Alice had dreadlocks.
The messy, dirty locks of blonde hair were tied back carelessly in a tattered bandana in a fashion that made me wonder if the bandana was purposely shabby or if it was simply because it was knotted too deeply in her hair to ever come out. She looked downright wild in her baggy cutoff jean shorts, crop top and cowgirl boots. Clearly she spent most of her time outdoors because she sported a dark tan that sharply contrasted with her bleached blonde hair and her body was toned with lean muscle, similar to a marathoner's body. I had to elbow Osten numerous times to stop gawking at her.
"This village was one of the most effected by last month's hurricane," Alice explained as we rode in an armored four-by-four vehicle through the mountains of Panama. "It's one of the most remote villages that is still inhabited. This area used to be covered in indigenous tribes of people but since Gregory Illéa's reign and the subsequent invasion of southern rebels, it's become much more established down here."
"Really?" I asked as we hit another bump and came out of our seats slightly.
"Running water is considered a luxury down here. So yes, having an actual road to a village makes things more established. Even if it is a dirt road." Everything Alice said had a bit of bite to it. Not in a sadistic sense but just in a way that shows that she has seen a lot of things in life and is chiseled from her experiences. I knew within moments of meeting her that morning that she was not someone to be trifled with.
She expertly handled her aluminum cup of coffee to make sure it didn't spill as we traveled deeper into the rainforest. Sweat collected on the back of my neck and I could feel the sun soaking the energy from me. I was baffled at how anyone could live in that kind of heat and get anything done.
"This is where we've focused the majority of my organization's rebuilding efforts. We actually teamed up with your Kile and he's been helping design more affordable, sturdy housing for these folks," she said. I winced at her choice of saying your Kile.
"Where would you be if you weren't here?" Eikko asked, interested in the broader scope of her non-profit. But that was Eikko – the ever-curious, ever-compassionate man with a passion for caring for people.
"Up in Whites working in the town that was covered by the avalanche, or working in western Allens and Carolina for the poor there. We go where there is need, Prince Eikko," she said grimly. "Sometimes we have a hard time selecting."
Osten's bewildered smile fell as he looked away from the window. "You mean you choose not to help some people?"
"If I could wave a magic wand and abolish poverty, I would have years ago. The reality is that poverty is as much a part of our economy as the wealthy. Where there's poverty, there's the opportunity for wealthy people to pose for the cameras in orphanages and coal mines to meet their humanitarian quota for the year," she said sardonically.
I raised my eyebrows. "So you're saying that we purposely keep people from succeeding economically?"
"No. I'm saying that far too many times I've seen rural poverty get swept under the rug for the sake of urban poverty because that's at the forefront of all news. You would never want Angeles looking like a dump, right? But you probably never once considered giving us asphalt to make the roads safer here."
My eyes fell downward to my lap because she was absolutely right and I was ashamed to admit it. Aside from the pollution and the cocoa beans that come from Panama, they were never more than a blip on my radar. "I'm sorry," I said, not knowing what else to tell her.
Alice waved her hand at me. "You have thirty-five provinces to look after. Some things are bound to slip through the cracks." She said it lightly but it wasn't at all. Yes, some things slipped through the cracks for my advisers and myself but it shouldn't be a whole province that falls to the wayside.
As the truck ambled further into the mountains, we could see more damage. Trees toppled over, places where large sections of the road had slid down the hill, trash littering the shoulders of the road. Stray animals dashed in front of the truck and when we drove through other villages, kids would run out and slap on the side of the truck to greet us. I laughed at their smiling faces, their excitement contagious.
Finally, we made it to the coastal village Alice had chosen for us to visit. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight there. The kids in this village were less enthusiastic as they greeted us. We parked in what Alice had said used to be the center of the village. There was nothing left around us.
In the distance, what looked like the original outskirts of the village, were studded frames and the beginnings of homes. There were camping tents set up where there was space and piles of trash and damaged goods piled to my height. Kids picked through the piles, some of them wearing what looked to be scraps of fabric that they happened to find in the aftermath, just to give them some sort of protection from the elements. Streams of murky, gray water flowed between our feet. Palm trees stood at forty-five degree angles with only half their palms left at the top.
Several picnic tables were set up near a concrete hut and that seemed to be the central hub for people. Osten followed behind Eikko and I at a slower pace, his eyes taking in everything around him. People seemed to be skirting around us as they went about their business. General Leger walked in my shadow but every once in a while I heard a small sound escape him, something between a sob and a cough.
One child had a skateboard that had been pulled from the rubble and went careening straight through our group, General Leger pulling me back roughly by my elbow. When we got to the tables where Alice's volunteers were set up, we noticed that it was mostly kids lined up there for food and fresh water.
"Why are they all kids?" I asked Alice quietly.
"They ran out of room in the shelter for everyone," she answered quietly, pointing to what really only seemed to be a box made of concrete. The roof had collapsed in on one side and most of the windows were cracked and broken. "The grown ups left to make room for kids there so that they could be safe." She didn't need to say anymore for me to understand what had happened.
"So most of these kids are orphans?" Eikko clarified as another group went running past us, a little boy holding a flat soccer ball in his arms. Alice nodded, her lips pressed together.
I found a familiar face at the food tables. Kile smiled when he saw me but his smile was even wider when he saw Alice. He came up and hugged me tightly and then gestured to Alice. "You've met my friend Lice?" he asked me, smirking.
"God, Kile," Alice scoffed, rolling her eyes.
"Lice?" Osten repeated.
"It's an inside joke. A very inside joke," she answered vaguely as she shook her head at Kile. Even she was smiling though. The two were clearly close friends and I felt a pang in my heart to see that I was missing out on something.
Eikko's hand slid into mine and squeezed my fingers, causing me to look up at him and smile. Kile seemed to notice that the kids didn't really know how to approach us so he placed his hand on one of the boy's shoulders and said, "These are my friends Eadlyn, Osten and Erik. They're gonna hang out with us today."
The kids cheered and started chatting excitedly. Some of them ran off and started searching for toys in the piles of rubble. "So what are we doing?" I asked Alice.
"First, you can help us clear out the areas where we're planning on building the next few homes," she told me. She led us to a pile of shovels and rakes and brooms, handing a snow shovel to me. I must have looked apprehensive because she sighed and took the tool from my hand. "I have a better idea. Eikko, Osten, you're with Kile on excavation. You're with me," she said, pointing to me.
"Be careful," I said to Eikko and he started to respond but Kile was already grabbing a bunch of kids to go with them and their cheers at being chosen drowned out anything my husband said. Alice led me over to a truck that was fully loaded with grocery bags of food supplies. "What's in the bags?" I asked her.
"Sugar, spam, cans of beans, crackers, and this sugar-coated candies," she answered, climbing up on the back hitch of the truck. "Are you coming?"
I climbed up beside her and sat carefully, curling my fingers around the lip of the tailgate to have something to hold onto. The truck lurched forward and we started moving slowly down the road that was cleared earlier. I noticed Genera Leger in the armored truck following us. "How long have you guys been here?"
"We arrived before the first hurricane back in June. This last one wasn't even as strong as that one but there was such little infrastructure left that what was left, was just completely demolished," she explained, her eyes sweeping around us. "This place used to be lush with palm trees and full of life. Now…I don't know how to describe it. You know, before the first hurricane, companies were trying to buy this land to build resorts? I would never wish to displace people like that but maybe they would have been able to handle all of this. There would have been less lives lost, less damage to the community. I don't know, it just hurts my heart to see all of this destruction."
"Where do you even get the money and supplies for this?"
"My parents give me the funds for most of it. They were Twos – my mom by marriage – so they had a lot of money stashed up. Actually, my aunt gave me all of her money from being in the Selection – which was a lot. She wanted me to put it to good use."
My head snapped up to look at her. "Your aunt was in the Selection? My father's Selection?"
She nodded. "Natalie Luca. The jewelry designer."
"My mom wears her stuff all the time!" I exclaimed, recognizing the name. "One of my tiaras was designed by her."
Alice didn't look impressed by that at all. "Anyway, she let me have her money if I swore to name the non-profit after her sister, Lacey. When Aunt Natalie started her business, she didn't have the heart to name it after her. But after fifteen years, she felt ready to honor her."
"Wow. Are you two close?"
"She never had kids and my parents say I'm a lot like her. I never was content with just staying put – I was always on the move looking for a greater purpose in life. Aunt Natalie helped me find it by giving me that money."
"That's an incredible thing to do," I mused.
Alice smiled faintly, the first smile I'd seen on her face since we were with Kile. "The funny thing is, the more blessings I receive in life, the more I recognize them. I don't think you ever get used to it. With grace comes gratitude, and the more gratitude you have, the more you have to find grace in."
"I think you lost me," I admitted, trying to keep up with her.
"Kile said you weren't particularly meditative."
I grimaced, wondering what else Kile had told her about me. We were friends but I had just broken up with him when he met her – surely whatever he said wasn't all positive. I tried not to be offended by her words and chose to focus on what we were seeing.
I imagined having all of the funds of the national treasury at my disposal and how not even one percent of those funds would be enough for this community to be rebuilt to a standard far beyond what it was before. But I couldn't use all of that money in one place. It simply wasn't feasible. "Crazy," I whispered to myself.
Alice huffed. "What?"
"All of the money in this world wouldn't be able to fix what happened here. You could rebuild homes and churches and businesses but you can't rebuild these kids' lives."
"So how do you help them?" she asked in a way that I knew she had thought that very same question multiple times. "It's something I wrestle with on a regular basis. How can we help these people without hurting them? You can't give these kids handouts forever or they'll never be self-sufficient but they need the aid to get by. Where's the line?"
"It's a fine balance," I said. It was a fine balance I faced everyday when I made decisions about health care and the costs of education.
The truck stopped a mile down the road where some homes were still standing. They appeared to be made of concrete and were generally sturdier. "Their homes weren't destroyed but the flooding did it's work," Alice said to me quietly. "Grab as many as you can. We're going on foot from here."
I took an armful of bags and followed her from house to house, kids of all ages running out eagerly to greet us. They jumped up and down and clapped their hands as they waited for us to hand over the food. It warmed me to see how happy they were to get just the minimum of staples but it left me hurting, thinking of how little this actually would do for them in the long run.
We were over halfway through with handing out the food when a girl stopped me by pulling on hand. She was small, I hadn't even noticed her approach me. She was wearing a dirty pink cami and purple shorts, her messy black hair in a loose ponytail. Her young eyes were shining as she held up a small xylophone toy to me. I remembered these toys from when I was a kid, little plastic keys with rainbow buttons that made different noises. One quick glance at the back of this one and it was obvious that the buttons weren't working since there were no batteries inside. She was holding a wooden spoon though and when she had my attention, she tapped various keys with the end of the spoon.
"That was pretty. Can you do it again?" I asked her.
She smiled, showing all of her teeth, and tapped out the melody again. I laughed and sat down on a chunk of concrete at the site of a home that had once been standing. She passed me the toy and nodded, encouraging me to play. "You want me to play?" She nodded again. "Well, I can't make any promises."
Mom had tried to teach me piano as a kid but I had never been able to have my hands doing two completely different things at once. I just didn't have the mental capabilities for it. Managing a miniature xylophone with one wooden spoon couldn't be too bad though. I tapped through the melody of a song Mom would sing to us as kids, and one of the first songs that she taught us how to play on piano. The girl clapped and squealed. She grabbed the spoon from my hand and surprised me by playing the next phrase of the song.
"You know it?"
She nodded enthusiastically. Then she dashed further into the rubble of the home and came back with a broken pallet of wood that was painted. It was missing more than half of it, guessing from the dimensions of what she had. We could still see that a music staff and notes had been printed on the wood and it was the song I was playing.
My heart sank. "This is your home?" As she nodded, her smile vanished. "Where's your family?"
Then she pointed to the ground and put a hand to her heart, wooden spoon still clenched in her fingers. "Gone," she said simply, her voice a lot stronger than I thought it would be.
"What's your name?"
"Loren."
"Do you know the words to the song?" I asked her, pointing to the toy.
She nodded. "Spanish."
I smiled and shrugged. "That's okay. I play, you sing." And she did. I only vaguely knew the words she had said, only from hearing Mom speak Spanish from time to time on the phone to my great-aunt but I wasn't fluent by any means.
By the time we finished the first verse, Alice had come over with some other kids in tow. General Leger had what almost looked like tears in his eyes when I glanced up at him and I knew that my dad would have been proud of me. There were no cameras or reporters around to capture this moment; it was all for me to hold onto.
Loren followed me everywhere I went for the rest of the day and though Alice had muttered something about liability issues, she let it slide. Loren's interaction with us made it easier for the other kids to approach us, forgetting that I was their queen and a total stranger to them and asking me to play with them. Once we reunited with Osten and Eikko, my husband organized a soccer game for all of the kids. His soccer skills were dismal compared to theirs but they were all having fun. Alice said that it was the most she'd seen them smile since the hurricane. Even if we weren't doing any real work, we were making a difference. Maybe relationships were more important than construction after all.
Osten stopped to catch his breath at one point of the game and I noticed him wander off to the side, looking not toward the game but in the opposite direction where the village lay in ruin. I sidled up next to him and folded my arms.
"How're you feeling?" I asked.
"I don't like this, Eads," he admitted.
I nodded. "It's hard to see, isn't it?"
"We just sit in a palace, on velvet chairs eating off of silver plates, It's not fair." He kicked at a piece of unrecognizable rubble with the toe of his brand new sneakers. "I want to do more."
I smiled faintly and nodded. "Okay."
"Okay?" he repeated, seeming shocked that I agreed.
"You can do anything you want, Osten. You can take your life in any direction you want, go to any college you want, maybe even not go to college. It's all up to you."
"And happens under the watchful eye of General Leger."
We both glanced over to where General Leger was sitting on the edge of his truck, his uniform unbuttoned at the collar as some of the boys were trying on his hat and inspecting his sword. "Damn right," I said, giggling. I threw an arm around Osten's shoulders, realizing suddenly that he was just a couple inches shorter than me and that before I knew it, he would be all grown up. "It's about time you made a name for yourself," I teased.
"I just want to make a difference."
"We all do, Osten. Funny, isn't it? All of the power we have and yet we're trapped by the fact that everything we do has to look good or be polished."
"Maybe you can change that too," he said hopefully, going back to being my boyish, ever-hopeful little brother.
"Maybe." I squeezed him again.
All too soon, General Leger was steering us back into our armored vehicles and we were on our way back to the royal safe house. It felt ridiculous walking through a marble entryway after the day we'd had, our clothes covered in filth from the rubble of homes that had been destroyed not two weeks earlier.
Eikko and I showered and then got ready for bed, exhaustion making my bones heavy. We lay on our sides, facing each other, whispering even though we were completely alone and not in any danger of being overheard. There were ideas buzzing around in our minds that we whispered about excitedly, assuring each other that we would carry this trip with us for the remainder of our lives.
When we arrived back at Angeles, I wasted no time in going to my mom. "Mom, I need your help. How would you like to have a little project?" I asked her as she put her book down, looking bored out of her mind. Dad was due back later that night so I was sure that she was bored.
"What kind of project?"
"Something stress-free and easy."
"Of course," she said, not believing that one bit.
"How would you and Miss Lucy like to start an initiative for orphans?"
Mom narrowed her eyes at me. "What are you up to, Eadlyn?"
"I'm just trying to keep you from going crazy from boredom. There are absolutely no ulterior motives here." But we shared a knowing smile with each other and the mischievous twinkle in Mom's eye was enough for me to know that she was on board.