Puppets

‘Puppets?’ I say and sit back, blinking. There is a moment of silence. You hear a lot of strange things in this business, but I’ve never heard someone tell me to buy puppets. It’s an earthquake, not a Sunday School picnic.

Anne shuffles and her hands move around like chickadees pecking words out of her. ‘Yes. Sorry.’ She is Scottish, with a voice like a song and a smile that paints her eyes into upside down crescent moons. She punctuates all her sentences with apology. Normally she works in Sudan, where they can’t even sing in the vehicles because they won’t hear the gunfire in time to duck. She’s here in Pakistan on a sort of working holiday, which means she lives in a soggy tent, goes to meetings from dawn to dusk and spends the rest of her time talking to people at light speed. I’m not sure where the ‘holiday’ part comes in, but she says it’s better than Sudan. Here in Bagh we work in a building that would be condemned if there was anyone to condemn it, and we sleep in tents filled with old grimy blankets, grey pillows, and damp, snoring men. We are surrounded on one side by the local thoroughfare and on the other by a noisy café that’s just sprung out of the rubble like a spring daisy. Entertainment used to be badminton until the local mullah saw one of the women at it and pulled the plug. The café’s on the court now, anyway. Now we sit and watch Indian music videos and tell the same jokes over and over. I can’t even imagine what Sudan’s like.

And now our Anne has just come in and announced that she will need 100 puppets. I remember someone telling me that she’s a child psychologist, and I relax a little. My father is also a psychologist. He has puppets, too. ‘Ok,’ I say. ‘Puppets.’

‘Sorry,’ she says. It sounds like a bird trilling.

But I am a logistician, which means I want to know details. ‘Puppets’ will just not cut it. What kind of puppets? How big? What kind of material? What gender are they? When do you need them? Can you draw me a picture? It’s her turn to blink. The chickadees get going again and the crescent moons. ‘Well the girl is Gouryia and the boy is Goudi, and she has a pretty head scarf and he is a bit scruffy, because he needs to clean up and that’s part of the story …’ Then she is off, hands everywhere and lightspeed sing-song voice, telling me the answer to the only question I didn’t ask: Why? It turns out children may have been traumatized by the earthquake. Huh. I didn’t think of that. I was too busy shoveling latrine kits at them. Anne, God bless her, wants to tell them stories, and she wants to do it with puppets. She wants to tell them it’s ok to be scared, that it’s ok to wake up in the night with your heart beating fast, that it’s ok to tell your friends and talk about it. If the puppets can do it, the kids might think it’s ok too. They might lose their fear, they might be able to sleep through the night and play through the day. Latrine kits lack the potential to encourage this kind of thing. Sorry.

So she makes me my picture, and apologizing like mad, she also makes me pattern. We try our best but no one in Pakistan wants to make puppets. They act like they’re scared of them, or like they’ve never heard of them, or like we’re silly.

It is Anne’s last day. Things don’t look good. And then. The God of the Kingdom populated by those who enter as children comes through. Celestina the HR Manager knows someone who has puppets. He sends through a photo of his puppets and they are perfect. The boy is scruffy and he is dressed in blue. The girl is rosy-cheeked, dressed in pink, and her head is covered in a sea-blue headscarf. Gouryia and Goudi. We’ve found them. Anne has been out all day walking in the hills above Islamabad, finally getting the ‘holiday’ part of her working holiday. They can’t walk in Sudan. I show her the pictures and her eyes crinkle into those wonderful moons again. She likes them.

My heart feels a hundred years old next to hers, and I order the puppets, smiling, just to feel young again.