More street children in Spain

Beyond Ibañiz, 01 Nov. 2012.

They remind me of a pack of orphans, a bit like the street children in the third world capitals I visited during my crazy backpack years, looking ragged and dirty, hardly human and all of them scrawny, prowling around me while I park my bike, my dirty equipment like a heap of garbage tied to the luggage rack, dark brown latin eyes full with curiosity looking up at me...

After all these little Spanish villages I have passed through, stopping every so often for much needed morning Cafe Con leche or an afternoon breqak and stocking up on my supplies, food and of course a few small cans of Estrella beer as well as a bottle of Vino Tinto to survive absolute boredom in front of my tent during boring evenings under Spanish stars and in the middle of proverbial f*cking Nada, I have come to hear their stories, most of them having moved back from the big coastal cities or else maybe Madrid where they were born, the offspring of parents who had to move back to their parental Pueblos because of Spain´s massive unemployment...No Dinero to pay the rent or food on the table...

Goodbye for these raggedly dressed city children to school mates and the Plazas and broad avenues of their erstwhile Ciudanial lives, having to cope with the dusty Calles of the Pueblos where their parents once, long ago, ran after soccer balls and upon reaching adulthood, moved to the more mundane cities of an Spain in better economical times...

I pay them a couple of cans of Pepsi coke, tell them a bit about my trips around this nutcase mudball, draw them in my sketchbook while sipping Cafe Con Leche out in the very dusty streets that have become their new playground, let them have a awkward go at my bike and have a good laugh when they tumble over unaccustomed as they are to the heavy weight of my worn out equipment, winning juvenile friendship in the process, for a short moment in time forgettng about my depressing feelings of loniless before moving on to the coast...it comes closer every day!!!