The Girl with the Hands like Fine Sandpaper

We went to the thinning-out east side of town, away from the glaring white sands of China Beach and the cafés downtown humming with card games and toward the green-swarded mountains, which resounded intermittently with the dynamite of quarries. Down a dirty lane, past wandering cows and teal-colored concrete bungalows askance to the road until we reached our destination, a moldering collection of custard-yellow buildings clustered disconsolately around a grass-bare courtyard. The gate faced the director’s office, which had been decked out in a motley amalgam of Tet and Christmas cheer.
The name of the place, translated, is Social Support. In the United States they used to call places like this poor houses. I was there to see a disabled girl. Hanh was not an orphan in the American sense of having two dead parents but, rather, had been left in the dark of night outside the gates by a relative who could no longer care for her.
Even before my friend turned off the motorcycle engine, Hanh approached us eagerly, smiling and turning shyly away while holding out a hand for me. Hanh loves nothing more than circumambulating the walkways of this, her tiny, pent-in world. She has a ragged haircut, doubtless the best her caregivers could do with a vivacious girl with no words, and scabs on her arms from scratching at scabies, a common problem with so many children sleeping on rattan bunks in close proximity to each other.
I took Hanh’s hand, which in contradistinction to the soft middle-class women’s hands I was familiar with had the texture of very fine sandpaper. Together we walked. She would get excited when a narrower path branched off near the conference room. Here was, perhaps, the only choice in her life, and I was one of the few people she could impose her will on. Always, she’d turn and give me the best smile in the world, and laugh, and that made me feel so special, to know that I had helped to make this halting autistic girl happy!