The green green grass of the other side.

A Phrase I learnt: “Tengo Miedo de Aves.”

It was a too bright Thursday morning in “El Cuna Jardin”, (particularly after partying with the locals in “Tequila bar” the night before) and I arrived to teary-eyed children, too used to spending all their time slung over their mother’s back in those colourful woven cloths which are used to transport sheathes of corn, mud bricks, babies, or anything else that fits.

The adjacent kitchen was noisy, the building work going on in the playground used no power tools, but the scraping of shovels through concrete, and the clank of boots and little feet climbing the metal scaffold provided more fuel to the blur in my brain. I made up a bottle, using the instructions hand-written on the rusty tin. Milk powder, three scoops; sugar, three scoops; ants, whatever isn’t spotted crawling through the sugar. Josue seemed to thrive on it.

We were singing, the topic of the moment was animal noises, for these were the babes that hadn’t quite got the grasp of any language yet. As I sat next to the tables, I was sure I’d already heard “Los Pollitos Dicen” that morning. I shook the thought and joined in, then out came a little brown box with little holes in it.

At the age of 6, I had an “experience” in a pet shop, involving a parrot.

I jumped with Josue in arms, away from the tables, past the piles of broken toys, to the other side of the partition, through the bed garden, as far as I could from the box. He was still merrily slurping away, oblivious to the locomotion and concentrating on getting every dribble of the glistening concoction...

Jen, another volunteer, came to check how I was, and gave me a description of the bird, now out of the box: A scrawny looking chicken, with lumps of dirt clumped on it’s underside, stubby little wings and a wobbly limp. A short while later, she shared two conflicting pieces of information: The children were having their hands washed for snack-time; the bird was pecking it’s way across the table. Reprieve looked hopeless.

“Shoo!” and a little squawk inspired me: climb into a cot! I didn’t though... Sometimes we’d put a child down to sleep and the mattress would plop to the ground, or the frame dropped an end with a thump. I stuck there, hoping Jen would find the words to explain my phobia. She did inform me the noise came from shooing the bird from the bread dish, so the children could have some!

Eventually she mimed the tears I couldn’t resist, but the teacher misunderstood, and as she brought the bird towards me, I cured Josue’s hiccups, though perhaps burst his ear-drum, with a squawk of my own!

Adventure brings highs and lows, but even the lows become highs when there’s a good story at the end of it. A couple of weeks later, they checked before introducing a cat.