For today’s Free Press, I wrote an article about a new program run by the Association of Africans Living in Vermont called New Farms for New Americans. I did the reporting for the story last week on a crystal clear day that served to remind me that I am in fact one of the paler humans I know and thus can’t forget my sunscreen ever. Our photographer par excellence Emily Nelson and I headed down to the Ethan Allen Homestead to hang out with the African refugees participating in the program and see what it was they were up to.But truth be told, once we got down there, it was all about the kids. The farming sort of took a backseat to the little kids running amok through the fields.
I am known to my friends as a “child magnet.” For some reason, as soon as I see little kids, I can’t break from their gaze. And once they see me, they immediately want to climb all over me. I am a human jungle gym, minus the monkey bars. So as Emily shot photos of Somali-Bantu and Burundi and Congolese women tilling the fertile fields, a 3-year-old named Rehima captured my attention. She and I are now best friends forever.
Rehima wandered over to the dirt pile upon which I was sitting and began chatting with me about this and that. Soon, after she won me over with her scandalously cute giggle, she announced that she had to pee and that she wanted me to take her to the bathroom. In fact, there was no bathroom at the fields. Rehima just wanted me to walk out into the tall grass with her as more of a pee companion than anything. The little girl, dressed in gigantic hand-me-down sweatpants embroidered with the name “Henry Lafferty” and a frilly purple top with her plaited hair piled into a peak on the top of her head, took me by the hand and led me to a spot where she would like to relieve herself.
Now, I don’t have kids therefore I’m not that adept at helping them answer nature’s call. Once Rehima found a suitable spot (“I want to pee on that yellow flower,” she told me), she dropped trow and asked me to help her. I wasn’t sure how one helps a 3-year-old pee, but it didn’t much matter because right after she asked me, she let loose a little stream right on her oversized sweatpants. That oversight would have upset me had I wet any sweatpants of my own, but Rehima didn’t mind.
As we walked back to her mother, Ismahan Somo, a Tanzanian woman who married a Somali-Bantu man and ended up resettled in Vermont, Rehima decided she didn’t want to walk any farther. She wanted me to carry her. “Oh, heck no,” I thought as she began the ascent up my leg. I was not about to carry some small human with sodden pants anywhere, but Rehima won that short-fought battle. I ended up carrying her over to her mother’s plot under her armpits, as far away from me as possible.
I resumed my post on my dirt pile to observe the women farming, and of course work on my wicked tan, when three more small humans came to visit. Before I knew it, I had Suniya on one knee, Habiba on the other and Rehima squirming her way onto the pig pile. Suniya pulled her little sister Lesley on top of her and by the end of their shuffling I had four small African children of varying degrees of wetness (they had been playing under the spigot, and of course peeing on their sweatpants) sitting on my lap. Tough day at the office.
Soon, as kids are wont to do, all four became bored with me and scattered. Relieved to have my lap back, but soggy and dirty, I resumed my “reporting,” which at this point had all but gone down the tubes. I clearly didn’t look very reporterly because not moments after the small humans abandoned my lap, a Somali-Bantu woman named Nuriya unwrapped a child from a sling on her back and held him out to me. “You watch please,” she said to me, pushing the 8-month-old into my arms. Clearly, Nuriya mistook me for the childcare help. As soon as Muktar landed in my lap he began to whimper and nearly let loose a full-scale wail, which I cut off at the pass by standing up and rocking him back and forth. How motherly of me. I turned to find Nuriya only to find her climbing into a waiting van to leave the field for the day.
So it was just Muktar and me, and Emily, who found the whole “Lauren as babysitter” deal pretty hilarious. I liked Muktar and apparently he liked me because he stopped crying as we walked and bounced. But he was heavy and I’m pretty sure that he decided to fill his diaper when I was holding him. Plus, I had to get back to work, or something. I decided to play “Pass the Tiny Human” and handed Muktar off to Sadia, another Somali-Bantu woman, who apparently was Muktar grandmother. She gladly took the boy, slung him over her back, wrapped him up and got back to hoeing.
I returned to work dusty, sunburned, mysteriously wet on the legs of my pants, but all smiles. I’d made some new friends. So what if they were only toddlers. I don’t discriminate.
