Boy in Yellow Shirt, in Tree

Though there was a war on and I'd been cautioned, I was often alone in El Salvador. I never believe, as much as I should, in danger. On this day we'd left in a mad hurry from the white house in Santa Tecla and driven a highly militarized road (guns everywhere, soldiers at attention) to the raw edge of a cattle-and-pigs somewhere, where we loaded our hastily assembled things into a pontoon of sorts and floated to an estuary. No one told me, until much later, that we were escaping the threat of bombs, a report that the American Embassy had been targeted.

The others unpacked and spoke in their Spanish. I was confused and wandered away. Down a dirt road where women balanced jugs of water on their heads and the houses were brilliantly thatched.

Finally I stopped and waited for this boy to look up and see me. Beyond the thin barbed wire, he would not. I wonder to this day what he was thinking.