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Grit in Juarez

By Marion Surles

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Cristal

Cristal stretched and tensed under the pile of dirty clothes, trying to stay warm. Halfway between awake and asleep, she tried to continue her dream about a warm bed. She usually had nightmares of someone chasing her. This dream was a nice change, but she couldn't go back to sleep. Her nose smelled the damp pee smell that told her Fina wet her pants in the night. She didn’t smell any smoke from the fire so she knew their mamá Rubí hadn’t come home again last night. She also needed to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to venture outside until the sun came up a little. “The sun is a poor man’s blanket” she had heard someone say. She knew all about that. She didn’t remember ever having her own blanket.
The door slammed and Cristal’s older brother Ivan came in from his run to the outside toilet. It was really just a scary hole in the ground with raggedy curtains around it. Some of their neighbors had fiberglass outhouses with a real seat. A government office gave them out for free, but her mamá never signed them up for one. Just like she never signed them up for school.
Cristal finally made herself get up. She wrapped herself in two dirty sweaters and went to the outhouse. She grabbed a bucket of water from the big barrel in front of their house. At least the water truck had stopped by yesterday when she was there so they could get their one free fill-up for the week. Cristal grabbed some cardboard scraps and some pieces of a broken pallet and went inside to start the fire in the little stove-pipe heater. She heated some water and made them some instant coffee with sugar containing a few ants. There were three tortillas left that she heated up on the comal. She made little Fina take off the wet pants, wipe off with a little of the warm water, and put on some other pants. Everything was dirty. Mamá never washed clothes. She just threw the clothes in a pile and waited for some more missionary donations.
The wind blew through the cloth hanging over the only window blowing dirt and dust all through the house. Even so, they were lucky now that they had a cinderblock house. It was the same size as their pallet house they had in this same spot but was a little more dependable. Cristal remembered the pallet house. Last winter it snowed. She had never been so cold. Pallets and cardboard dragged from the garbage heap formed the walls. The roof was made of tarps. Someone brought tarps across the border to donate to the needy families in their neighborhood. They had gotten a big strong tarp with some kind of advertising on it. It didn’t leak, but it still wasn’t warm.
The scary part was the electricity. They were far away from the closest electric pole. Their papá was around some back then. He ran a cable over 100 meters from the high-tension power pole to their house. They hung a single lightbulb inside the hut. They had a microwave then too that they used some if the neighbor wasn’t using too much electricity at the same time. But then came the terrible dust storm last fall followed by a terrible rainstorm. Everything was covered in mud. And in the middle of the night their little house collapsed. They had run screaming to a neighbor’s house who took them in. But, only for that one night. The neighbor had six children of her own.
That was when Papá left. A few men had helped them prop up the pallets again, but the electricity was too dangerous even for them. No one would help with that. Then Mamá got the news that a group would be building them a block house. Before the group arrived to build it in January, the snow had fallen. For just a few minutes the neighborhood was clean, white, and bright, but so very, very cold. Cristal often wondered what it would be like to have a bath, clean clothes, and a clean house, to be clean like the snow.
She scratched her head vigorously as she watched two lice crawling in her sister’s head. Cristal knew she must have lice too. But what could she do? Nobody really cared about them.
Ivan ran out the door without a goodbye. Cristal grabbed Fina’s hand and put a few more layers of clothes on both of them. They headed to the dump, hoping to find enough scrap metal to sell for some more tortillas. They were kids, just 10, 8, and 6, but they were old beyond their years in survival.

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