By Lauren Koenig-Plonskier
It’s impossible to take it all in. As everyone’s eyes flutter and heads roll with the gravity of post lunch drowsiness, mine widen to cartoonish dimensions, unable to relinquish their grasp on the hazy peripheries of my gaze. Women here, men there, children wandering, the organized chaos of traffic algorithms, mothers and daughters without helmets smoothing long braids as their scooters halt on a dime, beggars, sellers, consumers who seem only to buy lunch, hanging ornaments and cleaning supplies and beaded strands that sit untouched in every color of the Crayola rainbow, cows napping, cows chewing their cuds in driveways that have no cars to call their own, men (so many men,) school children in familiar private school uniforms, signs advertising American corn and coffee and fruit juices, precariously stacked coconuts and oranges and mangos, hanging bananas, women hand weaving baskets, men ornately sewing exquisite flower strands for temple and weddings and just to display their beauty, clothing drying in the sun, spread on clotheslines and rooftops, the smell of delicate jasmine flowers, enormous troughs of wretched toilet water pooling in the streets, hugging the curbs, the sounds of horns communicating through a code that becomes a comfortably familiar lullaby, men in sandals and in suits and barefoot, the overwhelming, pore clogging stench of burning trash.
The entryway to temporary housing settlement down the street from the school of some of our TFI students. We were fortunate enough to be invited in by one of our student’s mother’s.