The son of world travelers meets the children of the streets.
I have spent much of my adult life traveling—not rum runners on the beach travel but backpack, third world, swamp-ass, don’t ask what kind of meat is in the goulash, travel. Travel is something Karen and I bonded over on our first date and we vowed that as long as
our money and knees held out, we’d see as much of the world as possible. Before the kids came along we managed to pack our way through about 65 countries.
After Z joined the family, we decided drag him to El Salvador and Nicaragua for three weeks of family travel time. We learned two important things on that trip: 1) our days as carefree nomads were, for the foreseeable future, over and b) it is, in fact, possible to conceive your second child with your first child napping in the same room.
What follows is part of an email I sent home from our trip after Z made friends with some of the local street urchins.
It’s with no small amount of guilt that I shoo away a kid of about eight who approaches me with a “hello, amigo.” Z doesn’t notice. We’re sitting on the front steps of our hotel, me poring over the map of Granada and him captivated by the horse-drawn carriages that line the central square of this well-preserved Spanish colonial town.
Street kids—whether the pint-sized kitsch hawkers at Angkor Wat, the frequently belligerent Gypsy girls outside the Louvre, or the pack of 9-year-old boys who follow you Pied Piperstyle to the bakery in Hue (where you inevitably buy them a loaf of bread)—are a fixture in the life of a traveler. Almost anywhere you go, there’s a predictable culture of children working tourists on the streets.
Emotionally, it’s complicated. Sometimes you want to give them all your money. Sometimes you want to yell at them to leave. Sometimes you want to jump in the middle of them and sing “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” An appropriate response seems impossible.
Even more so once you’re traveling with your own child.
Before I can shoo him away again, the Granadan street kid is playing hide-and-seek with Z, who’s howling with delight at having found someone closer to his size to play with. Every now and again, this grubby eight-year-old pops up from behind a planter and yells, “Estoy aquí!” which sends my two-year-old screaming and scampering in that direction.
The next morning, as we head for breakfast, Z calls out “Estoy aquí!” at random intervals—his first words in a foreign language.
At the local waffle house, we’re tearing through the staggering platefuls of food when the first of the street kids appears, throwing us a forlorn “You gonna eat that toast?” look. In fact, we’re not going to eat the toast, so I reach down to the street and hand it off to him. At which point the manager shouts and chases the kid away. It’s a game of cat and mouse that will play out again and again while we sit here, the manager now paying particular attention to my side of the cafe since I’ve proven myself to be an easy mark. Of course, the manager won’t correct or scold me. I’m a paying customer, after all. But he’ll throw me a disapproving look and keep a better eye on my side of the patio. The last thing he needs is for packs of kids to run off his clientele.
And you can’t really blame the guy. The family from Richmond sitting behind us definitely doesn’t want some skinny, unwashed child asking them for a strip of bacon. That isn’t the holiday they signed up for. People get mad when poverty is waved in their face; it’s full of
messy feelings of guilt, helplessness, self-doubt and the knowledge that there but for the randomness of the birth lottery go you. And—honestly—who wants to deal with any of that over waffles and coffee?
Z, of course, is dealing with nothing but the conundrum of how to get the chocolate chips out of his pancakes without having to actually eat the pancake.
He isn’t old enough to ask why he has piles of food—most of which he won’t eat—and that little boy gets yelled at for having my toast. He isn’t old enough to wonder aloud why this potential hide-and-seek partner can’t come have breakfast with us. He isn’t aware enough yet to ask all the obvious questions we’ll spend the rest of the meal ignoring. And I’m relieved.
Because when he does, I have no idea what I’ll say.
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Image credit: cambodia4kidsorg/Flickr
A great piece JD. We all fear the moment when poverty stares our child in the face and wants to play. Thanks for the thoughts.