Reach Lesotho

She’s my Honduras

Posted on 07. Apr, 2010 by Elyse in Elyse, Mentors' Blog

For his speech at the Roots of Change event, Student Reach International co-founder, Abid Virani, read an excerpt from an e-mail that our Reach Lesotho mentor, Grace Burke, had sent him. He claimed that it had encouraged him and given him hope. The emotive story had the same effect on me. The passage follows:

If you have time to read this, I’ll tell you a story.

Four years ago I was in Nicaragua and I met a little girl named Lisa. She was three years old and the first time I saw her, her mother was trying to kill the lice in her hair. She was wearing a little white dress and lived right next to the work site we were at everyday.

I have no idea why but to me, Lisa was Nicaragua. I had never been out of Canada before that year. I had no idea what I would see in Nicaragua and went full of hope. But being there was so confusing; it was real. I didn’t understand any of it. It was something that I couldn’t change and that was painful. But Lisa…not Lisa.

She was beautiful. And full of light. She laughed and played with me and I was more in love with her than I’d ever been with anyone. She was my hero; my little hero girl. And I did nothing to help her, or change her. Instead she changed me.

Lisa was Nicaragua. She smiled without any reason and I would have died for her. So even though I didn’t, I knew I wanted to change the world. To make it better for Lisa.

This story touched me immensely because I had had an extremely similar moment just two weeks before. Over March break, I visited Roatan, an island in Honduras. There was a market there and I was looking at the local clothing, paintings, and jewelry. As I walked along, I saw a young mother and her toddler, maybe aged two or three years. This little girl was absolutely adorable, with stubby cornrows filled with beads in her hair, a mishmashed patterned outfit, and a Dora the Explorer doll hugged to her side. The mother and child sat below t-shirts, hanging by a wire attached to an adjacent building’s roof. These t-shirts that they had to sell as their sole income were very obviously picked-over leftovers that no one wished to buy; even priced at a mere five dollars, they were in obscure sizes with the less appealing of the recurring Honduran t-shirt logos and slogans. I knew that this family would have to be very lucky for a sale that day or any upcoming day, and that it may be a while before they would come across any money.

This however, was not the reason that they will be burned into my memory forever. This little girl, as she blissfully played with her doll beside her mother, stepped in gum. Being barefoot, it stuck to her heel. This site mortified her mother, as it would any. She quickly came to her daughter’s rescue, peeling the gum off her foot, muttering in embarrassment and frustration. I could sense that this woman was trying her best to successfully bring up this child, likely as her sole caregiver and protector. I saw as she cleaned up her little girl that she was holding onto her dignity and trying to keep it together, all the while living in poverty, poverty where meals were few and far between, clothing and footwear were scanty and lacking, and gum in the streets was gum on the floor of their home.

I was moved by this little girl. I returned to her and her mother later that day; they were still in my mind hours after seeing them. I gave them all the food I had brought with me to eat that day: trail mix, bananas, granola bars. I could not have cared less if I was hungry after looking into this tiny child’s eyes and imagining how hungry she must be. Her mother was exceedingly thankful and it touched my heart that what I considered such a simple gift, one that I received daily for that matter, was to them an elaborate blessing.

And just like Lisa was Grace’s Nicaragua, this girl was my Honduras. She was my inspiration to help. She was my image of attempting to retain pride in unfortunate circumstances. She was my firsthand image of poverty. She was my reminder of simple pleasures. She was my human connection for a desire for of improvement in this world. She was the beautiful little girl who stepped in gum and changed me forever. And I will never, ever forget her. And I will try to make a change for her. Because I love her.

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