Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis Page A

very good at patching mud walls. He fashioned a device with long boards that let him reach the high spots. Soon the house looked stronger.
    Leila and Parvana dug up some wildflowers from the edge of the mine field and replanted them in the yard. Leila edged the little flowerbed with rocks. Parvana remembered the flowers she had once planted in the marketplace in Kabul. She wondered whether they were blooming.
    None of the children knew anything about growing vegetables, but when Parvana pulled the weeds and dead plants out of the garden, she found some things growing there already.
    “Maybe seeds fell from last year’s vegetables,” she said to Leila, who was helping her.
    “Maybe it’s magic,” Leila said. “I told you, the ground likes me.”
    Leila started burying bits of Hassan’s food along with hers at the start of each meal. After some prodding, Parvana began to do the same thing. She felt foolish at first, but then it became a habit.
    Asif refused. “There’s no protection against land mines,” he insisted. “You two are idiots.”
    “Is that how you lost your leg?” Parvana asked. She had never dared ask him before, but if he was willing to tell Leila about his family, maybe he was prepared to talk about his leg, too.
    She was wrong.
    “No, it wasn’t a land mine,” he said, glaring at her. “It was…a wolf who ate my leg, but I ate the wolf, so I won that battle.”
    “You’re very brave,” Leila said. Asif smiled at her and stuck his thin chest out a little.
    Parvana just rolled her eyes.
    Every afternoon, Parvana went to a shady spot in the yard and wrote to her friend.
    Dear Shauzia:
    We patched up the pigeon cage this morning and cleaned it out. I wish we had some vegetable seeds. With all the fertilizer from the pigeons, we could have a wonderful vegetable patch.
    Some chickens would be nice, too. Pigeons are good to eat, but I prefer chicken.
    Maybe another peddler will get caught in the mine field, a peddler with chickens and seeds and lanterns and lantern oil, and toys for Hassan, books for me, a false leg for Asif, real jewelry for Leila and some new toshaks. Fluffy ones without bugs in them.
    Until then, we’ll have to make do with what we have.
    Parvana read back over what she had written, thinking how lovely it would be to have all those things. Then she realized that for her wishes to come true, some peddler would have to die.
    For a moment she wondered what she was becoming. Then she dismissed the question. “I didn’t create this world,” she said to herself. “I only have to live in it.”

FOURTEEN
    Leila and Parvana took turns taking care of Grandmother. She didn’t need much attention. She just stayed in her corner, eating and sleeping. A few times a day Parvana or Leila would take her a pan, give her some privacy while she used it, and then they would take the pan away again to empty it in the latrine.
    At first the children were careful to be quiet around Grandmother, but they soon forgot to worry about her and chattered as much inside the house as they did outside. Sometimes Hassan would use her as a prop when he worked on his standing skills. If Grandmother minded any of this, she gave no sign.
    Parvana found some needles and thread in the treasure house.
    “Let me fix your dress,” she said to Leila. “What you’ve done is pretty, but I think I can make it even prettier.”
    Although the dress Parvana made for Leila had sleeves that weren’t even — she wasn’t very good at sewing — it did look a little more normal than what Leila had been wearing, and the material she used brought out the blue in the little girl’s eyes.
    One day, weeks after they had arrived, Parvana decided to wash the dust off the shelves in the little house. She remembered how her mother and Nooria had endlessly washed out the cupboard in the tiny room the family shared in Kabul, using up the water she’d had to walk so far to fetch.
    Maybe they could add a room to their Green