Young Writers Society

A/N: This is a memoir I wrote for an English competition. These are my own memories and opinions, so please be respectful. :)

There’s something exhilarating about wandering into a world without quite being awake.

There’s something thrilling about waking up one day to find yourself in a jet-lagged haze, standing upon ground thousands and thousands of miles away from home. There’s something electrifying about staring at the red, cracked earth beneath your new blue tennis shoes and feeling a hot breeze brush your cheek, of knowing somehow that the sun burns brightest here, and clouds provide little mercy.

There’s something terrifying, but also breath-taking, in finally looking up and realizing that you are in one of your many favorite storybooks, a story of lions and dark-skinned people and little blonde girls from Ohio.

They introduced themselves as Pastor Wally and Aunt Donna at the airport, where my siblings and I sat in an exhausted daze from the 14 hour flight. The couple was originally from Michigan, and we were to stay with them for the majority of our trip.

Aunt Donna was a thin, pale-skinned woman with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to her ears. She ran a clinic below her house, treating sick children from the surrounding missionary neighborhood, and sometimes beyond. She wasn’t really my aunt, but insisted that I call her that, as all the other children did. At first, I was hesitant, but within a few days, I couldn’t possibly call her anything else. Her husband, Pastor Wally, was a giant of a man with short, stiff blond hair. He had a large smile and a deep voice, and while I soon warmed up to him, he frightened me at first. They had a housekeeper, and two daughters in college.

Their neighborhood (if one can call it that) was a child’s dream, and a parent’s nightmare. The front windows overlooked a wild expanse of dark green trees and shrubs that clung to the mountainside, their shadows cast far below onto the red dirt road that shivered along the edge of a steep drop. Cows and goats would wander the roads and hillsides, paying no heed to cars that had no other path around them. We were not permitted to go to the road, but there was much to explore in the fenced-in neighborhood on a mountainside.

The first evening we arrived, we hiked towards the top of the hill to see better below, but a fence kept foolish children from climbing further up the steep cliff edges. So my parents turned us around and gestured to the neighborhood below. There were tin and steel-roofed homes of missionaries squatting on the rolls of the land, and a primary school spread out thinly in the center, its basketball courts and playground beckoning the children from around the world. A hospital perched at the bottom of the mountain, and beyond, in the valley, sprawled the open markets and tiny restaurants of the locals. Scruffy bushes were strewn along the red dirt, and green trees laced with vines overhung every opening. Monkeys bounced from branch to branch, and sifted through garbage cans. The air was hot and dry, and the ground was dusty from a drought, one that had begun to starve the people of the valley. We could see the tents of those displaced from political war, their makeshift homes stitched together from flour sacks.

As a child, I didn’t understand poverty and war. I knew something was off about the way some of the dark children there had ribs like xylophones, or how their shirts were full of holes, how some wore no pants. I felt that there was something tragic about how the orphanages were so large, or how the hospital had only two rooms. I knew something was wrong, but I also knew that we were there because my parents were going to help. They were going to try and fix it, or some of it. It was in their nature.

It’s who we are.

My parents met and married in college. With their new education and student loans, they struggled to make their place in their small residence of Long Island, New York. My mother gave birth to me after gaining her Master’s degree in music, while my father continued to pursue his doctorate in physics. The artist and the scientist. My grandma jokes about how when she first saw my father’s long, hippie-like hair and beard, she assumed that he was a deep, sensitive artist, and that the happy couple would soon starve from lack of income.

Thankfully, she was proved wrong, because although my parents were poor for a period of time after college, they eventually built their way back up. When I was about one, they had saved up enough money to gather their meager belongings and wave goodbye to my first home on Long Island. They drove back to Ohio, where my mother’s family lives, and made a home in the suburbs.

“We didn’t even see the house before buying it,” my mom tells me whenever my origin story arises. “Grandma described it over the phone, and we bought it.”

Such leaps of faith are not all that uncommon in our household. My mother was once described as the “crazy mom” by my three close childhood friends, most likely for her enthusiasm and unique attitude.

“Crazy awesome,” she’ll insist with a bright smile each time the memory arises.

I, of course, having grown up in her household, with her character, didn’t recognize the difference between her way of life and other mothers’. In my eyes, every mom had to be like my own. That was the way things were for me, so that must be how it was for everyone.

But slowly, through playdates and sleepovers, I realized that our home was slightly different. Not everyone’s mom sings opera during dinner, while folding laundry, or while playing the piano. Not everyone’s mom cooks every meal and insists that it be a traditional family gathering, a time for talking and forming of relationships. Not everyone’s mom talks openly about her Christian faith with her children, explaining the details and making her goals clear. Not every mother takes her children to Kenya, or Mexico, or London, based solely on faith.

But mine does, and she’s a huge part of why I’m who I am today.

Every few months, Mom will come home from a concert or event with an invitation to another country.

“I met a missionary couple after my show today,” she’ll say, as she washes the dishes or prepares dinner, still wearing her nice concert clothes. Her voice is always even, and she bounces ideas off of us very casually.

“They’d like us to go to India (or Brazil, or Uganda, or another faraway place),” she’ll say, brushing her dark hair behind her ear.

My dad will look up from whatever he’s doing and gaze at her silently for a moment. Then he’ll ask, “Why? How could we help?”

“We’d work with human trafficking victims,” or

“We’d build wheelchairs for hospitals,” or

“We’d do concerts to benefit their HIV ministry,” she’ll reply.

“Hmm,” Dad will murmur, crossing his arms. “Let’s pray about that.”

And they do.

Now, most people would never receive an opportunity like these, much less consider actually going through with them. It could be dangerous, it costs money, and the kids will miss school. Why leave a perfectly balanced life in the Midwest to risk it all in a faraway country?

I’ve determined that it is because my parents have a distinctly Christian philosophy that they live by. “If God wills it, do it.”

A secondary philosophy to this could also be, “If you can help, go.”

My parents raised their children to see the world as something we are personally connected to and responsible for, full of people with fears and dreams, just like us.

Sometimes it is hard for me to understand the realities of people who have seen less of the world than I. If you have never been exposed to the world, how can you sympathize with it? Many people believe, as I did with my mother, that their reality is mutual. All people live as they do, have the same aspirations as they do, and work with the same restrictions and rules and hopes as they do. It’s hard to care about those who are poor, disabled, or abused if you never see them or speak to them. It’s hard to recognize their struggles, for to those with mutual realities, these issues don’t exist.

A friend once asked me on the bus home from school, "Are we rich?"

I had paused and blinked slowly, my mind flashing back to the refugee camps, the tents sewn from flour sacks, the people walking six miles to water. I was unable to comprehend the question at first, for the answer seemed so obvious that it didn’t need to be asked.

“Yes,” I replied carefully. “We are very, very rich.”

“Huh,” she said, as if this was new and slightly interesting to her. “Cool.”

In the suburbs of Ohio where I live, wealth is so common that my friend was unaware of it. She had never worried about it, so it had never crossed her mind. It was simple ignorance, the bliss of an existence without concern over the next meal, of paying the heating bill, of illness sucking up a paycheck.

In general, people have not seen what I have, and it is not their fault. I wish that every child could be unaware of their monetary worth until high school. For these people, the problems that are so important to me are so far away, so miniscule, that they can be joked about. They are a casual punchline, “You could have it worse! At least you aren’t a starving kid in Africa.” They do not understand that these are real people.

But for me, they are. I have talked to them, befriended them, laughed with them and cried with them. To me, they are very close, and very relevant.

Whenever my parents pray about a mission’s opportunity, often the answer they receive is, “No,” or “Not yet,” and that’s okay. But every once in awhile, the answer is “Yes.”

Kenya was one of those rare occasions.

When I think of Kenya, I think of brown, and elephants. Everything was brown, from the rust-colored dust to the acacia tree bark to the skin of the people. The houses were brown, the cows were brown, the volcanoes were brown, with a tinge of dark green. The accent of our driver Elisha was brown, deep and thick and warm, like hot chai tea. The dirt speckling the backs of orphaned elephants was brown.

The baby creatures were cared for by a special program that helped rescue, revive, and release orphaned elephants back into the wild. The program used local Kenyans as workers, so that they could educate a society that thought of elephants as pests on their true value. The orphanage was only open about a half hour per week, so that the elephants wouldn’t become used to people.

A lady with a British accent explained all this as my siblings and I bounced excitedly behind the rope where the elephants would soon gather. The air was dry and warm, but not as blistering as some of the days before. My white socks had been stained red-brown from the dust kicked up from the ground, and my hair was pulled back into braids. Thirty other visitors gathered around, shifting their weight impatiently. My mother patted my head and pointed.

Men in green jumpsuits began appearing over the ridge, and with them, a dozen little elephants. Some of the babies’ light gray backs were draped with red or purple cloth, like small capes. The color stood out among the brown, and the crowd gasped at the sight. The woman explained that the cloths were to protect them from sunburn. A normal baby would take shelter under its mother, but these creatures had lost theirs.

As they wandered closer, their large ears flapping comically, their trunks curling and swaying, I saw that many of the elephants had white scars running along their sloped backs. These, the woman told us, were from the babies falling into uncovered wells, scraping their backs along the rough stone. This would be how they lost their mothers, who would eventually be forced to leave their trapped baby behind.

The elephants ran forward on stumpy legs, approaching the ropes at surprising speed. In the green-dressed men’s hands were giant bottles of milk, which the elephants swarmed about frantically. I felt a surge of indescribable happiness in my chest, at the cuteness, at the amazing experience I was having.

“If the elephants get pushy shovy, let them. They may be babies, but they still weigh a few hundred pounds,” the woman warned us with a small smile. My parents picked up my baby brother as the hungry babies began wandering close to the rope line, probing the air with their soft trunks.

I reached my hand over the rope and brushed my hand over one baby’s head. It felt bony, leathery, and coarse with hair, but also babyish in some way. The elephant paid me no heed and lumbered away, its thick, tangled eyelashes blinking over black marble eyes. I leaned into the rope and waited for the next creature to pet.

The bottles were soon held aloft in dark hands, and the feeding frenzy began. The babies thrashed their tails as they fought for the milk, raising their trunks pointedly, mouths open. The workers calmly moved from elephant to elephant, making sure each had a chance to grasp the rubber nipple in its mouth before moving on. They were like puppies gathering for a nursing.

Once fed, the elephants happily ran about the workers and crowd, nudging one another playfully. I pet a few more, marveling at the wrinkles and scars already etched into the young creatures’ skin.

Back in Ohio, an elephant had just been born in the zoo. My mother told me that people were waiting hours just to see it from a distance and take blurry photographs, and I had just touched a dozen of them. What other 10-year-old could say that she had done this? How could I be so blessed?

Sometimes I find myself wishing that I could be a more “typical” teenager, caring deeply about dates to prom, the latest smartphone, or the newest album from a favorite artist. I wish I could unsee some of what I’ve seen, because those things are hard, and compassion can be a burden.

But then I remind myself that ignorance does not change truth. Being unaware of the problem does not mean that it does not exist, and if I remain unaware, I am unable to change anything. Being aware is painful, but uncomfortable reality is a gift. It is eating a completely foreign meal and discovering that I love ugali and chai. It is meeting a boy in a wheelchair with limited words, and realizing that we can still have a conversation. It is playing with AIDs orphans halfway across the world and noticing that we play the same games.

Uncomfortable reality gives me the opportunity to be changed, and to affect the world for change. It forces me to focus outside of myself. It’s the feeling of life, the experience of seeing many different realities from my own. It’s the realization that I can make a difference, and that the world around me is so much larger and more beautiful than I can ever know.

I remind myself of the adventures that still await me.