The Eyes of Hope

This is something I wrote for my Advanced Comp class. We had to write a "place essay," so naturally, I chose Africa...

The most prevalent sight from my short time in Lesotho can be summed up by one photograph. It’s one of a young girl. Her bright blue school uniform gave youth to her dark eyes that had seen too much in her short life. Through the lens of my camera, it was the only color amidst the drab, despondent world that surrounded her. She stood in a field smiling back at me.

That was at Bobete, an AIDS clinic that was hidden within the landscape of blue mountains. The lines that had formed outside of the harsh, gray concrete buildings of the clinic appeared stagnant, motionless. Chickens roamed the grounds freely, a light breeze blew, and the voices of nomadic merchants could be heard as they passed by the chain-link fence that drew a boundary between the clinic and the rest of the world. I wondered what happened within those mysterious concrete walls. Eventually a young Italian doctor emerged from the gray building. Her warm smile and vibrant red curls brought a sense of life to the otherwise lifeless clinic. Her eyes smiled, juxtaposing the dark, diseased ones of the patients.

As I walked back to the small plane that had brought us to Bobete, I saw the young girl. As we stood in a trance, each taking in the other, I heard the propeller of the plane indicating that it was time to go. There was a chain-link fence between myself and the girl, but for that one moment, we connected. Through the fence of poverty, disease, and confusion, I saw something in her eyes – I think it was hope.

This photograph paints a picture of the people we long to serve. We see them stifled by poverty and sickness, but what we also see is that they do not have the same ideals as Americans. We strive to make them like us – think like us, reason like us, live like us. While they are living in squalor, dying off by the second, we want to give them washers and dryers, computers, and books. These things are all important, but more important is a smile, a listening ear, a prayer.

I believe this young girl represents so many societies in third-world countries. The fence that encages her suffocates the very real potential that is within her. She did not look at me and desire money, or clothes, or even food. I think she just wanted me to smile at her, to see the hope in her eyes, and to believe in her.