Tuesday evening the basketball courts in Parque Juarez thrummed and thumped with exuberant kids who shouted back and forth to teammates while jutting and cutting up and down the blue surface, looking for an open shot.
It was a different world next door at the stately old gazebo. A fairy tale was unfolding. Like all good princesses, she would allow only a tantalizing glimpse of her face. The air of mystery was exquisite.
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“Go sit on a rock, and children will find you.” That’s the simple counsel of Elsmarie Norby, the founder of Ojalá Niños, a rural San Miguel de Allende program that encourages scores of children to explore their artistic side.
In Elsmarie’s case, it wasn’t really a rock. “I opened my gate,” she says.
Elsmarie moved to the rural community of San Miguel Viejo in 2007 and built a house like no other in the community. It had floors. It had windows. It had furniture. It had a kitchen with modern appliances. And it had a front gate.
Nowadays she says she was “a very strange person” to the residents. Especially strange to the children who would peer into her yard through the front gate. She didn’t know she was such an object of curiosity, an outlier, really. Not at first.
Elsmarie recalled the first time she invited the neighborhood kids in. “They stood frozen at the entrance … then entered wide-eyed. They had never seen a refrigerator, furniture, art on the walls …”
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Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 