It makes sense that our first post from a volunteer should be from our first volunteer, Carissa Guild. Actually, she sent it to me a while ago and said I could post it.
A kanga is a piece of cloth the size of a sarong that almost all women wear here. They have designs and a proverb on them.
Asante Carissa...........
************************
an elegant wisdom
wrapped up in
dirty colorful kangas
skinny girls in beauty-filled
hole infested
dresses with swollen feet and penetrating glances
intoxicating incense of trash that’s
burning ash
is hovering in the air captured by the
sun’s setting dancing drums carried on a
salty breeze
unreadable faces silently questioning
carrying thin children
wrapped up in
dirty colorful kangas.
gracefully stirring a meal above a fire chin raised with
dignified
indignation a subtle violent nod
erupting from an inside her head regally
wrapped in red
cloth distorting her fragility fighting with immunity
a child’s playful nobility watching as if torn from
a vibrant
erased painting--yet breathing
the song’s a conversation, the hope
has hardened
unbelieved, their laughter remains uninhibited
lying in hospital beds
wrapped tightly
in dirty colorful kangas.
black arms hugging bones of shoulders
ripped and tied
back together blue t-shirt standing in the sand seeing
overfed and manicured tourists drift
in and out
and by down along the seams of ocean and his
life? something a little unnerving for feeling too
intrusive
to see too needy for lack of receiving outside his own
twelve year old body like the caged bird’s bars
created
by society a broken shell wildly escaping oxygen
then forced ashore by the tide just
another
child mchanga malaika
elegantly
wrapped up in
a dirty colorful kanga
or torn t shirt.
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