Children Shelters and the Summer of Love

What does the Summer of Love have to do with children's shelters?

That's the question I want to answer here now that I've answered another one I'd been asking myself for years:

Why don't I have any recollection of the Summer of Love?

I now realize that that was the summer I did volunteer work in Mexico through Amigos Anónimos.

"Damn!"  I thought.  "I missed out on The Summer of Love!"

Instead of getting high and psychedelic,  I wound up taking care of three newborn babies at La Casa de Mama Rosa,  an orphanage in Zamora, Michoacán.

Four months later I got this newspaper clipping from a Spanish woman who worked there too.  She'd written in Spanish "Doing your shifts until you come back."

I never went back. 

 I finished college, got my teaching credential, joined the Peace Corps, trained in Hawaii, and went to Tonga.  Then to Spain.  Then to Algeria.  But I never returned to visit these three babies.
What kind of mother was I?!

The next time I held a baby was when I was married and had my own.

  When I realized this week that my babies were now fifty, I Googled "orfanato de Zamora, Michoacán" and found several news releases from 2014.  

La Casa de Mama Rosa had been raided, and Mama Rosa had been arrested.

Before I read more than the lead-in paragraph, I searched for a group picture with her--the woman in the plaid dress.  At the time I, twenty-years-old, thought she was about fifty, but from the newspaper article I see that she was only thirty-two at the time--just a decade older than I was but old enough to have already been written up as"The Most Unforgettable Person I've Ever Met" in the Spanish edition of the Reader's Digest.  

 Mama Rosa was a kind woman, and I think she had very good intentions... and inadequate resources.

Then I read the article about the raid and her arrest, and I thought back fifty years.

Of course, I didn't take care of the babies every day all day, but I took my hours seriously.  As a college student in San Francisco I baby-sat even more than I dated--a lot--and was so determined to do a good job that I read Dr. Spock!  I knew it was important for babies to be held, and that's what I did--fed them and held them, hour after hour.

Now when I read the SF Chronicle's features on shelters for foster children, I feel ashamed that I didn't keep up with those babies and with what was happening there at the orphanage.  I look at my diary from 1967 and see that I wrote a lot more about the Mexican guy I met at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City than I wrote about the babies.

All I did was hold them while I was there.

But in a way, shamefully lax though I was afterwards, when I think of holding them, I think that maybe I didn't  miss out on the Summer of Love after all.