Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: India (02/12/09)
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TITLE: The Serious-eyed Girl | Previous Challenge Entry
By Bonnie Way
02/17/09 -
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In the picture, she is a serious-eyed girl, staring at the camera. Her dark hair is slicked carefully into place, cut in a bob at her ear lobes. She has a small, unsmiling mouth, a neat nose, and a pointy chin between round cheeks. Her dress is brightly-coloured, yet simple. It does not look necessarily Indian; it could have been something I had worn six years before. I stare at that picture many times, wondering what she is actually like when she isn’t focused on having her picture taken for her sponsor—that wealthy person in a far-away country who sends money so she can go to school and have clean drinking water.
Her letters were always short: “Dear sponsor, thanks for sponsoring me, your loving child, Nasreen.” Sometimes she told me about the games she played, how she liked school, that she helped her mother. I peered at the strange letters, hanging upside down off the lines, and contemplated how they could mean anything to this child I barely knew. Sometimes she wrote the salutations and closings of the letters in English, and mentioned that she was learning English, as well as Bengali and Hindu, at school.
I wrote my letters simply, choosing small words and simple sentences, for the agency had warned us that many of the translators had learned English as a second language. I wondered if, after translation, my letters sounded as formal as hers did. We were both children, yet separated by half a globe, strange customs, and different languages. I told her about Canada, about things that I did, but I didn’t want to boast of my money in the face of her poverty, and so sometimes, I didn’t know what to say. What would interest this serious-eyed girl, whose face grew less chubby as she got older, but who never smiled at the camera?
I dreamed of someday scraping together the funds to go visit her—for though I had more money than she did, enough money to share some with her, I was an average Canadian girl. I worked babysitting jobs and housecleaning jobs, dreamed of college, wanted to travel. If I could see her—her smile, her family, her home—maybe that would connect us. Maybe then it would be easier to write, easier to understand how I was helping her. The letters from the agency were short and effusive—“Thanks for your recent contribution. Nasreen now has a new sari and a blanket”—but really, it was as impersonal as giving a gift card.
And then the last letter came. Nasreen was sixteen that summer, verging on womanhood. I was twenty-two, engaged to be married, working my first job. I wondered sometimes was the teenage years held for her—did she think about college? Would she graduate as I had, or would she leave school to marry, work, help her mother? I will never know, because her family disappeared. Without a word to the sponsorship agency or even, it seems, to friends in the area, they left. The agency said this happened frequently, that families relocated to find better jobs or be closer to family. And so, without even good-byes, my strange friendship with this serious-eyed Indian girl was over.
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One small note: Hindu is the religion and Hindi is the language.
I enjoyed reading this. Good job.