One of the Afro-Dite girls, Gladys del Pilar, collapsed crying at an orphanage in Tallinn yesterday. “I lived for seven years at an orphanage. The memories became too overwhelming”.
Yesterday, the Afro-Dite girls decided to visit an SOS Childrens' Village in Keila *), thirty kilometres outside of Tallinn.
Gladys del Pilar decided to personally greet every child, but after two to three minutes she ran out of the room.
The other Afro-Dite girls, Blossom Tainton and Kayo Shekoni, ran after her to comfort her, and after ten minutes they went back inside. Later, Gladys del Pilar explained what had happened.
“I was so overwhelmed by emotions. This is the first time I've been at an orphanage since the time I used to live at one myself. That is twenty-seven years ago”, she says.
Gladys del Pilar and her twin sister were abandoned as new-borns on the stairs of an orphanage in Guayaquil in Ecuador. “The memories I have from those days are not very pleasant”, Gladys explains. At the age of seven, the two sisters were adopted by a single mother, Inga Werner from Örebro in Sweden. “She was a true godsend to us”, Gladys believes.
As Gladys was talking to the children, she “knew exactly how the children were feeling inside. I couldn't control my emotions.”
However, the rest of the three girls' day out went well.
*footnote: the SOS Childrens' Village in Keila was built in 1995. It houses children from all over Estonia between the age of three to sixteen. It is well organised, and the children are well looked after.
