I remember the first time I ever drove a van. It was dark blue, held 15 passengers, and the radio was stuck on a station which constantly blared a very repetitive play list of hip hop music. It was eight o’clock at night on a Thursday in the middle of March. The windows were open to let in the 80 degree night air. The moon was rising in the inky, hazy sky ahead. The van was full of college students, their stomachs happily digesting a delicious, homemade meal, their heads nodding to the beat of the music, and their bodies swaying and bouncing as the van followed the curves of the road and jumped over the numerous boulder-sized bumps and swimming hole-sized potholes on this road which hadn’t been paved for decades. Traffic zoomed all around us, driving with total disregard to any sort of traffic laws, miles over the speed limit, changing lanes suddenly and without the use of a blinker, some lacking even working headlights.

If I had dared to tear my eyes off the vehicular chaos surrounding us, they would have wandered over scenes of immense, feel-sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach poverty. Skinny, dirty-faced children chased each other around barefoot, over the broken glass, sharp rocks, and rotting trash which was strewn everywhere. As they ran, their too-large pants often slipped down their frail frames. Their worn and creased mothers were standing in the yards, hanging their secondhand laundry out to dry while keeping a watchful eye on their swarm of little ones. “House” does not accurately describe the structures lining the road; “hut” or “shack” would be closer. They are all of one story, rectangular, composed of a single, multi-purpose room, and pieced together from scraps of discarded wood, corrugated metal, and cardboard. There are gaps in the walls where the wind blows the dust through, coating the family’s few, carefully organized, precious possessions inside. Chickens flap noisily about and efforts made to contain them stand about in the form of barbed wire fences placed haphazardly around a few homes.

As I tried to focus all my attention on navigating this monstrosity of a vehicle through the speeding traffic, the lack of marked lanes, and the sporadically-placed, unannounced speed bumps, other thoughts crept into my mind. The scene out the windows which was so foreign to so many, including everyone else in the van, seems like home to me. Though there are no road signs or directions to follow, I know where to go. I turn left at the thorny bush, and then right at the graffiti-covered cardboard sign advertising a purified water delivery company.