Salma & Furqan

Here is Salma with our bua's son, Furqan. "Bua" means something like cook/domestic helper.
Our bua's name is Mukhta. She lives very close to us, and we go over to her house often. Salma loves it there--in the neighborhood there are so many little kids. She gets bored stuck in our apartment with no one to play with. Our bua is very, very poor. Her house is nothing more than a shack with a tin roof thrown over a few boards to keep the rain out. The floor is dirt. But whenever we go to visit her, she always wants to offer us something to eat and drink. She is a very generous human being. Her son Furqan is a sweet boy. He's about 10 years old. He can't speak. When he was about 3 years old, he had a very high fever that burst his eardrums and made him go deaf. So he never learned how to talk, although he and his mom have figured out their own elaborate sign system. But he's very smart, and he does great in school as his mother tells me. And he's a very good athlete. I like to play racketball with him whenever I go to Mukhta's house. There's a net set up in the open field outside her house. Furqan really loves Salma. He always wants to hold her when we go over to his house. He keeps asking his mom to have another baby, but she has told me that she doesn't want any more children. Azfar and I pay her a living wage, but her future is always uncertain, and she told me she doesn't want to have to worry about another mouth to feed.