I met him when I was fourteen, when I was still living at the Aldea Infantil SOS de Granada (SOS Children’s Village in Granada). Carretera de Murcia, the houses spread out between the garden and the sports court, the Albayzín in the background as if the city were watching us out of the corner of its eye. I grew up there, in Aldeas Infantiles SOS España, in one of those houses. He wasn’t from my home: he came from somewhere else on the Aldeas map, from the Programa de Jóvenes (Youth Program). To me, back then, that sounded like an office, like turning eighteen, like a door closing. Grown-up stuff. Things I didn’t want to rush.
The first time, he didn’t take me to any meeting room. He stayed with us in the living room, with the smell of dinner and the TV turned down, that light of home that sometimes comforts and sometimes hurts. I was used to questions that came with the answer already in them: how are you doing in class, have you done your homework, have there been any incident reports, are you getting along at home. Questions that measure you and that, when they run out, leave you lonelier.
Miguel Ángel looked at me differently, as if there were room for me inside the sentence. And he asked me a question no one had ever asked me that way: “What is your dream?” He said it without smiling too much, without writing anything down in a folder, without hurrying, as if it fit in the air and didn’t have to ask permission. A knot formed in my throat and I shrugged. At fourteen, under a protection measure, dreams are spoken in a low voice. You learn early that the future is a formality: coming of age, leaving, and see what’s out there. Talking about what you would like seems like a luxury, or a trap, as if by naming it you might lose it.
He didn’t fill the silence. He waited, and that waiting disarmed me more than any advice. “Not what you’re supposed to,” he insisted, “what you’d like.” I said something small, a degree, a trade, a half-formed idea that not even I fully believed, said almost to the floor. He didn’t correct it or translate it into realistic options, nor did he explain the world to me to protect me from it. He nodded without fuss, like someone picking up something fragile, putting it in his pocket and showing it to no one. That was the detail: not the speech, but the question asked seriously of a teenage girl who lived far from her family and already suspected that care had an expiration date.
I had many dreams, but also a lot of fear.
Miguel Ángel supported me through the transition of leaving the Village when I came of age, and he still supports me. On the day the system declares you an adult and your body, nonetheless, still needs someone to turn to, a familiar voice, someone to call without having to explain everything from the beginning, your body is waiting for someone to care for you. His job was not to hold on to me, but to keep me from falling into the void on the day I came of age. To stay close without turning me back into a child. To hold me up without holding me too tightly.
That’s why he was also there on the good days, and not just the hard ones. At my graduation. The day I received the Excellence Scholarship for my master’s degree. Days that look like they belong in a brochure and that, when you have grown up in care, have a different tremor: the strangeness of having made it, the fear of not deserving it, the urge to turn around and check that one of your own is in the row. And he was there. Not as a job title, but as someone who had kept, years before, a sentence said in a low voice in a living room at the Village and had come back to see it come true.
Once I was an adult, we would meet at the Programa de Jóvenes office. I would walk in with my head full of the job contract, the enrollment, with that hurry of someone who has to prove they are making it. He didn’t start there: he asked about my goals, whether the dream still had the same name or had changed it. It seemed silly and it was, in fact, a way of telling me that he remembered me. In institutional care, what is extraordinary is not the plan, but that someone keeps a detail that is useless for the report and necessary for the person. Something you like. A sentence. A dream.
That, to me, is a portrait of someone who cares for young people in care. Not the hero, but the adult who sits on the sofa of a house that isn’t theirs, leaves the folder closed, calls you by your name and hands you back a small question so that, when the big one comes (where to live, what to study, who to call at two in the morning), it isn’t the first time someone has asked you what you want.
Caring for children in alternative care does not end at protecting them from harm. It also means not turning protection into a life without preferences, and not disappearing when those preferences start to come true. Miguel Ángel understood this before I had the words to ask for it: that a teenage girl under state guardianship doesn’t need someone else to build her life for her. She needs someone to stay close while she learns to dream it and, later, to celebrate it.
