By Gny. Sgt. Paul G. Palmeri, USMC (2006)
There are over one billion disadvantaged children on the planet today. My neighbor Rene is one of them. Rene is a nine year old boy who lives with his mother, father, and five brothers and sisters in a one-room bamboo shack. The floor of this shack is dirt, the Earth. There is no bed. He sleeps on a palm leaf mat on the floor. It has bamboo walls and a palm leaf roof. There is no running water. Rene has to fetch water on foot in one-gallon jugs throughout the day from sunrise and into the evening from a faucet over a mile away. The shack that he lives in has no toilet or shower. The toilet is a bamboo shack two hundred meters away from the house with a hole in the ground. There is no shower. Rene bathes in the creek next to the shack he lives in or walks to the faucet he fetches water from over a mile away. There is no kitchen. They cook their food outside with wood using one pot balanced on top of three rocks positioned in a triangle. The bamboo shack has no electricity. At night, one dimly lit kerosene lamp is used to provide lighting for the entire shack.
One look at Rene and you might think that he came out of a war zone. He has no shoes or slippers. He has been barefoot for so long that the skin on his feet is cracked and calloused. He wears the only pair of clothes that he has. He wears a pair of shorts which are to big for him. They are held up by a rope, which he has made out of a banana tree trunk he has converted into a belt. His shirt is torn and so faded and stained that you cannot tell its original color. His hair looks uneven like it was cut with a knife instead of a pair of scissors.
With all of this poverty in his life and person, there is one thing you would not expect to see and that is a big smile. From the moment Rene wakes up in the morning until he goes to sleep at night, he is always smiling. Rene starts his day by fetching water for his mother so she can cook breakfast for his brothers and sisters. His father goes to work before they wake up and does not come home until the evening. Breakfast is normally rice with dried fish. If they are lucky, one of their wild chickens might have laid an egg which they can then cook and share. After breakfast Rene takes what little dishes they have down to the creek to wash them. When he returns to the house, he helps his mother watch the children. Around lunchtime, he takes the older ones and they go foraging around the area that they live in. Rene knows where every fruit tree is within a five-hundred-meter area of their home. They go to each fruit tree in the hopes of finding some ripe fruit. If they cannot find any fruit, there are always coconuts to eat. In the afternoon Rene goes down to the beach which is less than a mile away. He has no boat or fishing pole or spear to catch fish. He tries to find what he can to give to his mother to cook for dinner. He turns over rocks and digs in the sand hoping to find a crab, clam or some kind of crustacean. At the end of the day, he heads back home with his brothers and sisters. They stop by a tree to pick some leaves which they can put in hot water and salt to make soup. As soon as Rene gets home he takes his brothers and sister down to the creek to bathe and get cleaned up. Then he fetches more water for the rest of the night. Rene waits for his father to get home in the hopes that he might bring them some kind of special treat. Rene normally falls asleep before his father gets home. As you can imagine Rene does not go to school. His family cannot afford to send him to school.
A few years ago Rene met a girl from the same barrio where he grew up and fell in love with her. They live in a small bamboo shack just like his parents less than fifty meters away from them. Today they are married and have two boys. One look at Rene’s kids and you can see his resemblance in them. They are dressed just like he was and going through the same experiences and hardships that he went through. But once again an unexpected sight to see were big smiles on both of their faces.