Moment in time

It is 3pm on a November afternoon in the state of Oaxaca. I am traveling back from a day in the hills with the children of San Dionysio. There are 16 people in the van, 2 volunteers from the local museum, 3 students (including me) and 11 small children. We are squashed up, two to a seat up front, five girls in the back seats, three wee boys standing at the back. The men from the museum talk to us in Spanish. The children in the back chatter and laugh in Zapotec (their native tongue). Language barriers mean nothing today, we are all just sharing the experience of being human, of walking in the mountains. Little boys pee by the roadside. Older girls shriek with embarrassment and hide their faces when we try and take their photos. The smallest girl picks flowers for her dad. An older sister looks after her younger brother. Small children get tired and demand water and a rest. A goat tries to eat a girl’s sandwich. The journey back is a riot of seats going up and down, girls falling backwards, boys getting squashed in the back.  Everyone is laughing. I look up and see their faces in the mirror of the car, laughing, enchanting. I catch myself for a moment and think: here I am.

In the middle of the mountains, with 11 young children speaking Zapotec, bumping along a dirt track, tired and laughing, back to a tiny toy town miles and miles from anywhere. And at the same time I know I am completely in the right place, completely at the centre of the universe at this precise moment in time, and that however far removed I am from where I have been, this place, this moment, this experience, this feeling is precisely what every thing, every part of my life has been leading to up to now, and that I am precisely where I am meant to be.