Prompt: A journal entry that explores a memory that surfaced during the course of your day, and connects the memory to the situation in which it arose.
Batey Libertad, western Dominican Republic. Early afternoon. I sit in a thatched gazebo constructed by some church group in the middle of this impoverished community. As I read, a small Haitian girl, no more than one and a half years old, spins around with her back on the concrete floor. Her eyes are crossed. Her sullied swaddling clothes have stains from dirt and what looks like blood, and she wears no pants. Lying in a pool of her own waste and sucking on whatever she can fit in her mouth, she makes odd sounds. Ahh, ehh, gurgle, ehh! She sounds, to my horror, happy.
Swaddling clothes? My mind races back to my red rain jumpsuit. I recall the countless pictures of me as a toddler, my bright pink face and a few blonde locks spilling out of the hole in the suit, frolicking in street-side puddles. In these pictures, I sported a look of wide-eyed, open-mouthed, missing-toothed delight. Like the Haitian girl, I had no control over my clothing or my actions or the blabber coming from my mouth. Like the Haitian girl, I was exploring my environment, taking in the world around me, being a kid.
A Haitian woman whips the dirtied girl up by the arm to give her the bucket bath that she so sorely needs. I am sure that after my puddle exploring I, too, was taken to a bath by my mother. The only difference between the end of my puddle period and the end of the Haitian girl’s was that my bath was in a porcelain tub in Buffalo and hers was in a black plastic tub underneath the hot Caribbean sun. The only difference, but one that makes her so much farther away from me than the twenty feet that separate us.
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