After I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of North America, the women brought me more bird books. They asked visitors to bring them—volunteers and lawyers and, for the lucky ones, family. The women have become my bird family.

The playground is the happiest place in the compound but it is not like other playgrounds. The slides are gray and made of metal. The monkey bars, the tunnels—they are made of metal. The whole thing is covered by a gray plastic tarp. Like an industrial playground for robot children. Or a laboratory with double-sided mirrors where aliens play while doctors study their behavior. Still, I like to watch the children shriek and play after school or on the weekends. I don’t think the children care about metal. I don’t think they care about gray. Maybe some of them have no rainbow-swirled, plastic, spiraling-ladder playgrounds to compare this to.

The playground is in the courtyard, at the center of the building. The ground is concrete, or plastic grass. On one side, our bunks. On the other are the classrooms, the medical unit, the common room, and a library that has hardly any books, some computers, mostly just binders that read SELF-HELP LEGAL or KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. I browsed them once. I understood very little. Every section of the building is called a camp and labeled with an animal and a color: red bird, green frog, and so on. Nobody refers to their room that way. Nobody says they live in an animal.

There are a dozen children at the playground today. Thank God the children don’t wear same-colored sweatpants and oversized shirts and can run in their full plumage. Blue shorts and red shirts and black skin and brown hair and green eyes and whirling laughter. Not all the kids are like this. Some of them sit on the concrete ledge, feet swirling sand, just watching. Some of them avoid the playground altogether and spend time trailing their mothers, the adult in them sprouting, ready to emerge in all its hardness. Ana, she is all questions and laughter. She likes to color, she likes to play soccer in the dirt, always has Band-Aids dotting her skinny legs. She likes to make up stories to pass the time. The babysitter knows her more than I. The babysitter is where she spent all her time until I finished work every night. The hurt rises, always surprising me when I least expect. I have to look away from the slide, the sand, the oil burning in the distance.