This is a piece I wrote for university this semester and part of a larger work on the Women of Malawi.
‘Do you ever think about your mother? Wonder what it would be like to have one?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Margret said.
‘Why?’
‘I never met her. I never knew her,’ she said. ‘I have always been at Home of Hope. This is my family.’
***
I had read about Margret Soko before I met her.
When I met Margret for the first time when she was thirteen-years-old, I asked how she was and if I could take her photograph, she giggled, her shoulders scrunching up tightly. She wanted a photo with her friends, and then another photo just of her. Margret posed with her arms around the shoulders of her friends, white teeth catching the sunshine that broke through the leaves and branches from above. The glare from the sun showed up in the photos, and I had to ask her to move over into the shadow of the tree to see her face clearly.
Margret’s face, round and full, had plump protruding lips and a broad nose. She wore a white top, something I don’t think I’ll ever understand in Malawi. The red dust quickly turns anything white into a mottled reddish-brown colour. Kind of like the colour old crocheted doilies turn with years of dust, sunlight and spilt cups of tea.
I suppose though, when you might only have two or three sets of clothes to choose from and all of them have been donated by people from developed countries the choice in the colour of your clothes is probably not a high priority. The top had pink embroidered flowers around the neckline and Margret wore a matching pink elastic headband around her head, gently sinking into half an inch of tight curly black hair. Her pink skirt sat just below the knee. The pink headband seemed to pull her facial features into proportion.
I showed Margret and her friends the photos afterwards on the tiny little screen. They shrieked laughing into each other’s shoulders, pointing at themselves on the little display screen as I scrolled through the half a dozen images.
The Margret I met was gorgeous. Her big brown eyes shone vibrantly and her personality was out for all to see. She would talk, getting louder and faster as she went, becoming more and more excited, until eventually she talked so fast that nothing made sense, so she ended in giggles. Her hands flew to her mouth feigning shyness, and she slumped against one of her friends who also giggled uncontrollably.
The Margret I had read about and the Margret I met could not be the same person. One was a bubbly teenager, surrounded by loving friends and enjoying life. The other was an abandoned child, orphaned in distressing circumstances
A dusty piece of typed-on paper, in the middle of a folder full of similar pieces of dusty paper, outlining in one short paragraph the events of Margret’s earliest days. Orphaned children’s stories – a catalogue the orphanage had collected during each child’s admission process, or from further investigations to try to fill in the gaps that existed in most orphaned children’s histories.
On the top half of the piece of paper was a photograph. Next to the photo, there was a note scrawled in blue pen that said “wrong photo”. The skinny child in the picture looked to be the right age, but was possibly a boy. It was hard to tell from the grainy black and white print out. All the children have their heads shaved, making it nearly impossible to tell them apart, unless they happened to be standing in front of you and you could distinguish actual facial details. At the dining room table of the Volunteers House, I read Margret’s dust covered story. Kathleen, a teacher from America, sat opposite me flipping through photo albums previous volunteers had compiled and left on the bookshelves of the volunteer house.
‘Kathleen, listen to this one.’ I said.
‘Margret is 11 years old (Born 1999) and comes from Chileka (Chiwe). Her mother died soon after delivery and all the extended relatives agreed to bury Maggie with her dead mother since everyone from the family refused to take care of her, and it was also their belief to bury a child if it’s one day old when a mother dies being afraid of the mother’s spirit. Margret was also wrapped as a corpse and taken together to the graveyard with her dead mother. When they wanted to bury Margret she cried louder from the grave and one woman courageously enough stood up and told the graveyard boys to take Maggie out from the grave saying she will take care of her but people from Maggie’s family still didn’t want Maggie out and said if she will be taken out they not be responsible and the woman agreed that they would not be. The woman left the very moment when Margret was taken out and took her straight to the orphanage since she heard of Home of Hope before.
Since Maggie came to Home of Hope none has visited her and always spend her holidays at Home of Hope. We hope without Home of Hope Maggie could not be alive today since the woman said she took a risk because she knew about Home of Hope and that Maggie would not be sent back.’
We sat in silence, Kathleen’s eyes shiny with tears. Neither of us spoke. Outside, the lunch bell clanged and children ran squealing towards the kitchen.
I couldn’t bring myself to turn the page. I re-read the blurb out loud again, hoping to make some sort of sense out of it all.
I stared silently at the photograph labelled Margret Soko, that was, in fact, not Margret Soko. I wondered what sort of person I would have grown up to be had I started life-like Margret. For some reason this seemed like the only way to try to comprehend what had happened to her.
I couldn’t begin to imagine it though.
Did Margret know what had happened to her in her first few days of life? And if she did know about being buried alive, what impact had it made on her? Was she angry? And how does one adjust to hearing this kind of information?
***
When a child grows up in a rural village in Malawi the basic necessities of life are not always met. Mothers die in childbirth, leaving fathers and extended family to care for newborn babies. Or both parents die: some from malnutrition, some from HIV/AIDS. Sometimes mothers give birth to a child conceived from rape. Sometimes mothers commit suicide or try to kill their baby due to undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses that can result from malnutrition. Sometimes great-grandparents care for a new-born and other times the oldest surviving sibling is left to raise the family.
Most villagers farm only enough to feed themselves. If the rains come too early or too late it changes the entire harvest or destroys crops completely. Clean water can be half a day’s walk away, and health clinics, a full day’s.
When a child goes to live at the Home of Hope orphanage he or she has a bed, a blanket, and a mosquito net. There is soap and running water. There is food, access to medical care, and the certainty of an education. There is safety, security, and the sense of hope that comes with the empowerment of each child through their gratitude of a better life.
When Margret was 12 years old, her eldest brother, Losho, arrived at the orphanage. It had taken Linda and the other Home of Hope staff 12 years to track down any of Margret’s relatives. And after endless phone calls, and tracing leads through hospital records, social welfare office records and questioning villagers, Home of Hope convinced the family to send a relative to the orphanage to meet Margret. This was the first time since being separated from her family as a newborn that Margret learnt of her relatives, and of her abandonment as a baby.
Losho was at least six-foot tall. He was skinny, with knobbly elbows poking out beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt. His cheeks and nose though were full and round like Margret’s. The skin beneath his eyes had sunk inwards and his eyes were creamy white, covered in a web of blood-shot lines that spread out from glazed pupils. The effects of malnutrition were definitely visible. Losho’s visit allowed Linda and the other administration staff to find answers to the questions they had about Margret’s birth and subsequent arrival at the orphanage. Losho filled them in on the version of Margret’s story that had been shared through the family, particularly the story of her abandonment and the cause of her mother’s death.
Losho told Linda that Margret’s parents had been working as tenants on a tobacco farm in Mkanda, in Mchinji district, about 35 kilometres from the orphanage. While Margret’s mother was pregnant with her, Margret’s father died from HIV/AIDS. Soon after giving birth, Margret’s mother passed away from HIV/AIDS as well. The women from the farm who had delivered Margret decided to bury her with her mother, not because they thought the mother’s spirit would be angry, but because the baby Margret would be HIV positive too. It didn’t matter that Margret might not be HIV positive. The decision was made on the assumption that Margret’s parents were HIV positive, therefore Margret was. Margret was buried alive with her dead mother, but saved by a woman working on the tobacco farm who couldn’t bear the sound of Margret’s cries from underground.
Unable to care for the rescued baby the woman from the farm took baby Margret to a nearby clinic: a tiny, one room mud brick building that serviced the surrounding villages and left the baby with the nurse. The nurse took the baby Margret into Mchinji, getting a lift in the back of a lorry to the district hospital, where the nurse then left the baby. After two weeks in hospital, undergoing treatment and monitoring from the doctor, an officer from Social Welfare drove Margret through the market place and across the unused train tracks, then half an hour down the dirt road to Home of Hope. She was just over two weeks old by the time she first arrived at the orphanage. The Christmas of 2012 was the first time Margret would ever leave the orphanage for the school holidays. She travelled two hours on the bus from Mchinji to the capital Lilongwe, before swapping buses to go the next five and a half hours to Chileka, 520km south-east of Home of Hope.
That Christmas, Margret stayed with her oldest sister for the first two days of her visit to Chileka and then with Losho. Her sister stayed at home looking after children and the extended family. Losho repaired bicycles during the day and drank at night. Margret slept on a thin mattress on the floor with no blanket or mosquito net. It was two days before the tears began. Two more days and Margret boarded a bus back to Home of Hope.
‘Why did you leave so soon?’ I asked her two weeks later, sitting on the front porch of the Volunteer House.
‘There was no electricity, no iron sheets on the roof. When it rained I got wet. When I was hungry I had to go and find food. There was not enough food at my sister’s house.’ Margret said.
‘Where did you have to go to find food?’
‘I would go out in to my sister and my brother’s gardens. But they don’t have a big garden and a lot of the plants have just been planted and have not grown any vegetables to eat yet.’
‘Do you think you will go back to your village again?’ I asked.
‘No.’
Margret stared at her hands. They were wound in a tight knot in her lap. Except for one finger, which picked at her nails, slipping and scratching her skin. There was a long pause, the sound of her nails clicking together nervously.
‘I’ve asked my relatives to come here and visit me,’ she said.
Linda had been translating for Margret and me. Linda spoke for long periods of time in Chichewa, repeating my questions and possibly adding her own version to the original questions. Margret didn’t look at either of us. Her hands or occasionally her feet, which are bare, hold all of her attention. Her shoes sit neatly at the bottom of the porch, a cultural custom in Malawi to prevent dirt from being dragged inside or onto places reserved for sitting. Every once in a while Margret will nod her head or mumble softly in reply to the Chichewa translation from Linda. Rarely does she respond with more than a few words. When she does though, the English translation is short and I’m not sure if I am missing out on the full story.
‘Do you ever think about your mother? Wonder what it would be like to have one?’ I ask.
Another long pause. I wonder if I’ve overstepped some invisible line with this question: the line between what is acceptable to ask about one’s dead mother and what is not. Although, I’m not sure there are any guidelines or rules, so I asked on the chance that Margret might actually answer yes. That she might say more than yes, and her answer would help me make sense of a horrific situation, that is unfortunately common place among children in Malawi.
A few days earlier, while asking Linda about Margret’s birth, I’d been told that Margret knew the details of her birth, burial, and arrival at Home of Hope, and that she was fine with it. I couldn’t understand how Margret could be fine with the whole thing. After 12 years her family finally appears. She doesn’t know them, but now she has to go and stay with them for her school holidays. The fear and anxiety Margret must have experienced was beyond comprehension.
Yet as Linda translated my question, Margret continued to pick at her nails, the inside of her hands glowed white, as she balled them into tighter fists. Maybe Margret was not as dealing as well with the arrival of her biological family as I’d been lead to believe.
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘I never met her. I never knew her.’ She said ‘I have always been at Home of Hope. This is my family.’
I understood. The people and the place had a way of engulfing you. It became your whole world. Where nothing else existed outside of the glass-topped, seven-foot double brick wall that surrounded the village compound. Home of Hope was more than an orphanage. It was a home for displaced souls, abandoned wives, disjointed families, and starving babies. It was a place where laughter echoed off the protective hills rising up behind the village wall, where everybody pitched in with daily chores, and no one complained. Because here they were safe; here they were taken care of; and most importantly, here they were alive, healthy, and loved.
Here they had hope.
The home started when the Reverend Chipeta and his wife took in ten of their grandchildren after the death of the children’s’ parents to HIV/AIDS. Home of Hope grew to become a huge extended family of Malawi’s most vulnerable, drawn together by the horrific circumstances faced by an incredibly poor country. Malnutrition and HIV/AIDS had all but wiped out an entire generation, leaving 46% of the 16 million Malawians under the age of 14 years old. Traditional families could no longer cope with the pressures of caring for young children and babies, especially with so many of those families reduced to single parent or child-headed households.
During Margret’s four-day visit to the village, she met her maternal grandmother as well as four of her twelve siblings.
‘What was it like meeting the family that gave you up?’
Margret’s right leg was twitching and jerking, bouncing her tightly balled hands in her lap, while she tried to dig away at her nails.
‘I felt happy to meet them.’ She said. ‘I felt sorry for them too. Sorry for the poor conditions they live in.’
At this point, both her legs twitched and jerked up and down.
I decided to head the conversation towards a lighter subject. Stick to the easier topics of Margret’s school life, friends, and her hobbies. When the school year started in a couple of weeks, Margret would be in standard seven, her first year in the Secondary School.
‘If you were still living in your village do you think you would get to go to school?’ I asked, prompted by the Home of Hope school uniform, a deep blue tunic that Margret wore even though it was the holidays.
‘I think so. But it would be difficult. I might not have a school uniform and I would have to walk a long way to the school.’
Linda added that Margret’s sister had stopped attending school at 15 years old. The family had no money to pay for the school fees.
‘Do you like going to school?’
The orphanage had a Primary and Secondary School built at opposite ends of the village. In the Secondary School, the classrooms were filled with lopsided rusty single student desks and there were not enough chairs for each desk in the classrooms. Some of the chairs had four legs, while others wobbled on three legs and with the back panel or even the seat missing. A wobbly frame broken long ago by a boisterous teenager or the wood panels pried off the seat for a fire to cook someone’s dinner. The front wall of each classroom was covered by a chalkboard. The class timetable and examination timetable were tacked to the end closest to the door.
‘Yes. I like being with my friends and I like learning Mathematics.’ She said, ‘I like singing in the choir.’
Margret looked up from her hands. She’d stopped scratching.
‘I’m the head of our choir.’ She smiled softly.
‘What would you like to do when you finish school?’
‘I want to be a nurse.’
This is a future occupation I had read on many of the children’s files.
Most of them wanted to be a nurse or a police officer/soldier.
‘Why would you like to be a nurse?’
‘I admire the people who are nurses,’ she said, continuing to look at
me, the smile spreading as she spoke. ‘They help the sick people. I want to help people too.’
Linda and Margret talked some more in Chichewa without my questions to prompt them. I listened, unable to understand all but two or three words of the conversation, while scrawling some notes on the paper in front of me.
‘Do you have any more questions?’ Linda asked. ‘Margret has chores she wants to go and finish.’
‘No, it’s ok. We can finish up now.’ I said to Linda.
I turned to Margret and took her chipped nails and leathery hands, worn rough from the day-to-day domestic duties of peeling kernels off maize cobs and hand washing clothes, in mine.
‘Zikomo kwambili.’ Thank you very much.
***
A mosquito buzzed around my forearm on the porch the next morning. Following it as closely as I could with a baby resting on my lap, I slapped my hand down hard and fast against my arm. The mosquito lay splattered in a mess of bright red blood and black tangled body parts on my skin.
‘Bloody rainy season.’
The rain had finally eased off after almost 26 days straight of thick globular rain that continued all day and all night and created red rivers of slush along the side of the roads and down the middle of pathways.
I sat on the front porch, a bag of baby supplies and camera equipment, beside me. Baby Emma hadn’t stirred on my lap during the mosquito death. Her bloated belly swelling with each breath under her new, milk stained, lavender sweatshirt (a present from my mother), which had the slogan pretty like my mummy embroidered across her chest.
Linda came towards us across the lawn, an umbrella tucked under her arm.
‘Good morning Linda, thank goodness the rain has stopped today.’
‘Good morning Emma and Baby Emma,’ Linda said. ‘It has stopped for now, but we’ll see.’
Linda stroked Baby Emma’s hand and clucked over her.
‘She is such a messy eater. Look at all this milk on her,’ Linda said.
‘She sure does like her food now, and her naps after her food. At least she’ll sleep most of the trip to Margret’s village.’
‘Ah, I have bad news Emma. The four-wheel drive is broken again. So we will not be able to go.’
‘Can’t we take another car?’
‘No the roads are too muddy. We have had so much rain this season, the roads out to the villages are full of holes, so the only way we could get there is by four-wheel drive or in the lorry.’
‘Is the lorry free?’ I said.
‘No. Agogo needs it at the farm today,’ Linda said. ‘I’m sorry, Emma, I know you wanted to go and visit with Margret’s family. Maybe if you can come back in February we will have the four-wheel drive fixed. But now with the rain the roads out to the villages are terrible.’
A few days earlier during my drive from Lilongwe to Mchinji, we had stopped to visit Chimbuka village. A short drive down the tarred road from Home of Hope, before a 45 minute first gear crawl along the severely eroded dirt track, or more precisely, beside the dirt track. For long stretches the road simply disappeared. In some places it was under wide, murky puddles of rainwater and in others the road had caved in on itself. Giant potholes the size of a full-grown cow scattered haphazardly every few metres.
I’d stopped to pick up supplies at the market before we went to Chimbuka. So for 45 minutes I balanced an open cardboard tray of 30 eggs in my hands, silently praying that we didn’t lurch forward into a cow sized pothole. Or the eggs didn’t jump free of their flimsy package and on to my only skirt for my entire stay in Malawi.
Linda said she had to go and meet with Agogo, but would be back soon to continue working with me. As she leant over to say goodbye to Baby Emma, heavy drumming started on the iron sheets above us. Linda laughed.
‘It is the rainy season, Emma, it never stops for long.’
***
After all this time I still hadn’t quite adjusted to the constant rearranging of plans and schedules that take place on a daily basis in Malawi. Cars break, a person you are due to have a meeting with comes down with Malaria, or people forget and turn up three days later, with no excuses or reasons. They have arrived now and the meeting will go ahead and that is all that matters.
I suppose though that with the lingering certainty of death always present, it makes sense to live each day as it happens, regardless of western notions of time and politeness to keep an appointment or meeting schedule. Western time considerations don’t apply in Malawi, because most Malawians don’t have the luxury of time. The Malawi life expectancy rate is half of that in the western world. Every day Malawians are forced to deal with the effects of HIV/AIDS and malnutrition. Finding food is more important than getting the car fixed. Getting their monthly course of ARV’s from the hospital is more important than turning up to a meeting on time. Watches and clocks were non-essential items when it comes to day-to-day survival.
With a trip to Margret’s village ruled out, I decided to go to the orphanage clinic and visit Dolly, the nurse. It was a short walk through the centre of the village, just outside the main houses, but before the start of the slope towards the primary school. I wanted to ask her about Margret’s medical records, particularly about Margret’s HIV status. It was the only question that remained unanswered.
She looked so healthy, and she was such a happy young girl, that it had never crossed my mind that she could be HIV positive.
***
Dolly sat behind her desk, her arms folded gently across her round belly. Her white nurses uniform, starched and pressed, stood out against the backdrop of the bright blue wall. She smiled warmly as she gestured for me to enter her office. The walls of the clinic were covered in government, UNICEF, and World Health Organisation posters. The words on each poster are in Chichewa, but the illustrations were clear: Know your HIV status; vaccinations save lives; and mosquito nets prevent malaria.
‘Hello Emma and Baby Emma. Have you come to weigh Baby Emma today?’ Dolly asked, as she stood up and reached across the desk to tickle Baby Emma under the chin.
‘Not today, Dolly. I was hoping you could tell me a bit about Margret Soko. Were you at the orphanage when she was brought in by the social welfare officers?’
Dolly shuffled past her desk and out through a side door in her office. Through the doorway I can hear her opening and closing metal filing cabinet draws. The unmistakable screech of overloaded files, in overloaded draws, sagging and buckling the metal runners under the weight of too many records, too many orphaned children.
‘Margret was a little baby when she arrived at Home of Hope,’ Dolly said, walking slowly back through the doorway. ‘Two weeks old I think.’
Dolly rounded the desk and sat back down in her chair. Her movements were slow. Not old-age slow, just no-need-to-rush slow. The children had already received their ARV’s and other HIV treatments early that morning, so the clinic was quiet. The odd child walked in to have a cut or scratch attended to, but otherwise it was just Dolly, Baby Emma, and me.
‘I remember the social welfare officers bringing her to the clinic with her medical records from the hospital in Mchinji,’ said Dolly. ‘She was a very healthy little baby.’
‘Was Margret HIV positive like her mother?’
‘You know the testing for HIV takes a long time to know for sure,’ Dolly said, flipping through the file in front of her. ‘Ah, here it is.’
Dolly turned the file around on the desk and pushed it across to me. She came around the desk and picked up Baby Emma from my lap.
‘Margret was first tested at Mchinji hospital using the HIV viral load test, a blood test for HIV. When she was six weeks old, we took Margret back into Mchinji for the second blood test,’ Dolly said, undressing Baby Emma and putting her on the scales. ‘At 12 weeks old we took Margret in for the last blood test.’
‘I thought that it wasn’t until last year that Home of Hope found out Margret’s parents were HIV positive?’ I asked, looking up from the page I was skimming over.
‘We didn’t. But if we know that both of a baby’s parents have died, then usually it is from AIDs. The first test was documented in her records also, so we continued with the testing the hospital had started.’
Baby Emma squirmed on the scales, the plastic tray cold against her skin.
‘She is growing very well,’ Dolly said, writing down the weight on a piece of paper beside the scales before taking Baby Emma off and re-dressing her in the two layers of clothes and the two chitenjes she’d arrived at my front door dressed in that morning. ‘When Margret was 18 months old we had to take her once again to Mchinji hospital for the last test to make sure she wasn’t HIV positive.’
Dolly cooed at Baby Emma and put her back in my lap.
‘The HIV antibody test has to be done last. It can only be done on a child once they are over 18 months old, as any antibodies that could have crossed from the mother to the baby through the placenta, might still show up. These antibodies don’t mean the child is HIV positive though,’ Dolly said, finding Baby Emma’s health book in the card file on her desk and writing the number from the scales in the weight section. ‘It just takes up to 18 months for any antibodies from the mother’s blood to leave the babies system. If at 18 months the antibody test comes back negative, along with all the viral load tests, then you know for certain that the baby is not HIV positive.’
‘Did Margret’s test come back negative?’
‘Yes, Margret was a very lucky baby,’ Dolly said. ‘She has been very healthy ever since. No major sicknesses and only malaria once.
‘Wow,’ I muttered more to Baby Emma than to Dolly. ‘I hope you stay that healthy little miss.’
‘Ah, I pray to God also that Baby Emma stays this healthy,’ Dolly said, ‘with how much food she eats, I think this should not be a problem.’
Dolly chuckled and stood up behind her desk. She filed the health book away and closed Margret’s file.
‘Thank you, Dolly.’
‘That is ok. Thank you, Emma and Baby Emma for visiting.’ Dolly walked around the desk and tickled Baby Emma on the cheek as she walked past to the side room to the saggy filing cabinet.
***
At least 20 of us sat on the grass out the front of the volunteer’s house. Children that had no family to visit for the holidays, or the children that were too young to travel alone. Plus Baby Emma and me. The wind that had been gusting through the village all morning had settled into a light breeze as the afternoon wore on. We had gathered to take full advantage of the late afternoon winter sunshine, soaking it up through dry and cracked skin, warming deep into our bones.
Margret sat beside me with her friends Ezalina and Chisomo. Chisomo fussed with Margret’s hair, twisting the short tight curls into even tighter little nodes on her head. Ezalina was slouched against Margret, but reached out one hand to softly stroke Baby Emma’s hand.
Smith, one of the poster children for Home of Hope, ran over to us.
“Emma. Emma. Come. Garden,” he said, pointing eagerly in the direction of the village gate.
“Are we allowed out in the garden?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes. Come.”
“Ok. I’m just going to leave Baby Emma in the house though. It’s starting to get a bit cold for her out here.”
After bundling Baby Emma up in an extra blanket and leaving her in the care of a volunteer, I grabbed both my cameras and a jumper and went back out to meet the group of children. Word had spread quickly and there were now twice as many children noisily gathered on the outside of the volunteer house fence.
I found Margret standing on one side of the gate waiting for me, and Smith on the other.
“Here you go,” I said, pressing the on button and passing my shockproof camera to Margret. “Push down on this button to take a Jumbula. Photo.”
Margret hooked the camera strap around her wrist, as children started crowding around her shouting Jumbula, photo, and pulling on her sleeves.
I hooked my camera strap over my shoulder and Smith slid his hand into mine. With his other hand he pushed the squabbling children away from my camera and led the way towards the gate.
Margret held the camera up at arm’s length from her face. Ezalina and Chisomo, and a tag along of younger children ran ahead of Margret, stopping to pose for a photo, before running forward again. I suspect they were trying to keep ahead of the group, so the photos didn’t end up bombarded by the other children.
Ezalina struck a pose. Margret stood still behind the camera and pressed the button. The flash went off. A look of horror crossed Ezalina’s face and six-year-old Joel went flying in between Ezalina and the camera, his mouth open wide, his arms outstretched, thumbs poking up.
I laughed.
Margret and Ezalina rapidly fired off words in Chichewa at Joel and swatted at him. Joel ducked and weaved between the older girls, a cheeky grin on his face. He ran until the girls stopped chasing him.
Margret hustled the girls back together. Chichewa instructions, mixed with the occasional angry word in the younger boys direction. Hands on hips, arms around shoulders, the girls smiled deeply and Margret took their photo. As soon as the flash had gone, the girls rushed up to Margret to get a look at the screen. They shrieked, pointing to each other’s image on the display screen.
Margret turned the camera around and held it up high. The three girls squashed in together. Arms around each other, big smiles, and Margret pressed the button. It seemed the art of taking a “selfie” photograph comes naturally to teenage girls.
This was Margret’s family. The girls she had grown up with. Sisters not by blood, but by shared abandonment, circumstance, and survival.
I waved at the girls to stay together in a group. I fiddled with the settings on my SLR camera getting them in focus. The girls smiled. Margret raised the little handheld camera up and we both clicked the button.
The girls, and the children who had watched us, split between the two cameras to look at the display screens. There was a hectic moment as they all ran to swap cameras. There were shrieks of laughter and pointing to those who had made it into the photographs of Margret and myself taking a photo of each other taking a photo. Margret jostled up beside me and stuck her head in front of mine to look at herself on the screen. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and laughed.
