Origami Wads

It was hot. Not I-could-really-enjoy-a-cool-glass-of-lemonade hot, but more of a mind numbing, head pounding sticky clammy hot. And yet she found herself more comfortable than she'd been all day. The games had gone by in a confusing blur, one minute wondering how anyone would know how to play the game through the din of the crowd as it was explained and the next being mobbed by hundreds of South African children desperate to get the much needed mark on their arm so they could get a point. She wondered if they even got the point or if having an American draw a short line on your forearm with a Sharpie was reward enough.

Then it was craft time. The origami crane had seemed simple enough when they had practiced it the day before, but then she hadn't realized how much shared "language" and "experience" had gone into that practice session. Things that she and her rowdy bunch of ten year olds did not have in common. They had ended up making balls instead of cranes and even those wads of paper weren't properly round thanks to the random creases and folds they had awkwardly applied to the paper beforehand.

But now it was worship time, and this she could do! Sing, dance, put an arm around the kid next to you-this was what she'd been waiting for. So as the song began and the children started singing and bouncing as if they'd never even heard of dehydration, much less experiencing it now, she suddenly saw the girl in the front row. Her friends her dancing with wild abandon while she moved carefully back and forth, careful not to jostle the baby sleeping on her shoulder. "Why does that child have a baby," she wondered. "And why was it here?" So she made her way over to the young pair and asked where the mother was. "She's at work," the girl replied in a thick accent that sounded like the origami ball was in her mouth. "Can I hold her for you?" she asked. "Yes!" the girl replied, eagerly handing over her burden and launching herself into the air to join her sisters in the last verse of Brother Friend. And as she made her way outside, into the unrelenting sun and away from the joyful ruckus of the singing, she realized that this was why she was here: to hold a baby so a child could sing.