"God breaks the heart again and again until it stays open."
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
Judy and Susan have said to me before that we cannot even begin to understand the lives of these children. And they're right. Nothing here is a guarantee. School, clean water, books, clothes: all of these things are blessings that are treated like treasures by the children. When I did home visits, one of the mothers told me that her son would have to withdraw from school soon because she had five children and there just wasn't enough money for her to pay for his school fees. There is a factory nearby that used to make batteries; remnants of lead float onto our roof and when the rain comes, it is carried into the water tanks that both the children and the teachers drink out of. Our girls are often pulled out of school at the time they start menstruating because they can now be married off and have children. This is their world, and guess what? It's our world too. Though these struggles are not our personal struggles, though these hardships are unfathomable to us, it is still the exact same world that you and I live in. I live on the same continent, in the same country, and teach these kids and I can still hardly believe that these shiny little beings that prance and sing around me, that beg me to play games with them or to read them a storybook, that these little ones suffer in this harsh world of ours and still show up smiling.
My kiddos and I studied persuasive writing today. After asking them what they would say to persuade their moms to buy them a sweet at the market, I posed the prompt, "What is more important, friends or family?" Every single one of my kids picked family. Their reasoning was, "Family will pay for your school fees," and "Family will provide you with your basic needs," and "Family will take you to the hospital when you are sick." I was telling Judy that this surprised me because most of my kiddos in the states definitely would have picked friends. She said, "Well, you know, I bet kids in the states don't even have to think about things like their basic needs. And orphans here, the first thing they ask is, who will feed me, who will clothe me, who will pay my school fees?"
My heart continues to stretch and break over and over again with and for these students, just as it did when I taught in Oklahoma. We are all familiar with heartbreak, a condition of our humanity. And somehow, this painful process, this feeling of shattering and splintering makes us more whole than we were before, leading us inward by exposing us outward. So, dear friends, today, tomorrow, and always, let us be brave enough to journey into the inevitable heartache that comes when we make ourselves vulnerable in caring for others. Let us be aware and remember the children of this world, who smile with a joy that is fought for. Let us always, always embrace the broken and open heart.