Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: EERIE (07/28/16)
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TITLE: Little Girl Lost | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lisa Enqvist
08/04/16 -
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Suddenly a window opened on a part of my childhood history, a part of an identity I had tried to create for myself when young. My longing to be a Ceylonese was a longing to belong - no matter how. Being mistaken for a Burgher was the closest I could get due to the color of my skin. My darker-skinned classmates used to love to see my skin turn red when they pinched me - and that they did just to see the color change - not because they wanted to hurt me. I wished I had black hair instead of the blond I had as a child. I had a classmate who was slightly fairer than me. She - or was it her sister - had blue eyes. They were Burghers. I was proud that when my skin was sunburned, it was darker than theirs! My eyes were brown. I was thrilled when strangers took me to be a Burgher. My hair became darker only after I left school.
Being found by someone who had never known me, but whose family history, unknowingly, played an important part in in my childhood seemed both eerie and exciting. My new friend was also a Burgher.
As we shared our stories, she opened her childhood window as well.
For just a few years, she had experienced the love of her grandparents, just enough to give her a sense of being loved by someone. The song that brought us together was part of her memory of those happy years.
We exchanged memories, photos, names of people, discovering some whom we both knew, even finding her close relative had been our landlord. She had visited that relative together with her grandmother.
Each email brought new insights on parallels in our experiences, but also perceptions of the vast difference between us. We both had moved very often. We both loved the tiny pink flowers growing along a fence by the school which we both had attended, though our age differed so much that we never met.
We had both made bouncing rubber balls from dry latex strings we pulled off the cuts on rubber trees. Maybe the wounds we both had in the past gave us the needed “bounce” to get on with life.
The greatest difference between our separate childhoods was the fact; her parents did not love her. That was the reason for her many moves – partly sent to different relatives – partly sent to boarding school.
One of the places where she spent a holiday was with her father. Though they stayed at the same farm, they were like strangers. At night she was locked out of the main building. She could go in and out of her room as she wished, but was allowed to enter her father’s part of the house only during the day. She was eleven.
As she described the night sounds and sights from her windows in the moonlight, I remembered the eerie feelings I had at that age whenever I heard weird tropical sounds or imagined seeing something scary in the dark. I could always call my mother when I was afraid.
She only had an oil lamp which she kept burning all night. The distressing loneliness of her childhood left hardened scars.
There is one who was wounded and who felt the bitterness of being abandoned. On the cross he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why do you refuse to help me or even to listen to my groans? Day and night I keep on weeping, crying for your help, but there is no reply” Psalms 22:1-3.TLB
My prayer is that each one who has experienced similar wounds will be able to say, “for he has not despised my cries of deep despair; he has not turned and walked away. When I cried to him, he heard and came.” Psalms 22:24.TLB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgher_people
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