I returned to Badi School and who should come to greet me but this same little boy. He ran toward me with a big smile, proudly wearing his school uniform — a beautiful green shirt and blue pants — and carrying his backpack.

It stopped me in my tracks, amazed, and I thought how can a life be so transformed? How can the scars of years of poverty and deprivation heal so quickly? But it was true. Like a withered flower that finally got the simple essential elements it needed to grow, the child standing before me was living proof that love wins it all. True care and providing an environment where the innate gifts of the young can be nurtured and developed can revive the whole world.

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