Girl

I knew there'd be children like her. Children I’d want with all my heart to give money to, to give food to, to tell them that it wasn’t there fault that they’d be abandoned. Yet this knowledge didn’t make her voice any easier to hear, it didn’t make my guilt, my sadness any less. She walked up to our car, once she saw that I wasn’t from Kenya. Her skin was dark and scars that looked like burns covered her face. She had a baby on her back, wrapped in a raggedy blanket, the baby’s cheekbones were prominent and she looked too thin for anyone her age. The girl called me “Madame”, she tugged on my shirt, and touched my soft, light skin. She asked me for money to feed the baby with and I began wondering if it was her own child. She looked no older than 13, though her frail figure could’ve been why I thought she was so young. She pleaded in a soft voice, “just some coins, Madame, just a few shillings”. I had just taken out 10,000 shillings from a nearby ATM, an amount she had probably never seen, an amount that could feed her and the aby for months. My stomach began to hurt as her sunken in eyes starred into my own, searching for sympathy. I wanted to run away, give her my 10,000 shillings and run away. I wanted to trust that if I gave her money, she really would spend it on food for the baby and herself. I wanted her to know how much her words cut into me, and that my silence wasn’t because I didn’t care, but it was because I cared too much.
I got back into the car, to get out small change for her, but she would not stop staring. She pressed her face up against the window, tapping on it. I quickly got back out and gave her all the coins I had, amounting to about 90 shillings, but it wasn’t enough. Then I realized nothing would’ve been enough. She doesn’t have a family, she doesn’t have a home and she never had a childhood. My money could buy her a meal but it couldn’t buy her all the things she really needed, it couldn’t buy her happiness, I learned money can’t do that long ago. And as I pressed my cupped hand against hers, I felt helpless. She scared me, she hurt me, her stare has been in my head for the past day, and yet I’m the supposedly “powerful” one. I’m the one that eats three good meals a day, the one that has a supportive family, the one that has flown across the world, and yet I did close to nothing for her, and she did so much to me.