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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Relunctly Coming Home

I'm coming nearer and nearer my time to go home and it just gets harder and harder to actually leave.  I know I've spoken of these difficulties before, but because I can't exactly explain why it's so hard to leave I feel the need to continue to speak about it.  Here's one of the most difficult reasons I find to leave.

One of the kids that I know pretty well from my work at club Espoir during my 2 years here, recently retold a story how, after her two parents dying, and her then being placed with her Aunt, the Aunt then told her daughter, the cousin of the child, that the girl was HIV positive and she should tell everyone at school that she was HIV positive.  Aside from this extreme humiliation, the girl is also called a dog at the house, and is always the last one to be fed, if there is food that remains after everyone else eats that is.  Whenever she brings food home from the NGO that tries to take care of her, the family steals the food and sells it.  She's HIV positive through no means of her own, just simply by being born from HIV positive parents, and completely marginalized as a result of this.  She's only at the junior high level and extremely polite and surprisingly optimistic considering her situation.  Why I should leave and leave her in her situation and return to my comfortable situation just because I was born healthy and in a developed country is the reason I struggle to go home.  I come and I spend two years just befriending her but little to change her lively hood, then I leave to return to my comfortable lifestyle.

I wish I could bring her home with me, I wish I could bring many of them home with me.  Give them the opportunities that are available to them after all the money the U.S and other developed countries have spent on research. But it's not feasible, and it's also not feasible that I can bring this to their country.  As I see it there's not much I can do other than befriending them and telling them how special they are.  So then what happens to that after I leave?  The one ounce of anything I can do for them is removed and I only hope that there's someone else to fill it once I'm gone.  This is the reason I'm having such a hard time leaving.  I know my life is calling me else where for my own personal reasons, but I know I could do so much for a few children's self esteem by staying here. It's a decision I wish I didn't have to make, but it's one I have to make no matter what. The fact is, a cold as it sounds, there will always be suffering in this world, and no matter how much we like to ignore it, or pretend that it's deserved, that isn't always the case, many times it's just innocent children that suffer and there's not much we can do despite our best efforts.  Why a child should suffer through no fault of their own is beyond me, but that just seems to be the way of the world at this point.  I hope one day it can change, but I'm not too optimistic.  In the meantime, I hope we all do what we can to at least alleviate to some degree their suffering.  And for that I'm finding it really difficult to leave this country. 

1 comment:

Emilio Fernandez said...

Good morning how are you?

My name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.

I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because trough them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately it’s impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.

For all this I would ask you one small favor:
Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Togo? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Togo in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:

Emilio Fernandez Esteban
Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
28902 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain

If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.

Finally I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.

Yours Sincerely

Emilio Fernandez