Between Kratie and Banlung, January 14, 2020
Somewhere on the road between Kratie and Banlung, at the edge of the asphalt leaden with sun, near the scorched and burned fields, in a gas station like so many others – with its sign with a drop of petroleum –, in the dust and the strong smell of the fuels, a little girl arrives with her two toddlers.
I’ve already filled up. The tank is big with Regular 92. The scooter cools near the pumps. I took a coke from the fridge and, leaning on a sort of counter, I sip it. My buttocks ache from too much riding. I’m just happy to stay standing drinking something fizzy watching the road, the pumps and the little girl with the toddlers – who is coming.
She is maybe seven. With one arm she carries her youngest brother (chubby baby who seems too heavy for her); with the other arm she holds the hand of the older one, the one who can walk and must be three or four. She wears very simple clothes – bazaar t-shirt, poor folks’ fatigues –, and her brothers are in Adam’s outfit. You can see they go naked as worms all day long: their skin is browned over the whole of their bodies.
She has come to buy some snack, the little mother despite herself. No doubt she watches her brothers all day long while her parents work. The gas station is a bit like the corner dépanneur, even if there isn’t much: a fridge, a few shelves of chips, of peanuts, of sweets, all of it outside under the canopy of the pumps.
She is surprised to see a farang at the station. It amuses her. When she passes in front of me, she delights me with a smile so full. It makes her day, perhaps, and mine. The toddlers have round eyes and a dribbling lip: they’re not yet old enough for the embarrassment that makes one smile. The little girl takes a plastic sachet out of her pocket. Inside are crumpled riels, derisory sum entrusted by her mother or her father for exactly that: to buy a little treat, a ten-cent chip to brighten the afternoon. She holds out a bill to the owner, stuffs the plastic sachet into her pocket, takes her brother’s hand again and leaves with her chip – not without looking at me one last time, and smiling at me again, from embarrassment and perhaps from joy.
As I watch her move away, the little girl, big sister Courage, with her two toddlers, I regret not having given her anything. Not a bill, not a dollar, not a coke. Nothing but a smile against her smile. As if it were enough. As if it were fair.
At the same height as a city, a crowd, a river, a night or a landscape: this little scrap of humanity.