This is a picture I did not take

of an Italian woman just outside the gates of the Sheraton in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with her arm tightly closed around her black leather purse, two armed guards standing with their machine guns at the ready ten yards from her, and a boy in a white t-shirt and shorts with his hand out, beseeching her for money, which she retrieves from her now open purse, and as she hands him the money, three children, one running faster than the rest and wearing a bright red t-shirt from a Northern Virginia children's soccer league, tears down the hill (from the tin-roofed slum that abuts the Sheraton's grounds) running barefoot with his eyes blazing, intently focussed on the woman's opened purse and whistling to his friends, signaling that they better come quick while the getting's good, and seeing this wave of children running toward her, the Italian woman shuts her purse and starts saying "no, no more" to the hands of children that are suddenly appearing from every direction as she turns and walks the ten paces back toward the comfort of the Sheraton's gates, and the armed guards paid to insure her safety, and the oil paintings that grace the walls of her perfectly purchasable air-conditioned room.