Jasmine had barely touched her dinner – it was too warm to eat anyway – and so she took her plate to the bin and scraped the remnants away. She went back into the dining room to work on her geography project as a distraction from Tim, from her parents.

The powerlessness of her situation was making her crazy. She pulled out the photo albums from their trip last year to Nicaragua. She had fond memories of the place. The landscape was staggering; it had felt almost prehistoric, a far cry from their quaint little house in their model village of a town. She started to go through the photos, the volcanic scenery making her nostalgic for a country she would probably never go back to. They had never been to the same place twice. She saw faces of people she had become close to and then, after they left, lost touch with entirely. She couldn’t imagine doing anything differently, but it occurred to her that they existed within this tiny snapshot of happiness and when they left everything likely went back to the way it was before. Were they really changing anything?

Jasmine placed the pictures she had selected for Nicaragua face down on the scanner one by one and pressed copy. When she was done, she put the original photos back in the albums and returned the albums to the shelves. She sat and wrote an account of her stay there, leaving the space between photos on the first page blank for the country status which she would draw up nicely. Over six million inhabitants and a GDP of almost fourteen billion dollars. It was late and her shoulders ached from hunching over on the floor. She placed her copies inside the scrap book, ready to stick them down later when she had drawn her stats chart.

She got a drink from the kitchen and then went back into the dining room and grabbed some more of the photo albums to go through them. She noticed how young she looked in the pictures and realised how recent that was; she had been fourteen – almost fifteen – years old. The girl she was in those pictures was playing with the other children. She felt so much older than that now.

The albums for Honduras were next. They had visited when Jasmine was thirteen years old and built wells in several villages, as there was a severe lack of clean drinking water. She wrote a paragraph on how the country made a lot of money from mining but unfortunately the metal leaked into the water, making a lot of it undrinkable.