ABSTRACT
Creation and child well-being became linked for me thirty years ago on a mud track in Bali. I was walking beneath tall coconut palms through padi fields in the centre of that Indonesian island. My four-year-old son was running slightly ahead of me. As I came close to him he jumped with a mischievous grin into a trackside puddle drenching my feet, legs and clean shorts in muddy water. I was not amused and responded immediately and angrily, shouting at him for his foolishness. At the same time and unknown to me a young man was approaching from the direction of the Hindu temple we were about to visit. I stopped my upbraiding when I noticed him. The youth wore a sarong, a decorated headband, and a white frangipani behind his ear, and he was smiling. His smile broadened as he came near and I expected the usual Balinese greeting, but instead he said in English, ‘You should never be angry at a young child in Bali – he is the nearest thing we have to God’. He could not have been more than eighteen. I have no idea of his name and I never saw him again, yet his unexpected and anonymous admonition quite literally changed my mind.
