Free Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis Page B

old board to scoop dirt over the animal carcasses. They’d have to be properly buried, but she didn’t have the strength to do that just yet.
    “The dirt might help keep the flies away,” she explained to Leila, who had taken to following her everywhere.
    “I never thought of that,” Leila said. “Nobody told me.” She looked down at her feet. “I try to do things right.”
    Parvana bent down so she could look Leila in the eye. “You do all kinds of things right,” she said. “If you don’t know, you don’t know. No shame in that.”
    Parvana brushed some hair out of the little girl’s face so Leila could see her smile. She suddenly drew back and then forced herself to look again.
    Underneath the hair that fell over Leila’s forehead was a large sore, like the smaller ones on the lower part of her face. But this one had small white worms wiggling in it.
    “Come with me,” she said, and she led Leila to a sunny place in the yard.
    “What are you up to?” Asif asked.
    Parvana showed him the sore.
    “Let me take care of it,” he said. “I’ve got more patience than you do.”
    Parvana was about to argue, but she realized that he was right. He was more patient. She went to heat up some water to wash the wound. That was what her mother always did.
    “Do you realize you’ve got worms crawling in your face?” she heard Asif ask Leila.
    “Sometimes I feel them and I try to brush them away, but I can’t always feel them.”
    Parvana fetched a bit of soap from the treasure house and built up the fire under a pot of water. She cut some strips of cloth and carried everything over to Leila and Asif. On her way, she checked on Hassan. He was napping in the little house, not far from Grandmother.
    “You’ll need these,” Parvana said to Asif and Leila. But they didn’t even hear her. Leila was talking a mile a minute while Asif patiently pulled the tiny worms from her wound.
    “It’s the flies,” he said. “They lay eggs in the sore, and the eggs grow into worms.”
    “How did you get to be so smart?” Leila asked.
    Anyone knows that, Parvana was about to say, then bit her words back. Asif was actually smiling.
    “I can take over,” Parvana said.
    “Why? We don’t need you.” Asif finished with the worms and gently dabbed at the wound with a cloth soaked in hot water. “You need to keep your face clean,” he said to Leila. “In fact, you need to keep your whole self clean.”
    “I know I should,” she said. “Now that you’re all here, I will. When it was just Grandmother and me, I forgot.”
    Parvana left them to it. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Was she jealous? Of what? Mentally, she gave herself a kick. Here they were, finally safe, with food to eat and water to drink, and she was getting all moody. What was wrong with her?
    Whatever it was, she couldn’t understand it yet. What she could understand was work. She changed into her old boy-clothes so she wouldn’t get the girl-clothes dirty, and got busy.
    Bit by bit, Green Valley took shape. The worst job was hauling the animal carcasses out of the clearing and burying them outside the canyon. Asif attached ropes to them, Parvana and Leila pulled them out, and all three children dug the holes. Then they dug a proper latrine and cleaned up the yard of everything that attracted flies. There was a lot less buzzing after that.
    “How do you know how to do all this?” Leila asked after every new thing they did.
    Parvana wasn’t sure. “My mother liked everything to be clean, and she always made me help her. I also saw how people did things in the camps and villages I traveled through with my father. And some things are just common sense.”
    “You? Common sense?” Asif laughed.
    Parvana ignored him. She had come to the conclusion that Asif could be pleasant to everyone but her.
    “We need to keep the mice out of the rice and flour,” he said. He rummaged through the junk in the yard until he came up with enough boards and