migrant child

I’m a migrant worker, the son of an El Salvadoran farmer, a poor child of the rich soil of the earth. 

Most mornings, just before sunrise, I stand sleepily outside our broken down school bus turned migrant housing, and see the world brighten around me to yellow, the color of a peach in an orchard before it ripens under the South Carolina sun. 

In the evening, just before sunset, I wonder wearily outside that same bus and watch the red sun the color of a Better Boy Tomato ripe on a Johns Island vine hang on the horizon.

The days are good, though, because I have my mamí and my abuelo beside me.

We pick fruit and vegetables, day in and day out, from sunrise to sunset, for the world to 

eat.

Lost Words Dictionary

It was early morning. 

The African sun had yet to rise above the mountains, and the sky was the soft yellow of newly shucked corn.

“Beep, beep,” sounded the horn on the old truck as it rumbled to a stop in front of my house. 

My friends, Momadu, Madu, and Balamusa, greeted me with smiles, waves, and morning blessings.

We were on our way from Kenieba, a small town in western Mali, to Sitaxoto, a large village about two hours away over a broken, dirt road.

There was a small group of people there who met each week under a big baobab tree to pray, share their stories and ask, “How do we follow Jesus?”

On that day, we were going to share communion with them.

Before we left town, we stopped at the home of a baker with a stone oven to buy the bread that would become Jesus’ body.

We bought dried leaves to make the red tea that would become Jesus’ blood.

With waves and departing blessings, we were off.

We arrived at Sitaxoto and found the people sitting in a circle in the shade of the great tree. 

We spoke to each other and blessed each other in the customary and humanizing way of the Malinke people.

“How are you? How is your family? How are your children? May God send rain to your field. May God give you enough food to eat. May God give you healthy children.”

Their arms hugged me and their words encouraged me.

As we began the liturgy, Momadu whispered, “Will you say the words? It would be meaningful to our friends.”

“Yes,” I answered in broken Malinke. “I would like that very much.”

I held the bread tenderly in my hands, gave thanks, broke it apart and gave it away saying, “This is Jesus’ body, which is given for you. Take it and eat it in remembrance of him.”

Everyone ate the bread except one woman across from me in the circle.

“Why didn’t she eat the bread?” I whispered to Momadu. “Do you think she understood my Malinke?”

“It’s OK,” he answered. “I’ll tell you later.”

After the service, Momadu placed his arm around my shoulder and said, “Look very closely at our friend.”

I looked at her and saw what I had not seen during communion. 

There was a child in her lap laying against her body, a child as thin and frail as one of the furthest branches of the baobab tree.

“Her daughter has been sick for some time,” said Momadu. “Bread is expensive for her to buy. She was saving the bread for her daughter.”

I was speechless. 

Here, I as a missionary came to bring God to my African friends. 

Instead, this African woman and her child came to me as missionaries from God.

Lost Words Dictionary

Lost Words Dictionary

Today, a boy came to our mission station.

Several weeks ago, the inner part of his leg from his thigh to his ankle was burned in a fire. 

He comes to us for the cleaning and care of his wound. 

I am the one who cleans and cares for him.

He screams and cries as I wash the burn and apply the Silvadene cream a kind doctor left for me to give to people who cannot access or afford hospital care.

The liberation theologian Gustavo Guttirrrez teaches us that the word ‘poverty’ has three meanings: 

1) Solidarity with the poor, along with protest against the conditions under which they suffer; 

2) Spiritual poverty, in the sense of a child-like readiness to do God’s will; 

3) Real poverty as an evil - that is something that God does not want. 

My small friend is living in real poverty.

It is evil. 

God does not want it.

Tears roll down my cheeks as I see his pain and hear his cries.

I make a promise to the little boy to work against this kind of poverty for the rest of my life.

“What can I do to help him?” I think.

After the treatment was done and he was resting beneath the thatched roof of the bamboo shelter, I went to my house and got a baseball cap for him, my favorite old, battered Detroit Tiger’s cap that I have had since I was his age. 

That cap has been all over the world with me. 

“I’ll give my favorite hat to my small friend,” I say to myself.

We know the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, when it is planted, becomes the largest of all plants. 

It become so big, the birds can sit in the shade of it’s branches.

Giving my favorite cap to my small friend is a small thing. 

It’s just an old, battered cap. 

But it is my favorite old, battered cap. 

And I give it to him.

Because he is a human being.

He is worth everything.

To me.

To the world.

He smiles when he puts on that Detroit Tiger’s baseball cap.

I will always remember that moment.

I will always remember him.

Small things are big things.

Lost Words Dictionary

I stepped onto the train and walked with my duffel bag to the seat number on the ticket the porter gave to me. 

A man in shabby clothes was sleeping in the seat next to mine. 

He smelled as if he hadn’t taken a shower in days. 

I sat down beside the old man, leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. 

The old man shifted in his seat.

Tenderly, he rested his scraggly cheek on my shoulder.

For the next five hours we chugged along, dozing beside each other. 

He suffered from night terrors.

“What is his heart carrying?” I wondered.

He didn’t speak a single word to me, and I didn’t speak a single word to him.

It was was late into the night, for I’d caught the midnight train from Greenville, SC to Boston, MA.

I smiled at him sleepily as he shuffled around me at dawn somewhere in rural Virginia. 

He didn’t have a suitcase.

He meandered down the aisle and stumbled off the train.

I closed my eyes again.

“I rested my head on your shoulder,” I thought I heard God whisper.

Thank you.”

Lost Words Dictionary

Our mission station volunteered a truck, a driver and me to assist the hospital with a polio and vitamin A vaccination program. 

My friend Kaba came along to help me communicate with the doctors. 

They spoke French and Bambara, I spoke broken Malinke and Kaba understood us all. 

He helped us understand each other.

We gave the vaccinations to children up to five years in age. 

I was responsible for giving the polio vaccinations.

As we were making our way from village to village in the remotest parts of western Mali, I felt good to be a small part of the big undertaking of eradicating polio from the continent of Africa. 

It is good to be a part of something that is bigger than you.

The name of the polio vaccination program is “Kick Polio Out Of Africa.” 

The symbol is the continent of Africa kicking a soccer ball. 

Everyone loves the symbol because everyone loves soccer.

The polio vaccination was in small plastic bottles that looked like Visine eye drop bottles. 

Mothers lined up with their children under giant baobab trees. 

I squeezed two drops from the bottles under the children’s tongues to protect them from the dreaded disease.

Most of the children were terrified of receiving  the vaccination, and most of them were terrified of me.

We were so far out in the countryside, the children had never seen someone like me before.

Their moms wrapped arms around them and held them still.

I gently squeezed their jaws with my left hand until their mouths popped open.

I gently squeezed the vaccine bottles with my right hand until two drops dropped under their tongues.

Sometimes, I had to hold their noses and blow into their faces to get them to swallow the vaccine. 

“The cure can be more painful than the disease,” my grandpa used to say.

Not in this case, though. 

Polio is a powerful, fearful disease.

One little four year old girl was struggling against her mom and me with all of her might. 

Just as I got the first drop of vaccine under her tongue, Kaba yelled, “Bakary (that is my Malinke name) watch out!” 

A stream of pee came from under the little girl’s dress all over my flip flopped feet!

It was her way of saying, “Now we’re even.” 

I understood.

“I care about you,” I said in Malinke. 

She looked at me through tearful, defiant eyes. 

“You have a strange way of showing it!” she must have thought.

I hope my small moment with the little girl and the polio vaccine under the baobab tree will help her live and remain a beautiful part of our wonderful world.

rain drops

The curves of her body were the gently rolling hills below the mountains where he lived as a boy. 

Her brown eyes were the deep soil of the peoples farms.

She was beautiful like the land, like the yellow flowers he found as he roamed the countryside barefooted, like the green trees that sparkled in the morning sun.

They made love to the sound of the rain on the window of the old hotel beside the sea.

brown eyes

“Hey,” she said.

The wind blew strongly off of the Chukchi Sea and cold air settled bitterly over Point Hope.

Even his bones were cold.

Her brown eyes looked deeply and kindly into his eyes. 

This made a small warmth in the middle of his belly that moved out toward his hands and feet.

Her eyes were like the earth, like the newly plowed rows he walked each day of his life, like the tough and tender bark of the peach trees he reached up and into during South Carolina summers on Charleston farms, like the blanket his abuela made from the colors of the flowers and fields of the beautiful mountains of El Salvador.

“You know,” he thought as he looked back into her eyes, “They’re just like my abuela’s blanket. They wrap me and keep me warm and loved.”