Anil Buys Me a Lemonade

Day fifty-seven, Bulgaria. „Which is the most beautiful place in the village?“ I ask Anil.

I met the ten-year-old, his brother and his grandfather half an hour ago on the square in Popovets, in Haskovo province in southern Bulgaria. We got talking with hands and feet. Anil has some English.

He takes me out of the village and up a rise, to a spring set in stone. A cow is grazing on the bank. His parents have made a garden on the hill. Today I am going to meet his family.

Anil walks me through the village. Old men and women wave at us. In the one shop on the main street he buys me a lemonade. He refuses my money and hands me the cold bottle with a certain ceremony.

This boy and his family turned my picture of the world upside down in an afternoon.

I had assumed, my whole life, that you have to give something back for anything you receive. Anil gives because he wants to give. So does his family. At his house I am given coffee. His mother brings sweets and chocolate while his grandmother washes dishes in a plastic tub on the floor.

By Western measures this family is poor.

I have never in my life been handed anything with less accounting attached.