A small clear, brown bug squirted out of my shampoo bottle yesterday. Haley said that’s what I get for buying shampoo from the Dollar Store. Now she won’t go near my head, fearing she might get lice or some other varmint burrowing into her brain. Yet I being the Ms. Frugal I am will continue to buy infested hair products just to save an extra 25 dollars a year to send to my Hope Child in Africa.

Che is his name. A six year old black (or to be politically correct, African African?) boy who lives in a small community with no school and an AIDS infested water supply. Sometimes I think about this fact while I am washing my hair under a warm filtered water supply, but then I wonder if their shampoo has dead bugs in it.

Now I am sitting here, nestled in my soft, incubating robe wondering what he is doing. Maybe running away from one of his seven siblings, chasing after him with a dead turtle swinging from their outstretched hand. Or possibly helping his father, a subsistence farmer, plant crops for next season. Sometimes I imagine having conversations with him. Of course Che and his family speak a Tribal Language, but my imagination surpasses this small boundary.

“My name Che,” he would say.

“My name Nerual,” I would supply.

“What food you eat?”

“I eat Cheez-its which have been highly processed and mass produced in factories and filled with ingredient I cannot pronounce nor know what they are. What do you eat?”

“Eat millet. Eat plantains,” he would answer.

“Huh?” I’d as incredulously.

“Eat real food. Eat simple food.”

“Oh, right, I don’t know what that is.”

After we would hang up I’d seek out the internet to research “millet” to find that it is a type of wheat used to make grain bread. Then I’d search to see if it could be found in America, and of course, it couldn’t.

One day I will go to East Africa and visit him and his country. I will experience some of their culture, learn traditions and perhaps… understand.

Then I will write again.

Then the content will have value.