Poverty-eaten Seaweed

Poverty-eaten Seaweed

There was a family who had nothing to eat but seaweed. They lived by the sea and harvested seaweed that washed on shore over the white pebbles. And they ate the white pebbles too because their daughter Bewinsin had an ulcer – a little hole in her stomach – and the pebbles gave her stomach something to digest and keep digesting between meals. No. That isn’t true. Their daughter Bewinsin didn’t have an ulcer, she had a tumour and the pebbles were an attempt to dislodge the tumour so then her stomach could have some meat and protein to digest for a better balanced diet. Eating all only seaweeds. There wasn’t much meat and protein to digest for a better balanced diet. Eating all only seaweeds there wasn’t much meat and no protein. To tell you the truth, the tumour only came off in little bits for every meal and in this way lasted from when Bewinsin was ten until she was eighteen.

Her sisters and brothers were jealous. They only got little fish to eat for their protein, caught in the morning. And they only ate seaweed Sundays because there was so much of it. It’s just like you wouldn’t eat dandelions even though there are more than you can eat in the springtime. You’d only eat it in a salad once in a while because it’s healthy but you don’t feel like picking any.

Well, the parents ate fresh halibut and even whales. The children only got seaweed.

There was great poverty for them but they had more than could fit in their stomachs all at once so they spend the whole day eating. The problem is, they were very fat people to begin with, they would have burst and died but they ate very little at a time and very slowly.

So much for having too much to eat, they were so poor they could only make themselves clothes by growing seaweed on their skins. The seaweed did not grow as densely as it did on the sea floor in the ocean. The children spent plenty of time in the sea to condition their skins to the right climate, from the time they were born, eight hours a day under water. That was how by the time they were twelve they were covered in seaweed and wouldn’t be walking around naked and shamed if there be any rich merchants coming to buy seaweed from their parents’ skins in exchange for rings and earrings for the fish of the sea. And there was even a duke who came for a picnic once and abducted Enhanhada, the one born before Bewinsin and made the family pay him all their skins’ seaweed for ransom of her life.

Enhanhada was saved and returned to help her family’s poor struggle in poverty by the sea. And she got the duke to give her whole family rich clothes from the palace and trunks of gold. But her family didn’t want to change their way of life and opened a new savings bank to dump all that gold in it. So they had a very big investment by the sea. And nobody ever touched it.

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt