Izaquel's Day Out

"Teachers, I want to ask a favor," Izaquel said to us one day, "In order to enroll in eleventh grade next year, I need an identification card. I have to get it from the city. Will you take me?"

And so it came to be that, several weeks later, we found ourselves in the back of a pickup truck with Izaquel and some goats, bumping along the dusty road towards the big city.

The actual process of getting the I.D. card was not difficult. We strode into the office, and within twenty minutes Izaquel was sitting in front of a camera and fingerprinting machine.

"What's your name?" the heavily pregnant woman attending to him asked brusquely.

"Izaquel Váz Solar," Isaquel said nervously, looking very small and keenly aware of the several hundreds of dollars of equipment around him. 

"How do you spell that?"

"I-Z-A-Q-U-E-L," he said, handing over his birth certificate.

"Hmm." The lady squinted at the document. "No, your name is spelled with an I in it. I-Z-A-Q-U-I-E-L."

"No," protested Izaquel, "That was a mistake at the hospital. It's supposed to be without an I. My father told me to---"

"Don't you even know how to spell your name?" the woman accused, "It's right here. It's with an I. Ponto final. End of Story."

Izaquel glowered, but didn't argue. What can a scrawny sixteen-year-old do to change the mind of a lady who clearly doesn't want to deal with the extra paperwork for a name correction?

The lady muttered something about "these ruffians from the mato" and went on processing his application.

It wasn't until later on, as we emerged from the dingy office into the brilliant sunlight of the streets of Tete that Izaquel finally stopped frowning.

"Lunch?" asked Laura, and we started towards one of our favorite places to eat.

The rest of the day was, in a word, fantastic. We took Izaquel out to lunch, where he ate a plate of chicken bigger than his face.

"Can we just eat already?"

Giant plate of chicken... yum!

Half an hour later... an empty plate and a huge smile.

After lunch, we went to Kwachena, a market that's a bit outside of the city and chock full of calamidades. We wanted to get Izaquel some decent pants and a nice shirt, since he wears the same thing pretty much every day. We let him pick them out. Instead of classy pants and a dress shirt, he chose blue athletic shorts and a brown short-sleeved shirt with sparkles all over the back.

"Are you sure?" we asked each time.

"YES!" he said.

Then we told him to pick a jacket, since we didn't like seeing him shiver every morning. He carefully examined rows and rows of coats, and eventually came across a gigantic, white, women's ski jacket. He tried it on, and it didn't fit him at all, but the minute he wore it, a huge smile crawled across his face, and that was that. We bought the jacket, and started heading home.

I think my favorite part of the day was watching Izaquel pick the most ridiculous things to wear. I think Izaquel's favorite, other than the giant plate of chicken, was the ice-cream at the end of the day.

"I'm glad we ate the ice cream together," he told us afterwards, "Otherwise, I wouldn't have known that you can eat the cone. I would have thrown it away!"

I'm glad we got to eat ice cream together, too, Izaquel.

First ever ice cream cone!