The Barbed Wire Garden

On the night someone broke in, and the wall we built after, and the corner I refused to give up.

The house in Quito sits at ten thousand feet, on a slope outside the city, with a Spanish-tile roof I had wanted since I was a girl and the perfect kitchen I designed just for me while lying awake at night, reaching for things in the dark. Reaching for the colander before I knew I needed it. The salt where my hand would go. We bought it in 2012. I was thirty-something with three children and a ministry I had just helped found, and I thought I had reached the place where life gets steady. I thought the pinnacle was an actual elevation you climbed to and stood on.

The backyard was overgrown when we moved in — like a small forest grove behind the glass wall that ran the whole back of the house, no curtains because no one could see in. I worked with a gardener who kept wanting to make everything trim and square, the way Ecuadorian gardens are supposed to look, and I kept telling her, no, I want it wild on purpose. I want it to look like it grew that way. She was patient with me. She drew sketches and we walked the yard together and eventually she made it the way I had been trying to describe: meandering stone path, asymmetrical beds, plants overflowing into each other. Wildness, but planned.

The covered porch was the heart of it. We put wicker furniture out there. We hung hummingbird feeders. Bobby and I would sit in the late afternoon and watch the sparkling violetears came in to drink — the ones with the iridescent green bodies and the violet patches on the sides of their heads — and watch the butterflies, and at dusk the fireflies, and beyond all of that the volcano on the horizon. Pichincha. Active, occasionally smoking, always there. The weather at that altitude on the equator stays between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees most days. Perfect, if you are a hot-natured person, which I am. You can sit on a porch like that all day and not need a sweater and not need air conditioning and not need anywhere else to be.

It was the most peaceful place I have ever known.

What I did not understand then is that you can finish the kitchen of your dreams and a year later be sitting at the counter trying not to weep into the dishes. The pinnacle is not a destination. It is a place you are passing through.

* * *

I will not tell you the specific shape of what came next, because the story does not belong only to me. I will say that within a few years of moving in, our family entered a long season of difficulty I had not seen coming and was not equipped for — the kind of season that involves mental health crises and choices about how to keep people you love safe and alive — and we made the decision to spend the school years in the United States to be near family. Five years of bouncing back and forth. Two months in Ecuador in the summer. A few weeks here. A few weeks there. The house sat without us for most of every year.

I cried during those years more than I have cried in any other season of my life. Some of that was for what was happening inside our family. Some of it was for the work I had left behind, the children at Agua Viva, the staff who carried things while I was gone, the version of myself I only had access to when I was in Quito. I would dream about the porch. I would wake up in Alabama and feel for a second the cold tile floor of a kitchen six thousand miles away.

There is a particular grief that comes from giving up the place you love for the people you love. I do not know that anyone tells you to expect it. It is the right thing to do, and you do it without much hesitation, and it still takes years off your life.

In 2020, the youngest was finishing elementary school. We had a window — a moment when everyone was stable enough and old enough — to move back full-time. I was forty-something now. Ecuador had become the place I returned to instead of the place I lived in, and I needed to live in it again before too much more time passed.

We moved back in May 2020.

You can imagine how that went.

* * *

COVID hit Ecuador hard. Guayaquil was on the international news because the morgues filled and the bodies were left in the streets while officials tried to figure out what to do. The country closed. We had curfews. We had license-plate days, when only certain plate numbers could drive. We had to wear masks in the car alone. For about eighteen months there was no in-person school.

For me, this was not the worst of it. We had a small bubble — Sophie Moncayo, my partner in this work for almost two decades, the closest thing to a sister I have, and her family — and we did the holidays together. We carved pumpkins. We dyed Easter eggs. We celebrated Christmas and New Year. The pandemic took a lot from a lot of people, and I do not want to pretend otherwise, but for me it was eighteen months of being able to sit on the porch and not feel like I was about to lose it again. I was home. I was working. The hummingbirds were there.

Meanwhile, on the coast, the cartels were getting worse. Not new — Ecuador has been in their corridor for a long time — but the violence was escalating in ways that made the news every week. Kidnappings. Bombings. Prison riots. The city of Guayaquil became one of the most dangerous in the hemisphere. Up in the mountains, we felt insulated. The mountains usually do feel insulated, until they don’t.

In late 2022 our team was asked to lead a children’s ministry event on the coast. Several hundred kids over a few days. We flew the whole staff over. The house was empty for the first time in months.

Coincidence of all coincidences, that night someone broke in.

* * *

They had studied us. That was the part I could not stop thinking about afterward. They knew where the cameras were and avoided most of them. They knew the back of the property is shielded from neighbors by the slope of the land, the way I had loved when we bought the house. They got all the way to the back door before they triggered the alarm. They smashed the glass. They went through every room. They went through every drawer. Every drawer. They were in my underwear. They were in the bedside table where I keep the things you keep next to a bed. They went through our kid’s room. They went out my bedroom balcony and dropped down and ran.

The security company called us that night. Everyone we would have sent to check on the house was with us, two hours away by plane or ten by car. We found a friend who could go. We knew there would be no resolution. There never is, in Ecuador, for things like this. It is too common. The police take a report - if you can get them to come - and the report goes nowhere.

What is strange is that I did not really fall apart over the loss. They did not get the things that mattered most to me. My emerald ring was hidden where they did not think to look. We were physically safe. The dog was safe. They did not burn anything down. By the standards of what cartel violence was doing to other people that year, we had been only lightly grazed.

What broke me was the next night, after we got home. I stood in front of my lingerie drawer and looked at the disheveled stacks of folded clothes someone had pawed through, and I thought: they touched all of this. They were in here. They knew where to come.

Someone had been watching. Someone had decided which night.

The violation was not the loss of stuff. The violation was the discovery that the place I had thought of as private was a place that someone had been learning.

* * *

A month later, Bobby and I started talking about the wall.

I did not want the wall. Almost every other house in Ecuador has a wall — six feet, eight feet, ten feet, brick or concrete, topped with broken glass or razor wire or electric fence or all three. Ours had been one of the rare exceptions, because of how the land sloped and how the neighbors sat. The wall-less view was part of the reason we had bought the place. The glass back of the house was part of why I had wanted it. I had spent a decade trying not to live behind a wall.

But Bobby is wise, and our security people were clear, and the people in our small Ecuadorian community whom I trust were unanimous, and I knew before I admitted it that the wall was not optional. Whoever had broken in had not been caught and would not be caught and could come back. They had picked us. We had been picked.

I cried a lot during those weeks. I went back and forth and back and forth — what if we do this instead, what if we extend only here, what if we add cameras instead of a wall, what if — and Bobby was patient with me. We compromised in one place: we kept one corner of the property open, just enough to keep a sightline to Pichincha. I would not give up the volcano. I had given up enough.

When the wall went up, I cried again.

And then I made my own peace with it the only way I knew how, which was to refuse to let it be ugly.

I spent weeks online searching for ironwork. I did not want the cold vertical bars I have seen on every other Ecuadorian house. I did not want a fortress aesthetic. I wanted something that read like garden before it read like fence. I sketched. I sent ideas to a metal worker. I designed a curving piece of bronze ironwork with cutout flowers in it, set into the open corner — a piece of metalwork that holds the volcano view and keeps us safer and is, on its own, a beautiful thing.

The ironwork went in. It held. It still holds.

There is electric fence wire running along the top of the brick. You can see it if you look — a thin line above the warm orange brick, a faint silver against the green of the climbing flowers that have grown up to cover the wall. That is what is actually keeping the people out. The bronze ironwork is what is keeping me in.

* * *

I sit on that porch most mornings. The hummingbirds still come. The volcano is still there in the corner I refused to give up. The wall is there too — terracotta brick, electric wire along the top, beauty in the corner. All of it at once.

This is the platform’s name. This is what The Barbed Wire Garden is.

Twenty-five years of working with vulnerable children has taught me that some threats can be fenced and some cannot. The wall keeps out the human ones. It cannot do anything about the volcano on the horizon, which is active, and which has sent ash before, and which will again. It cannot do anything about the things that go wrong inside the houses of people I love. It cannot do anything about the slow grief of years given up to the right reasons. It cannot do anything about most of what hurts.

What it can do — what the iron arch I designed can do, what the writing I do here can try to do — is insist that what we make in response to the things we cannot prevent will be beautiful. The fence will be a garden too. The protection will hold the view of the volcano open. The work that comes out of the hard years will be tender, will be true, will be made with care.

I am the practitioner who learned, slowly, that God does not always rescue. He does not always prevent the break-in. He does not always restore the perfect view. He does not always heal the child in the timeline you would have chosen.

But he is with you in the room. He is at the back door when the alarm goes off. He is in the laundry drawer the next night when you stand there with your hands on the disheveled stacks of clothes and try not to come apart. He is on the porch the morning the wall goes up. He is in the design of the iron arch. He is in the corner you refused to give up.

This is where I write from. This is what the writing is about. The barbed wire garden is not a metaphor I made up. It is the actual place I sit, most days, when I am home.

Pull up a chair.

* * *

Tamitha Lynch writes from twenty-five years of walking alongside vulnerable children whose stories are not hers to tell. She has lived and worked in Ecuador for two decades, where the THRIVE Model™ was born out of the children’s ministry she co-founded with her husband Bobby Lynch, PhD. Her work has taken her throughout Latin America and now around the world, equipping churches to care for vulnerable children through trauma-informed care.