Life seems to work just like the water. It immediately takes the shape of the object where it is spilled. The liver of that life does not worry about the “could-be” unless pushed to it. The idea of “difficulties” seems to come from the knowledge of different situations, and that is something more present in the visitors than in the residents. Difficulties seem also to take shape only as time goes by and that is what you perceive by looking at these young faces. Moments after these pictures were taken, the ball of the children fell to the water. The kids wearing the jerseys of Messi, Suarez and Cristiano started screaming about their elemental instrument for playing. The couple of hours that we spent walking along or across the canal, that any of our belongings fell to the water felt like the worst thing that could happen in the world. It was a brown and dense water, slowly passing full of floating rubbish and with a subtle stink. On top of that, all the articles read and all the videos watched about the pollution of the rivers and channels of the city surrounded our heads and dramatized any interaction with the body and the soul of this water. However, the falling of the ball for the children did not appear to represent any trace of a disgrace. It was almost a part of their game. As quotidian as throwing the ball down the mountain and running after it with enthusiasm. The easiest way to retrieve the ball would have been to get it from the boat that follows the rope, but the boat had just moved to take us from one side to the other and it would not go back on time to get the ball: the ball was already moving with the current. But I heard Eduardo exclaim “Look! the kids have their own little instruments!” The kids had started disputing some bamboo sticks in order to hit the ball, possibly trying to bring it closer to the edge where some wooden stairs could be climbed down (as the kid on the left of the picture that in a matter of seconds went down to get its sandal that had also fallen to the water). Between the struggle for the sticks and the playfulness of the intent they did not manage to get the ball any closer and the current was almost taking it around that small dock where the kids had crowded together. That is when they took from who knows where a larger stick that had a rounded net on its end and handed it to one of the little girls. It was her that, between the cheers of the children, with amazing skill managed to give a couple of hits first to the water and then to the ball until it became within reach. She grabbed the ball with the net and threw it again to the dock and immediately Messi, Suarez and Cristiano kicked it to the sunken sidewalk along the canal and resumed their soccer match. When we were about to restart walking, I wondered what would have happened if the girl had not managed to grab the ball. It appeared to have been very close to slip away. Despite the naturality with which the kids interacted with the water it did not seem something usual to jump to the canal and swim. And the area of the city where we were did not seem to be one where a new ball could be easily afforded. But I looked downstream and I saw a couple of hundred meters away another dock and another rope connecting both sides of the canal. I thought that if the girl had not grabbed the ball, the kids would have immediately run to the next dock. Even though there is not a sidewalk that goes uniformly along the canal between the two docks, since it is interrupted by sporadic groups of houses that reach the edge of the water, the kids would have easily gone through the labyrinthic alleyways over which we had gotten lost when walking on the other side. There is fewer to fear about the canal than I thought. The body and soul of the water are certainly an additional player in the game of these kids. And all the things I have narrated were only 25 seconds of the everyday life of this neighborhood.