Once Upon A Time

I remember my first encounter with the power of story.  I was in second grade, and so deeply engrossed in Danny’s adventures with his pet dinosaur that I was unaware of my little classmates transitioning from their desks to the carpet.  I finally surfaced to realize that not only was Mr.Bollinger scolding me, but the entire class was staring at me.  This may also have been my first memory of the power of blush as it flooded my chubby cheeks, a sensation I would never completely outgrow.  Oh, the shame.  I put my head down on my desk and sniffled silent tears behind my foggy Coke bottle glasses, feeling so embarrassed: how could I be so absent from the world around me?  More to the point, how could I be so present in someone else’s?

I think we live in a world created and sustained by story.  We each have our own, whether or not we fully own it.  We may or may not ascribe to a faith that is, at the end of the day, a story on which we stake our lives.  Places have story, like the golf club I visited in Kitale, a social club once used to hold slaves as they were shipped from Uganda to the awaiting slave ships in Tanzania.  Do the club members sense ghosts as they sip their club specials and watch their children swim?  Even the air we breathe, story: I write as my nostrils once again detect the noxious black smoke of the pyre behind our playground, the daily burning of the plastic bottles strewn across our compound, collected and transformed into a toxic, oxygenated cocktail.

I think story is as tangible as water.  It has weight and volume and viscosity and takes up more space than anything on earth.  You can see it, and touch it, and transform it into Kenyan chai, and ice, and steam for your facial.  But it’s impossible to really hold onto, or put parameters on: story has no clear beginning or end, but continuously transforms and enlarges us as we share it with others.  Our individual little droplets become puddles, and creeks, and rivers, and oceans.  Together, for better or worse, we have power.  We can sustain, create, teem with life.  We can form the boundaries of the land, cut canyons through prehistoric rock, resurrect arid fields of dying crops.  Or we can poison entire communities with disease, flood families onto rooftops in hope of rescue.  We can become hot sewage or hot springs.  A single drop can short a fuse.  But a hydroponic plant can generate electricity for an entire community.  Alone, our little ounces will eventually, inevitably evaporate.  Together, like water, the sky isn’t even our limit.

In a funny way, my first month here in Kenya has been for me the ultimate “Danny and the Dinosaur,” a complete departure from my own world into an epic narrative on the other side of the world.  This is a saga in which few women are allowed dialogue, a world in which orphaned children live in the quiet shame of not yet knowing their own history, about the wells from which they were drawn.  A story that's left my heart broken and my mind reeling as I scramble to find the hope I profess to believe under the rubble of the marginalized lives my beloved kids are currently living.  I don't have answers, and if I'm honest, I don't expect to find any that will effectively change their lives, or make me feel any better.  But I know that we need water to survive.  So maybe we need to be the water to survive, to become drinks for the thirsty and currents to shore for the drowning.  It seems the least we could do for one another; it seems the least we could do for Saida.

To learn more about you can become involved in the lives of the world's most vulnerable, visit villagevolunteers.org or halftheskymovement.org