Me (19 page)

We managed to get through the night, and early the next morning the doctor from the orphanage center arrived and he, of course, had no problem examining her. He looked at her eyes, he took her pulse, and after checking her thoroughly, he said, “The only thing this girl has is a stomach virus.”

“How can that be?” I asked, surprised. Most of us get sick when we eat a piece of chicken that hasn’t been cooked through, or poorly washed seafood, but these girls . . . these girls were born on the street and ate anything that crossed their path. Their bellies had to be made of iron! God knows what she must have eaten to become so ill!

“I’m telling you,” he replied. “All she has to do is take this medicine and in a few hours she will be just fine.”

So she took the medication, and within two hours that little girl was running from one side of the room to the other, climbing all over me. She grabbed the television’s remote control and kept asking what everything was.

That day they slept in my friend’s hotel room. The next day we took the three girls and their mother to the orphanage, which isn’t in Calcutta proper, but instead about an hour’s drive outside the city. It was beautiful, because when we arrived, the rest of the girls came out to welcome us. They all looked so pretty, dressed in their uniforms with garlands of flowers around their necks. They also placed garlands around the necks of those of us who had just arrived.

To this day, those three girls live in that center, where they are very happy. Later on, they were joined by their older sister, who had run away at the exact moment we’d picked the girls up. She was afraid because she didn’t know what our intentions were, but once she came to visit her sisters with her mother, and saw how well the girls were doing, she decided to stay there as well.

The mother, however, went back to the streets. A Spanish woman who had heard about the situation gave her an apartment in order to get her off the streets, but after just one week of living there she decided to return to her corner, where she could beg. “I am happy here,” she said. “This is what I know. Leave me here. I don’t need anything else.”

And even though she is in the streets, she is nevertheless an amazing mother. She visits her daughters on the weekends and maintains a relationship with them. Although they live apart, she seems happy to see that her daughters are living under better conditions than the ones she had to offer them.

Today I am the three youngest girls’ sponsor, so I have been able to contribute to making their lives a little better. They are happy, but what they don’t know is that they have given me so much more than I could ever give them. They give me strength, they give me hope, and they make me see what is truly beautiful in life, because they have taught me that the only thing one really requires to live is the urge to breathe.

Everything in life arrives at its moment. Those girls came into my life at the time when I most needed them, to ground me and show me a touch of simplicity. They forced me to reassess my priorities and they showed me that true beauty in life usually exists in the simplest of things. They appeared at a time in my life when I wanted to please my record label, the members of my band, my family, my friends . . . but what I didn’t realize was that by trying to please everyone else, I was betraying myself, because I was not thinking about myself, about what I really needed to be happy. I believed that my happiness consisted of pleasing others, and that ruined me for a long time. With the girls I learned that happiness really appears at the times when one is finally able to detach from all those types of complications.

They would say to me, “Come and sit on the floor. We’re going to play.” They had only three pebbles, and that’s what we played with. So how is it that we need all of these things—computers, video games, televisions, sound systems, cars—to have a good time? These girls taught me that if my clothes are ironed, it’s fine, and that if they’re not, that’s fine as well. Most of the things we often consider “important” really aren’t that important in the big scheme of things. Life is as simple or as complicated as we make it.

After I met the girls and discovered the simplicity with which they lived and the innocence they carried in their souls despite the hard lives they had lived, I felt an immense desire to reconnect with Kiki, that boy I abandoned when I got on a plane on that rainy day in San Juan. There is something so beautiful in the innocence of youth, and it breaks my heart to know that there are so many children out there who are stripped of their basic right to just be kids.

WHEN I LOOK back, I realize that those trips to India marked me in a very profound way. One might think it was all a big coincidence that I went through both of these experiences in this extraordinary country, but deep in my heart I know it is not the case. I know that the cosmos sent me these lessons because that is how it had to be, and because there is something in that country, with its colors, its people, and its energy, that vibrates with the same frequency as my soul.

Everything I ask of the cosmos comes when it is meant to come. It took me a while to understand this, but now that I know it and have integrated it into my own philosophy, I live a much more peaceful life. Instead of worrying about what might be or what could have been, I stay focused on the present and on what I need to do to reach my own happiness, because whatever it is I may be lacking, I know the cosmos will ultimately send my way.

It was thanks to the silence I found through the teachings of my swami that I could for the first time look at myself in the mirror and see who was really standing there. In the peace and tranquillity of the ashram, the daily rituals of cleaning, cooking, and meditation, I found the bubble of silence that I needed to reconnect with the boy I once was. I could open myself to the universe to hear what it was telling me, and what I found was a world of beauty and transparency. From that moment on, I found the equilibrium I so longed for, and for the first time I understood that what I want most out of life is to give—and to give in this very concrete manner—because ultimately, it is the very best way to receive.

In India I found what I consider to be the three keys of life: serenity, simplicity, and spirituality. I was able to comprehend the enormous blessing that is my life, and I discovered that true wealth does not exist outside, but instead lives inside of me. From that moment on, gratitude became a huge part of my life, and instead of hiding all the things that caused me pain and discomfort, I started to look at them head-on, without fear.

I’M SURE I’M NOT ALONE, BUT I SPEND A LOT OF TIME
searching for my life’s purpose. Of course, I want to have the kind of work I am passionate about, a family that loves me, and friends who support me . . . but deep down, beneath all of those things that are more like needs than anything else, lives my desire to contribute to the world in a profound and lasting way. Ultimately, my presence on this earth will only last a short time (relatively speaking), and the desire to leave a mark is a very natural thing.

For a long time I thought my way of contributing to the world, of showing gratitude for all the miracles and favors received, was through music. When I get up to sing onstage in front of thousands of people, I feel a very human and powerful vibration. Music allows me to connect with the audience at a visceral level, and through music I feel that I transmit my entire essence, my very being. It is a unique privilege to be able to feel what I feel when I’m up there, and this sentiment has always made me believe that this was my mission: to convey joy, rhythm, and movement to others.

But after my last trip to India I began to realize performing onstage was simply not enough. Even though being onstage gave me immense satisfaction, it is a satisfaction that only really serves me. The three girls, and my experiences in their country, made me realize what I was really missing.

I WAS AT a point in my life when I was questioning everything. The feeling of helping these girls had been so powerful that I no longer knew if music was really my mission, or if it had simply been a tool that helped me find the path to philanthropy and helping the most defenseless among us. I came back from India thinking deeply about what my friend told me, and how those three girls could have easily fallen into human trafficking. When I returned home, I spent three days sleeping because of how drained I felt after everything I had seen. The experience with the three girls shook me so profoundly, and I was still not sure how I was going to fit this newly gained awareness into the rest of my life. I knew I didn’t want to go on with my life as before, and that I had to do something; I just didn’t know what it was.

When I finally got out of bed, after resting for what felt like an eternity, I began to investigate. I went online and started to read everything I could about human trafficking. I realized that this was not only a problem in India, and that it is actually an epidemic that affects the whole world. I realized that in reality it isn’t necessarily a question of wealth or poverty, but that it is actually an issue of values, of human rights—which makes it all the more tragic. As long as there are people who want to continue believing that boys or girls should be exploited for the simple reason that they are young and defenseless, this type of crime will continue to exist.

My reading awoke a lot of rage, anger, and frustration within me. I learned that each year more than 1 million children become victims of trafficking. Do you know what that means, more than 1 million children every year? That means that every day, almost three thousand kids are kidnapped, sold, abused, and God knows what else. And most are girls. There are men who are willing to pay $15,000 for the virginity of an eight-year-old girl. The fact that there are men out there who think this way is incomprehensible, and in my opinion anyone who allows this to happen and to keep happening deserves to be imprisoned.

After doing all this research, realizing everything that was at stake, and seeing what can be done, I went to Washington, D.C., and met people who to this day are my mentors in the fight against human trafficking. They taught me everything I needed to know to help me further this fight in a tangible way, and have guided me so that I could help in the most effective way possible.

And that’s how I began working for the cause. I think there was a bit of selfishness in my desire to help, because I did it in large part to relieve myself of the pain I felt upon witnessing such a tragedy. I needed a form of catharsis, a way to do away with all the anguish, the rage, and the frustration I felt upon seeing what could have happened to my three girls and to the millions of children who suffer each day at the hands of abusive adults. It is an infuriating situation, because it somehow feels like you’re swimming against the current. There is so much work to be done that anything I did wouldn’t be more than a drop in the ocean. You might be able to rescue one child, but every day there are thousands more who continue to be forced into prostitution or to become sex slaves—this is the reality of modern slavery, and the saddest part about it is that it happens in cities all over the world.

So, what
can
be done?

When I took an interest in this cause, I knew it was not going to be easy. It’s not that the situation was being ignored completely, because much has been discussed and written on the subject for many years. However, a true awareness of the gravity of what is really going on was lacking. The crime happens on various levels: The term “human trafficking” includes the factories that exploit their workers, prostitution, forced labor, sexual exploitation of minors, servitude, and organ trafficking. Within prostitution, there is child prostitution and child pornography. It is a pyramid with various levels.

The more I researched, the more I found. I educated myself on even the smallest details, which is how the People for Children project of the Ricky Martin Foundation came to be; through it, we defend children who are being exploited or who run the risk of exploitation. This project, which has been in effect for many years, was born from the rage I felt after what I saw, and all the people whom I met. It is my way of supporting the cause, although I know that the work we do will never be enough. I would like to be able to do so much more.

PEOPLE FOR CHILDREN was actually an offshoot of a foundation that already existed, the Ricky Martin Foundation. The foundation was started to help disabled children in Puerto Rico, a project undertaken with the help of the Easter Seals/SER organization of Puerto Rico, through which a children’s rehabilitation center was created. What happened was that Easter Seals/SER already had a rehabilitation center in San Juan, the capital. But there are children who live elsewhere on the island who could not get to this location because of distance. So we created a rehabilitation center in Aibonito, a town located in the center of the island, where people can easily come from farther away. Ever since its doors were opened, children have been able to receive treatment that was not previously available to them.

Later, when the foundation was up and running, we decided to broaden the spectrum of its functions to bring music to the children of Puerto Rico. And like so many things in my life, the project was born out of sheer happenstance. Or was it?

My niece, who at the time was attending art school, is a flute player, and she was showing me the flute her father had just bought for her. But while we were talking, she mentioned something that surprised me: She sometimes had to lend her flute to other kids in the class because they didn’t have one.
What?!
I thought. An island like Puerto Rico, with its beautiful musical traditions, and the kids don’t even have instruments! So I looked further into the matter, and informed myself more about musical education in the school system of my island, and I realized that it simply didn’t exist. I called the Department of Education of Puerto Rico several times, and I discovered that at that time there was not one single desk that was focused on music, and if there was, they just didn’t answer the phone. I don’t know if things have changed since then, but I certainly hope so. Investigating a bit more, I realized that some schools did have music departments with classes and a few instruments, but generally the instruments were already used or in terrible condition, and they are usually scarce. Like in many parts of the world, there are never sufficient funds for education, much less for music.