Geography 101

"Why does this girl have no food and no house?" asked Madeline, picking up a picture of Vilma Yaneth Sagche Merino that was lying on my desk. Vilma is a 13-year-old Latin American girl we sponsor who happens to have the same birthday as Madeline. So we'd had a brief discussion of her before. I was suddenly realizing just how brief it must have been. "No, honey, she has a house and food, and a brother and parents. She just needed some help with school and new shoes." Madeline was uninterested. Latin America, to her, translated into "No cats in America," the song and theme woven through that old classic cartoon about Fivel the mouse. Suddenly she was desperate to watch a movie. So, I tried to draw her back in with a different tactic. "I can show you on the map upstairs what country Vilma lives in; it's Guatemala. I visited there once myself, in college." "Oh," Madeline said, in charge of the situation once more, "Guatemala, like Evan and Emily live in Guatemala!"