As A Child 1

I enjoy the sea cause I live near it.

There aren't many storms here. Mammy said that a time ago there were some storms awful big that tore up the house and the yard, all our little strip of land where the family is crammed together, but Mammy and Baba rebuilt it.

Baba's always been there for Mammy and I respect him for it considering Pappy was mighty mean to him, but I don't blame either of them cause Pappy's Baba was mean to him and hate breeds hate.

Apparently the weather is always good down south but it suits me just fine here. Even if the dry season is longer than you think it will be we can always get water from the sea and boil it so it's dripfresh, no good for the crops considering how long it takes but we don't get too thirsty.

In the dry season Baba goes to the city and does some labouring but he's getting older now so I don't reckon he'll have much working days left in him, but Omoba and Arino work real good too and they'll take me along when I'm a bit older, not that I can't work, I deliver messages around the countryside, walk for miles for pennies or some sugar, but all the work in town takes strong arms and backs and I've got neither.

We go school most days but the teachers aren't so useful so they come and go as they please, and we miss out, but I save the fees for a bicycle seeing as I already got some nice shoes.

Some of the kids are jealous of my shoes but I don't pay them attention cause their Baba's don't work so hard and spend all their earnings on beer and liquor instead, and I don't hold that as a grudge against them but it's selfish drinking all the money rather than buying shoes for your children so their feet aren't so callused from the ground, and it's red hot some days so they must feel almost nothing, I know after wearing shoes so much the ground burns me pretty bad.

There's the buton trees so no one goes hungry cause the buton nuts grow all year round and only need the sun and the tiniest bit of water to grow, so even in the dry season we all have food in the village. In fact buton trees grow so good all across the country near the sea and we hear about in other countries in Abvua that don't have buton trees so when the dry season comes they can't do anything other than work in the city I guess, and some of the cities have enough people for the work so country folk can't do anything except starve, and I feel bad for them.

If I could I'd take buton nuts to them all so they could eat fine for a whole day, but I can only carry ten at a time with my pack on so I wouldn't be able to help anyone really, I'd eat most of them on the way. A week across the country, a week back, 18 days, by that time kids will've died, but I try not to feel too bad about it cause I'm only a kid myself and I can't be responsible for everybody.

Apparently up agaf there are plenty of other light skinned Abvuans like the teachers who have made new machines that run by steam that can move houses for miles they're so strong, I don't know how kids are starving in nearby countries like Igcer and Hausani if the Imagyts have steam-machines but I guess they're busy, it's even hotter and drier up there than down here so maybe they struggle too, even with all those inventions.

We do alright even if it's just rakes and hoes and shovels we've got. A bicycle would change our lives but the crooks in town charge more than their worth new, but Ifota is a small city compared to the capital so less competition, they can charge what they want.

I've never been to Ikos but Baba brought me a photograph back on a postcard, you're supposed to send them in the mail but the mail doesn't work well anyway and he'd rather give it to me in person. That was my gift when he worked away for a while, my brothers got better gifts but I'm youngest so I always get last pick, plus I didn't mind, they share with me, and to see those tall buildings, even if just in brown and white, was amazing. I didn't know buildings got so tall considering our's is just two rooms, the sky scrapers have got hundreds and they go into the air like trees, only bigger. Ikos is dangerous though, Baba says, even if the bikes are cheap they're always at war there cause of the generals, Baba says. He can read better than us so when we get the paper, always one a few weeks late or something, and never at the cost printed on the top, he'll tell us Ikos gangsters are fighting over who should be mayor, and the people don't get any say at all, and if they want someone they're not supposed to they get cut up and the slums get covered by people skin for mud.

It scares me that things like that happen in my country but Mama said to Baba he was never allowed to go to Ikos again cause he came back with a finger-tip missing, and he was lucky that was all that went missing. Baba wouldn't tell us how it happened but he said he was glad Mama forbid him of going that far mashar again. Like she always says 'masharners don't know any decency.' and she's right cause in Simhalia and Iptohia and Onco especially, and places like that they eat kids, we saw a picture in the paper, it was blurry but you can always tell masharners cause they have different faces, little eyes and orange skin, like they got a fever or something, and you can see that even without colour, there's nothing much but brown and white out there anyhow.

Yammners are beautiful I say cause we have big eyes so we can see real good and our skin is black as the night. Mammy says we're so dark cause the ancestors give us their colour and make our skin 'dark like liver and thick like syrup', but school teaches us that ancestors are just bones in the ground and blackness comes from melanin so I don't know what to think. In any case the only one blacker than me is Mammy so I feel good about that cause I'm her favourite. Mammy says 'black is beautiful' and I agree, though Mama is quite light cause she's from Hausani and she's still the most beautiful woman in the world, probably cause her face is so lovely, so it all balances out cause I'm beautifully black but my nose is a honker. I don't mind, I can smell good and Mammy says 'the man who smells the prey hauls home more than the noseless man', she says lots of proverbs that she learned from her ancestors, and I like proverbs. One is 'you like beauty but the grass is climbing the buton trees' and this is true cause I like it when the grass climbs the buton trees but it is bad for them, I think there is lots of intelligence in proverbs that science can't teach you, or at least not in so few words.