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world, its problems, and do something, anything, to help. So I suggested the fundraiser, helped her make the signs and staple them to poles around town. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, I can still hear the staples as they bedded in the wood.
It was one of those things, you think. That your kids should be exposed to. So that they understand. And she took the money she’d made on cookies and lemonade and selling some of her dolls and toy cars, and she counted it out and brought it to me in a box. I wrote the check and kicked in the stamp, and then, as far as I was concerned, it was done. Good, and done.
But for her, it was just the beginning. Over the next few years, she emptied our house with fundraisers, even selling my records for Burma or Myanmar or wherever. Summers, she got internships and externships and handed books to my wife and me, that serious look in her eye, pressing our hands as she made the handoff, as she trusted us to allow this book, and the next and the next, to change our lives.
It turned out that I was too old for that, although she was successful with my wife, who left when she realized the extent of suffering going on in the world, literally, as she said, literally under our noses. On our watch. She disappeared into the trackless wilds not three years ago, and while I still receive postcards from places I never knew existed, they never say anything that I can understand.
My daughter, although she did not go then, has left recently, for good, I think and she says. For good. I believe her and force myself to be proud of her, although I wake every night gasping. Visions of her coming to me, blood streaming out of her eyes. Or lying on the ground covered in snakes. Or half-buried, clumps of dirt like rotting flowers in her hair.
Of course, these are just dreams. I sit here now, picking out words on a keyboard, waiting for her replies. She tells me about the markets there, how you can buy voodoo charms that will keep you alive forever. Buy three, I type, but she goes on to discuss the distribution of water and how there aren’t enough clinics set
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