Little girl

Our paths crossed for the briefest sliver of time.

We as a family were coming home after an enjoyable outing. Stomaches full after a lovely lunch, we were ambling home and almost reached the gate of our appartment block. A few meters before the gate is an alley which houses our nearest shanty-town. At the mouth of this alley a 'tempo' - our local word for a cargo carrying three-wheeler - was parked.

She - a child of no more than three - was holding another child - barely a year old in her arms.


She held him in a motherly way - the noon-day sun was upon them and she was shielding his eyes by allowing the shadow of one of the tempo's bars to stripe across his face.

Why were they sitting there alone? The contents of the vehicle gave a clue. Plastic jerry cans - which the poor use for water collecting and storage. A grimy kerosene stove. Various cloths. A plastic straw mat. Broom. More plastic vessels. Shapeless lumps of things. This is the inventory of her family's home. This is a family moving from one 8 x 10 foot 'room' to somewhere else. To nowhere else.


Our paths crossed for the briefest sliver of time.

Having been on a family outing. I had a camera in my hand. Three quick clicks.

Three images remain on our computer. Nestled in the midst of a sea of images - chronicling smiles and laughter of happy Eichers. Three images of a little girl and her brother. Alone and waiting... for whom? A Dad who keeps losing his job - but not the regular visits to the bar? A mother and other siblings? An uncle who is packing them off back to a village?

Its easy to get drowned in despair at the grinding horribleness of life all around us. It is just as easy to shut down our heart and ignore - hoping things will go away.

A few thousand years ago a widow returned to an uncertain future. How many things did she pack for her journey towards her village? The village whose name 'house of bread' had seemed a bitter mockery when she and her husband and sons left during the famine. Now she was returning - with not much more than sorrow at the deaths of her men-folk - and a foreign daughter-in-law who clung to her.

The story of how this destitute woman became the great-grandmother of Kind David is told to us with heart-breaking hope in the book of Ruth.

Would that the little girl holding her brother with a gravity beyond her years, would that she experience a similar destiny, a similar experience of the divine.