World Beginnings

  A few days ago, my dog, Paco, chewed through yet another expensive new leash. I sighed and looked at all of the unusable leashes draped over the railing. Then I realized that I could take it to the little shoe repairman whose shop was nearby. Of course, here in my little village of 11,000, everything is close at hand. When I got to Humberto’s dark, dusty shop, I found him watching something on his phone, with shoes,   belts, and all sorts of leather things stacked up, filling the tiny shop. But the back walls were covered in posters advertising the events where he had performed. Some showed a very youthful and handsome man, while others were of a proud older gentleman. Using my broken Spanish, I explained my dog had chewed through yet another leash and could he sew it up? Smiling at me, he answered in English that he could, and I could just wait. His first step was to apply industrial strength glue, and while we waited for the glue to dry, I asked him if he sang? Putting the...

In 2004, Sri Lanka was at the beginning of the end of the long-running civil war between the government and the LTTE, known as the Tamil Tigers. The LTTE has the terrible distinction of creating suicide bombers, often using women as carriers, targeting political figures. Since busses were the primary transportation, they became frequent sites for their destruction,  as well as the crowded bazaars. They once attempted to bomb the government complex, which was very close to my school, and the blast rattled the windows in the staff lounge. But the one of the most brutal of their activities was the capture of children to serve as soldiers. No child was safe outside in the North  and armed soldiers would even break into homes demanding one to conscript. No one argued with the brutality of the guns in their faces. One day at school, word filtered down that the UN had captured dozens of child soldiers from the jungles in the north and that several dozen boys and g...