Caged Bird Sings

I am the kind of person that gets things stuck in my head and they stay there until I resolve the issue in my heart. I have to be at peace with it. I think that is why the double ferris wheel is my favorite ride. One wheel goes about life and the everyday stuff, while I am sorting and processing all of the things going around and around in my head with the other wheel. Once I have an answer, it is like getting a "get out of jail free" card and it can finally leave me alone. It's not like bumper cars, always banging into stuff and never seeing above what is coming at you. It is finding the place where you can see things from a new place, seeing the whole picture clearly.

As I go about my everyday stuff I have been thinking about Maire Loude next door. She hangs out everyday in between her household chores and watches everything we do. Says nothing, she just watches.
No harm in that, right!
However, it is a different matter that has me stuck.
Not the fact that she can't come to literacy class, not the fact that she is so young and works so hard.
At first, I didn't notice because I am so busy in the morning and Haiti is a very loud place. We have people coming and going all day, classes going, dogs barking, machines going in the back ground all the time.

It is always early morning before I make my way down stairs when I hear her singing. Everyone from the house next door has gone and she is finally alone.
The sound of her voice haunts me when I sit and think about it.
Sometimes she sounds like a little girl singing loudly off key and silly.
However,it is the other times that haunt me.
She isn't singing a sad song. She has found a place within herself that seems happy and peaceful just like the ferris wheel. When I think about it I am reminded of two very different things.
One - Mia Angelo's book, "I know why the caged bird sings" and something I heard Elie Wiesel say on Oprah, "free men never have to run". She isn't free or is she?

Why? Why Maire Loude, Mia Angelo and Elie Wiesel. I am on top of the ferris wheel looking for the big picture on this one. In my American mind I had it all worked out. She couldn't be happy and I didn't like her life. In my book, it was an injustice and I was going to fix it. But why is she singing every morning?

I have come to understand that peoples lives are not what we think. People are complicated. Life is complicated.

In Blue Like Jazz Donald Miller asks, what song will you sing when your soul gets set free?