She approaches the car window, marking no more than halfway up the glass pane. Dirty hands with palms upward beg. Her face is soft seeming, her eyes big and brown, they scream child. It is a piercing scream. It penetrates through the glass, cuts skin, and stabs directly into the heart. It is sharp and heavy as iron touches muscles. To contact those eyes, meet them gaze for gaze, saddens every part of me, settles something dark deep inside me. It calls on a marrow-aching depth. Sometimes the street children will speak, other times simply motion to their mouths. Today, she asks to go to school. She does not name directly what she wants, but it is insinuated, implied… money.
“If nobody gave them money, they wouldn’t be here.”
I want to pick up the child. Take her and her siblings home and bathe them, give them food, security, love. If heaven speaks, perhaps the first and only question she would ask is “What did you do for the children?” Here I sit, back seat passenger side. I can look away. I don’t have to answer back. But I feel the profound grief in this exchange. How did we all get here, to this place where children sleep on streets, beg for food from stopped car? And why have we all chosen to stay?
Poverty exposes herself to me every single day. Homes made out of plywood, clothes, newspapers. Newspapers feature clinics. Clinics without water. Water coated illness. Illness calling death. Death weaved in life. Life lived by children. Children calling pavement home.
