Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
and she busied herself taking pictures with a very expensive Nikon
while Wyatt made faces to make the kids laugh. Bennie was adding
shading to the sketch he had made of this local Chinese bistro, a
dilapidated building at a crossroads that appeared to lead to no­
where. Mr. Fred, the bus driver, had wandered across the road to
smoke a cigarette. He would have stayed closer to the bus, but Vera,
who wanted to board, had asked with exaggerated waves of her
hands that he not contaminate the air around her. Miss Rong was in
the front seat, studying a book of English phrases. Moff also got
on the bus, and lay down at the back for a five-minute nap. Heidi
boarded and applied a disinfectant to her hands, then put some on a
tissue and wiped down the armrest and grab bar in front of her. Mar­
lena and Esmé were doing their best to use the latrine with its per­
ilous pit. Bad as it was, they preferred privacy to open-air cleanliness.
Harry had gone searching for a better loo and in doing so saw a pair
of interesting red-breasted birds with twitchy eyes.
This tendency for people to wander off was already becoming a
habit, with Rupert and Harry vying for first place in being the most
dilatory. When everyone had finally been rounded up, Miss Rong
counted heads: the black lady, the plump man, the tall man with
horsetail hair, the kissing girl, the man who drank too many beers,
those three with baseball caps, another two with sun hats, and so on,
until she reached eleven and had to start over again. At last, she
found the requisite twelve. She gave the signal to the bus driver with
a triumphant “Zou ba!” and off they went.
The bus’s transmission and shock absorbers were put to the test as
Mr. Fred lurched into oncoming traffic and in Russian-roulette fash­
ion passed slightly slower vehicles on the uneven road. The combi­
nation of bad suspension and frightful suspense was ideal for
inducing motion sickness in almost everyone. Heidi felt no queasi­
ness whatsoever, thanks to her anti-nausea wrist device. And Rupert
was also unaffected and was even able to read from a black-covered
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