Niños ambulantes

So instead of following Raquel's list of DR fun facts, I've decided to switch the "happy children seemingly content with running around in circles" with a discussion of street kids. It seems more applicable to my life right now.

Long story short, you can't miss 'em. With their beaten-up wooden boxes (which appear to be lunchboxes to the untrained eye) complete with shoe mold on top, rest assured they're there, at any commercial establishment frequented by the relatively better off. Sometimes they carry around gallon bottles of water and a dirty dishrag, hoping to find a willing stalled-in-traffic windshield to wash. Sometimes they have parents, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they attend school in the morning, sometimes they've never been. Sometimes you buy them ice cream or an empanada at the internet cafe you frequent, where they hang around outside all day but never in their wildest dreams will they ever enter. Sometimes you notice that amazingly broad, ear-to-ear grin spread across their face when they notice you walking by, and you stop to chat with them, always small talk, because you can't really get much deeper than that before the ear-to-ear quickly dissipates into a look of foreboding that you can't even hope to comprehend. Sometimes you play sports with them, on a run-down blacktop covered with trash and forgotten laundry that's now growing more grass than the eroded hillside they call home. Sometimes they cooperate, other times they curse you out to your face imagining your well-intentioned gringo ass won't understand them, but you understand them perfectly and you take them aside to let them know that although they want to hurt you, they can't, and you'll always be there for them. But you also know, as damn well as they do, that you have no fucking clue what's going on inside them and outside, and sometimes it makes you feel, for a split second, as utterly disempowered and marginalized as they have their whole lives.