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Mia's Story

by Michael Foreman

Let's say you were to open an artist's sketchbook to see what he's scribbled there. You'd expect to see a few pen-and-ink doodles, some messy notes, perhaps a few fuller pictures that have been fleshed out and colored in.

You might feel a thrill peering in on a work in progress, hoping to glimpse the whirring gears of a creative mind. That's what I felt reading this journal of Foreman's encounter with a young girl who lives in a garbage dump outside Santiago, Chile.

Upbeat, redemptive stories about girls living in garbage dumps surely don't come along every day, but Foreman shows us what captivated him about the family. As he writes on the back flap:

"For Manuel and his fellow villagers, the trash was a crop to be harvested, recycled, and made useful once more."

Mia is Manuel's only daughter, whom Foreman encounters when his bus to the Andes mountains breaks down in her village. A few cross-hatchings here, a wash of blue or beige there is enough to conjure up the splay of rickety hovels that pass for a village or Manuel's rusting truck. The story is scrawled on the scraps of paper:

"Sometimes Papa comes home happy with money in his pockets, and sometimes he comes home sad with none."

Foreman is the master of small gestures, as Manuel hugs his daughter or pulls a puppy out of his jacket for her, his thin face a gaunt landscape of hardship despite his grin. The puppy soon runs off, and Mia's pursuit into the mountains leads her to a white flower that she brings home and cultivates, until after a couple years it covers the dingy village in snowy blooms and offers a chance at another source of income.

The flower is probably some sort of lily, an appropriate metaphor for redemption and purity. Because the chance encounter isn't just between the artist and an innocent, ever-hopeful Mia, but between her world and ours, where our assumptions about what it takes to be happy seem startlingly provincial.

Each scrap of paper in the artist's notebook becomes a passport into another culture, where wealth is measured by how well you enjoy what you have.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Comments

[Camille]

I love Michael Foreman. Thank you for pointing me toward this book.

[brettdl]

I loved it.