The boy, maybe 6, pushed the bike up the steep steps towards where I stood on the road. The girl was next, about 4. But it’s hard to know the age of the poor, they age differently.

A heavy bag drooped with weight either side of the bike’s middle bar. Their haul. Maybe sand from the creek running into the beach just a hundred meters off, or mud, or rubbish.

Their faces became complete smiles in return for mine.

“Salamat sori”, I said. Two soft ‘Sori’s’ came back.

With our afternoons exchanged and with calm and experience almost as weighty as the sack on the bike he could hardly push the boy pushed the bike to the road.

They were crossing the main road to take their booty perhaps home, perhaps to sell. The boy eyed his sister closer to him, behind the bike.

The traffic, bikes abreast, bikes clotted together, bikes weaving, bikes everywhere, buses, bemos, trucks . . . But a gap came and over they went. No big deal.

I looked back at the creek.

Rubbish covered the banks, the water and it crested the sand bar where the creek would flood in the monsoon.

I knew now why every day people came to sift through it. It was because new rubbish was added every day by the surrounding houses.

And I knew now that some of that rubbish had come from the bin I put stuff into in the villa I was renting. And that my shower and kitchen and toilet water was going into that creek. What I wasted was now pickings for kids, dogs, chooks – anyone alive for whom that creek’s spoils was all they had.

So of course I smiled at the boy. We’re connected, me behind my villa walls and they outside it, waiting and harvesting each day.

But what made me smile way ahead of all that was his quiet dignity and solemn determination as he got that bike up.

Just as the earth keeps turning around the sun, so does it ignore the wealth of the corrupt, the skew of the media, the red faced peppery politicians, those who would mine, drill and grub out the water from our rivers and the oil from where there was once just ice.

And so, I sense, does the boy ignore all that as he crosses the road each day and wins what he can from the creek.

What do I do? Do I do what I promised myself; find a way to stop my waste going there?

What would the boy say, I wonder?