I am an optimist and I think it’s largely in part due to my dad, who is seriously the friendliest, most encouraging person I know. I try to hold true to positivity, even in the most difficult of situations, because I find that it produces the clearest and simplest ways of dealing with certain aspects of life. That being said, coming to Zambia was daunting for a myriad of reasons, one of the biggest concern of mine was how much could I really do in barely two months of time? Even though I have people from all corners telling me how much good I would be going, I still questioned really how much tangible good I could do. And honestly, I often still feel this way, as much time that I spend in Bauleni with the kids, or listening to stories of adults I look around me and I see SO much suffering. Zambia is just the size of Texas and it is one of Africa’s fastest developing countries, when I hear this fact I feel astounded.
Zambia does have some obviously developed parts, but when I look around and see kids playing in massive trash piles, and boys leading their blind mothers from car to car begging for food and a huge amount of funerals next to the compound every weekend, my heart breaks and I think, “the entire CONTINENT of Africa is worse off than this, how is that even possible?” I have no answer, and I don’t think I ever will. I feel like some of the biggest, most difficult questions in life have no clear, big answer and that can be crushing, to even the most optimistic of people.
Sometimes these big questions have to be broken down, so that you can find ways to answer little pieces of them. It is easy to suffer from compassion fatigue, to end the day knowing that you taught one little boy to read, but also having the knowledge that there are millions of children who have no access to school and who never will, loom over your head. There’s a story I really love, the starfish story, that I find truly applicable to this theme:
A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement. She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”
The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied,“Well, I made a difference to that one!”The old man looked at the girl inquisitively and thought about what she had done and said. Inspired, he joined the little girl in throwing starfish back into the sea. Soon others joined, and all the starfish were saved.
As corny as this story is, I do believe it, and I find it essential to remind myself almost everyday of this idea. No matter what we do, everyday we have the choice to reach at least one person, it doesn’t have to be a whole country, or town or even neighborhood, but if you make one person smile, I’d say that’s succeeding. So go throw a starfish! I will if you do...
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