There were five of them altogether, a woman and her four kids. They sat on the train platform, with the days work in front of them. Trolleys, filled with junk. Bags, filled with rubbish.
Two young girls sat together and sorted out paper from the rest, they chatted as they did it, oblivious to the cold conditions. It looked like they had done the same task before. The older girl walked off to talk to her brother, and the younger yelled not to be left. She hurriedly stuffed some paper into a plastic bag, and sat there for a second on her own, disgruntled at having been left. Who knows what else she was thinking. She got up and our eyes met very briefly, then she looked away and ran after her sister.
Another boy, of about seven, wearing an odd assortment of clothes, in various degrees of filth, was at the other end of the platform. I couldn’t make out what he was doing, maybe it involved rooting through bins, looking for treasures.
Five minutes later the two girls were now back to their sorting, they exclaimed over certain things they found, and one of them ran to the mother to show her something. She smiled weakly. She looked cold, sitting on a bench, rubbing her hands together. Her children had gloves but she did not. She appeared well-fed, although she probably wasn’t. Perhaps I was imagining it, but I felt I could sense a resigned sadness about her.
I watched her from across the platform, glad we’d missed our stop and were at the next one along, glad even of the wait for the train. I felt I was observing a snapshot of the “Real Argentina”. This was it: sorting out rubbish that other people don’t, earning very little, struggling to survive. They weren’t simply begging, they were a collective unit mucking in. I wondered if they did the same every evening and I suspect that they did.
I felt sad watching them, yet I admired the way they went about their tasks. I wondered if things had always been that way for them.
The younger girl abandoned her work to balance between the railings, one foot on either. She shouted for her mum and sister to watch her as she took one hand off. She was still a child, yet I felt sure that her life was not full of childlike pleasures. Her sister was not impressed with this trick, she had short hair and a long, hard face.
After a while, the others began to arrive, a man with a bike, another with a trolley, someone cried “papa” and the children ran to a man. I couldn’t see his face, they surrounded him, clearly pleased to see him, yapping about things I couldn’t hear.
Along the platform, a couple shared a pizza. They had stuff with them and it was difficult to know if that stuff was everything they owned, were they in “situacion de calle” (a street situation, a phrase newspapers use) or were they simply eating a pizza on a platform before heading home?
The train came and three people with trolleys full of rubbish to sort arrived with it. We got on and ten minutes later we were home in our own apartment, the spacious one, with the unused spare room.
Thirty minutes later I was tucked up in bed after tea and toast. I wondered if anyone else would think about that family that evening, did anyone care about them? Or were they simply together, though totally alone.
Thoughts from a Latin Land 