Peeking kids: alert / astonished / anxious

Top photo: The mother and daughter are part of a relatively new NYC phenomenon of hundreds of adult-child pairs and kids alone who ply subway cars and platforms, and occasionally streets, selling small candy bars for $2 each. Mostly from Ecuador's rural central highlands, where much of the Indigenous population lives, they have fled debt, climate change, political turmoil, and violence to form a  wave of migration. One woman interviewed by reporter Jordan Salama said she didnt know the name the store where she bought the candy, but followed instructions to take the R train to the end, then the Q59 bus, and get off at the 22nd stop.

I usually buy some candy, and in a sad circle, pass it on to the next homeless person I see. It does not rest long in my pocket.

Middle photo: It was one of those days in 1984 China when we stuck a finger on a map, boarded a tobacco smoke-blurred local train, and ended up in a village in Yunan whose name we could not read.
This gray, late-winter afternoon, we came on the Art Troupe of Baofeng County, a traveling circus that had set up in an open space near a small town. It was not long after Mao's death, and a few people had shed the obligatory blue and olive clothing to sport a bit of color. A few days before, on an unseasonably hot day, we had passed a giant construction site where the workmen had shed their drab Mao-era jackets to reveal the improbably gaudy colors of their undershirts—bright blooms of secret rebellion against party-enforced uniformity.
Another sign of change was us, a stranger attraction, perhaps, even than the itinerant magicians.

Bottom photo: All dressed up, these brightly clad kids peer out a doorway, on the lookout for something or someone, but certainly not the bombs and invading US army that will devastate homes and lives within a few weeks of this warm, quiet day in 2003 Baghdad.