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How to explain?

For so many years, I lost count, I sponsored a World Vision child with my meager $25 a month--which evidently buys more than I can imagine in Indonesia. Here, it buys about a pound of filet mignon, which shows just how over-indulged I am.

Actually, it was just last night when I was complaining that my husband's new pickup truck doesn't have automatic windows or an external thermometer, that a good friend called me "over indulged."

Anyway, my WV girl has grown up and gotten a job, so she's off the "payroll." I have been assigned a new child--a 10-year-old boy from Senegal named Mayecor. Mayecor has written a letter to me and my family through the help of a village interpretor.

He lives with his family in a little farming village and goes to school when he's not helping with the animals. He likes football (the international version), and he tends cows, goats, and chickens. He describes his father has having one wife, which seems very odd to me, but then I am an American, and we don't like polygamists here, even if they collect wives for religious purposes--or maybe it's because they collect wives for religious purposes.

So, now I have to write a letter back to Mayecor, and I am struggling with what to say. He has asked so many delightful questions--like how many animals do we have, how many people are in our family, what do we like to do. How do I explain to a child in Senegal who is all about survival that my only animals are two overweight inside cats whose claws have been removed so they don't shred the couch, and that I am the one wife and always will be the one wife, and that I like to sit in my arm chair or at my home-office desk and type to absolute strangers on a computer. And my truck doesn't have automatic windows.

Maybe Mayecor won't be judgmental. Although I'm not sure why he should--it's not bad to have two or three of everything, is it?

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