Keeping one’s first born child alive and well is of course any travelling parent’s primary concern. At every turn, though, our best efforts appear the very height of futility. We carefully wash and rinse Max’s milk bottles in mineral water, and then find that he’s snuck off to drink with gusto from the tap for minutes at a time. We painstakingly enforce helmet wearing on the scooter, and then we’ll find that a friendly Indian man has borrowed Max and is driving around with him rodeo style on a motorbike. We encourage Max to hold our hand in the road, but the next minute he’s chasing a chicken or a piglet into a broken down building site, through a checklist of tropical hazards: snakes, centipedes, rusty nails, broken glass, fetid puddles, men with puppies, mosquitoes, rabid dogs, and high-sugar beverages. What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Or make you ill.
No comments:
Post a Comment