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rules?
    ‘You have to tell her. How long will you keep it up? She will be disappointed if you don’t send her money.’
    ‘I could make some.’
    You look at her and raise your eyebrows. It’s easy to make money here, especially for a woman, but there is a price. And it’s not the right one. Someone would think he could own you.
    The wind is picking up. Mariam huddles against you.
    You stand for a second to pull up the tight trousers so they don’t expose your backside. There is a gap between your skin and the jeans. You are tiny but your backside can give any of the big girls a run for their money. Mariam says it all the time and laughs. No one makes trousers for your shape. The pair you picked yesterday aren’t the loose-fitting ones volunteers think are suitable for this place because you can layer them, as someone said. You gave her the silent treatment when she was trying to make the case, holding up an oversized pair of second-hand hiking trousers. Why people think they know what’s best for you when they are not you, you don’t understand. Why you wouldn’t know how you want to dress at your age is beyond you. The woman didn’t say anything else after that; she turned her face away for the rest of their one line, the thing they shout during the distribution of food, clothes, building materials, tents, wood. She stayed, but she didn’t have any more advice to offer. You had asked for leggings, tighter jeans, something that would make you feel like you were still twenty-four and not just a refugee squatting in a camp that the locals want gone. Leggings are in fact more comfortable, more practical. You don’t have to remember to pull them up when stepping over the endless mud. They won’t flap around and you know where they are: close to your body.
    When it was your turn and you stood in front of the open van doors, doors that had two volunteers on each side with outstretched arms to help everyone queue,she let you scramble to the cardboard box in the back of the vehicle and choose your own pair. She didn’t say anything, just pointed. Dignity involves choosing your own outfits, at least, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?
    Mariam shuffles to create some heat between you. Her phone is ringing and she waits for it to stop.
    ‘What shall I tell her?’
    ‘The truth. You might need her help. You know that.’
    Mariam redials. A van has parked opposite you. It seems that the two women inside have already distributed whatever they had fund-raised for or collected at home. They are in no hurry to get anywhere. They stretch, leaving the front doors open. On a day like this, sunny with its pretence of calm, it’s almost like any other short trip but even better: the satisfaction of having done good work, important in fact. Without these people coming and some of them staying, the camp would be nothing like it is. You would suffer a lot more. You know that.
    One of the women is changing a little baby on the passenger seat. The second one now looks at you and smiles. You are tired of the visitors who all need acknowledgement, who need you to engage so they can feel that they are doing the right thing. It is not that you don’t appreciate their help. What they do keeps you alive. But the rules of it are annoying. You have, in fact, more important things to do. To plan and arrange the next step, if you can even talk about arranging here.
    A song pops into your head as the woman moseys towards you. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
    It is of course not Christmas. It is autumn.
    It is the aid thing, the helping syndrome, you think of while you avoid the woman walking towards you. Your mother has told you many times of the great famine. And the great song. And the humiliation.
    She used to say, ‘There are no other pictures. We are always the famished skeletons with the kwashiorkor belly only. It’s not enough, it’s not right, that this is all there is to us.’ Your father would reply that these were exactly the