Taki

Taki looked into the eyes of the little girl. 

They were brown, the color of the dirt in the countryside around the city, the color of the weathered bark of the guava trees in the courtyards around the capitol building. 

"Ah, these eyes could grow the humble beans that fill plates and help us live," she thought to herself. 

"These eyes could produce the bountiful guavas that hang from trees like tiny gifts.”

Yet she saw in those eyes a hurt and hopelessness that came from the underside of the great city, the place where the owner of a sugar plantation drove around the streets in a sparkling, new car from el Norte and a worker on that plantation walked around on those same streets in broken sandals made from used tires from a broken down, old wagon...at the same time, together...but as far apart as one world from another.

She listened to the stomach of the little girl. 

It was empty, the emptiness of the poverty of a family with seven children and low wages, the emptiness of one meal a day for days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime. 

"Ah, this grumbling stomach could be filled with beans and guava," she thought again to herself. 

"It could be filled with food and hope if only she had a chance to become a person instead of a thing, to become the owner of a small piece of land instead of the servant of a large landowner, to become all that she could become instead of all that could be used by another...to become, to become."

She welcomed the child, kissed her softly and tenderly on one cheek and then another, and sent her on her way with a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup and cup of water, the smallest of things in the world, yet everything.