A Boy's Castle and his Flag

     Two days ago I met a young boy, we will call him Antonio. Antonio is what Kenyan's call a true orphan. The distinction lies in the fact that he, unlike normal orphans, has absolutely no where to go. He is the only one in his year that stays full time at the school. Some of the administrators at the school have told me that he, only age six, has one of the roughest and saddest backgrounds at Father Tom's Kids. This at a school where students come from drought destroyed Sudan and Northern Kenya, Rwanda, where they lost parents during the Rwandan genocide, and many from Kenya who survived the horrible post election violence only by running by severed heads as men chased them with machetes.

      As I wandered the grounds at OLG (Our Lady of Grace School) on Thursday evening I saw Antonio sitting in a corner by his dormitory, an elongated hut, not originally built to be a dorm. As he shifted side to side, his tongue slipping between the gap in front teeth, he fiddled with the broken end of a broom handle and what looked like a plastic bread rapper. I walked over to ask him what he was making. As I plopped down on the path next to him he gave me one of those nervous excited smile that only kids from age two to six can give. He did not answer the first time but after my third attempt with his head down and holding in giggles, he gave a very soft answer I could barely understand. I thought he said something along the lines of, "stick" but I could not be sure. He kept fiddling with the plastic bag. It looked like he wanted to tie it around the end of the broken broom handle but again I could not be sure. I was struggling to communicate with him, so I began to search to do so on his own level. I spotted a straw from a broom, reached down, picked it up and made a palm sized triangle. I gave it to him, we counted the sides and I told him that it was a triangle. He repeated what I said and counted the sides a couple of times, turned it from hand to hand and began to smile his trade mark smile, tongue peaking out the gap in his front teeth as the corners of his mouth curl to his cheeks. I had to leave him for a couple of minutes and when I came back he was no longer seated on the curb of the side walk. As I drew closer I spotted something carefully placed in the dirt by the coral end wall of his hut. Planted in the ground with rocks and dirt neatly arranged around the base was Antonio's red broom handle and plastic bag transformed into a clear flag with blue and red lettering proudly flying from a bright red flag pole. Out of his broken handle and plastic bag Antonio created his own flag, flying proud outside of his home, his castle. Maybe, because my mind worked and still functions in a similar way to Antonio's I was able to realize that he, like young me, communicated by creating the splendors of his active imagination. Flags, forts, castles, only he knows what was swirling around in his imagination at that moment.
        Antonio struggles to express his vibrant imagination in traditional ways. But, as I found, that does not mean he cannot create. Today I saw him bouncing along holding race car fashioned out of a box, the size of a shoe box, with no top, two sticks poking out the back and front sides and four disks at the ends of the sticks. The wheels of Antonio's mind are always turning and churning out new imaginative creations. Although he rarely speaks to anyone but his five class mates, who he speaks to in Kiswahili, his mind teems with life and beauty. I found him one more time on thursday afternoon and talked to him about his flag. This time I made him a square out of another stray broom straw. Once again we counted the sides, he fidgeted and smiled and said square, only interrupted by his hiccups which jumped out instead of a one, two, three or four. He is an incredibly inventive boy with a live imagination that expresses itself in non traditional ways. I am not sure if his creations and imagination serve as a shelter or a mental block from all of the trauma he has been through but regardless of why, hope and light are bound up within his imagination. God has ways of showing us beauty in darkest corners and the most unsuspecting characters.