From another Perspective #4- Maria

October 28^th 2014

I think there are many aspects of this experience I will have to sensor when I get home.  Even being here, immersed in the culture, certain things still seem surreal.  Certain things I just can’t comprehend.  I have grown up in a culture, which shrouds the misfortune and pain of the world.  Being here seeing one of the center's youngest children I can take in the fact that he has HIV and lived on the streets for months as a four year old.  I can take it in because I can see him smile and giggle or hear him talk fervently whenever he gets into a hot shower (his favorite activity of the day).  I can take it in because I can see him now and how he is and will be because of the center.  Someone at home will hear his story and focus so entirely on his past that they will not even see the future he has in front of him.  I do not blame them.  It is easy to feel helpless when faced with such stories.  Especially if you have grown up with the sheet of ignorance covering your eyes much as most, including myself, has in the United States.  It is hard to see the future and the hope, for us, because we have never been asked to be so resilient.  That is exactly what these kids are though.  They are the picture of resilience.  They have been beaten, sexually abused, starved, and hurt in ways we cannot begin to comprehend and yet they smile.  They smile for their futures are brighter than their pasts.  They smile because they are just little kids and although their young lives have not allowed such innocence they are now allowed to be just that.  Little kids.  They are allowed to not worry about where their food will come from or where they will sleep at night.  That is perhaps the most powerful aspect of this center in my opinion.  Yes their futures are extremely important and the fact that the center gives them the opportunity to have a life fulfilled through education and health is extremely powerful, but the biggest thing this center gives to these kids for me is their childhood back.  A childhood is a precious thing.  The whimsy and innocence of it cannot be had in any other time in a person’s life.  It is in my opinion the time when we are most free. We take childhood as a given in the western developed world but the truth is many never experience it. I believe every person should have the privilege to experience this no matter where they come from.  

Written by Maria Forsythe