Rebecca's Poem  
 

The Epitome of Innocence
By Rebecca Price

“Where are you from?” You ask me curiously; innocently.
“What answer do you want to hear?” I feel like asking you.
And yet, I smile bravely, seemingly present, but my mind begins to travel elsewhere…

A child; teetering out of a small, weary plane, clutching her mother’s hand tightly and,
Staring in wonder with my wide, toddler eyes at the new, exotic place before me.
Later in life, the mud fights I had with friends: us sliding barefoot down,
A steep, seemingly glass clay incline, our shouts of delight echoing around the valley.

My country.

I can almost hear the predictable beat of the flat, tinny reggae music pulsing through a sleepy village at dawn:
The Pacific alarm clock.
I can almost picture the low-budget cracker commercials depicting muscle men and beautiful women.
As if crackers could make you beautiful.
And they’d sing those pathetic, monotonous jingles that made you want to SCREAM!
Every commercial was to music. Even baking flour commercials.
I can almost breathe in that simple, perfect scent that only comes after a good, hard rain.
And yet, no place is perfect.
The malnutrition, the poor hygiene, the low-employment rate.
My thoughts turn towards the horrible poverty, the anger, the crime.
A flashback comes crashing into my mind like a freight train:
A knife being shoved up in my face as,
Men in threadbare ski masks scramble on either side of the car, grabbing all the bags and wallets they can.
And for what?
A couple of bucks.
I think of the tribal wars, the political unrest, the corrupted government, the horrible economy.
The flour sack purses, the mistreatment of women, the ever-so-prevalent AIDS that is literally killing out the population.

And then I’ll see a sunset that’ll take my breath away;
Royal colors smudged like finger-paint across a perfect opal sky.
And I’ll see a group of dirt-poor kids sitting on the filthy ground, barefoot,
With faded, hole-covered clothes, playing a simple game of jacks.
They have huge smiles contrasting against their coffee skin, ignorant of their destitution.
Then I’ll begin to smile and believe for a precious blip of eternity that all is right in the world.
I picture my friends in my mind.
Us laughing so hard we fall to the ground in exhaustion,
And then crying like babies and hugging each other for dear life as we watch a friend fly away in a small plane.
Sleepovers, with us talking about everything under the sun, until the real sun rises in all its beautiful, pastel glory.
Sitting. Thinking. Crying. Hugging. And not having to say anything at all; some of the best times I’ve ever had.

So tell me something: how are you supposed to keep moving on?
When you leave that one place and those people that you love most in the world?
How does your heart keep beating when your heartbeat is so faint it barely keeps you in existence,
Because you left it in a third world country?
It goes thump, thump, thump, ever-so faintly.
Then it starts to slow down…thump…thump…thump…
I’m dying. Slowly. How do you fix THAT?

You can’t understand that, but I know it’s not your fault.
You’re still staring at me so innocently, waiting
Patiently for my answer.
But my life just can’t be defined in any number of words.
You have to have seen what I’ve seen; walked barefoot through the mud and the gravel and the grass that I have walked,
Loved like I have loved and cried like I have cried.
It’d take a lifetime to explain to you who I really am and where I come from.
In your shiny white shoes and your designer clothes, you can’t even BEGIN to understand poverty.
Or what’s inside of me.
Or the land I hold so tightly—
A third world country.
The raw, untouched beauty,
Of Papua New Guinea.

So, I smile weakly,
My eyes get all misty,
I open my mouth slightly,
And whisper quietly: (giving you the EASY answer)
North Carolina.

Rebecca moved back to her home in PNG in June where she will stay for the next two years, before saying goodbye forever.