Almuerzo

by Kaitlyn Rode

West Bloomfield

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Mompiche, Ecuador is a small fishing town known for its surf and worry-free mentality. I came for the beach but what keeps me here is the sense that I have leaped back in time. The beauty of a place where kids are not given their first iPhone at six is that play still exists. Since my childhood bordered the invention of the smartphone, my imagination was allowed the space it needed to grow. However, my siblings are significantly younger than I and I've witnessed a childhood seriously lacking in make-believe. Mompiche is still full of the magic I recall from being a kid. Children play cops and robbers and make toys from sticks. There is a freedom that kids from the United States no longer have. There was once a generation of kids that could run around the neighborhood and come home for dinner, and now there are children with helicopter parents who lack a sense of adventure. In Mompiche the kids run free and seemingly own the streets. My series, Kid Kingdom, studies the lives of the youth and what it is like growing up in a small beach town in Ecuador.