I am both a great fan of hope and a dyed-in-the-wool idealist so you can imagine how I lit up when I read Nickolas Kristof’s column, “The Power of Hope, It Works.” His columns often assuage my thirst for either truly good news or a compassionate response to truly bad news but this column rested on a large-scale experiment which showed, with rigorous evidence what works to life people out of the most extreme poverty. “One of the lessons maybe so simple and human: the power of hope.”
Reading this column, I imagined a veritable army of iridescent hope bubbles moving into the monochrome density of a poverty stricken status quo. They moved relentlessly here, there and all about enlightening, enlivening.
I deeply understand both the need for hope and its power after working with the rural community of Rooiboklaagte in South Africa where the unemployment rate for women is over 70% and the HIV infection rate over 30%.
I watched carefully over the years but again, you see, I have to be very careful for my idealistic tendencies can tend to glom on to even an illusory positive. Yet, I can still picture the way a light came on in very sick Anna’s eyes when she heard that many people from America were praying for her to get better. And I can still see the way Eulender, a teenager brimming with ambitions to become a doctor after having watched her auntie dye an inglorious death, began to glow when she heard Americans were going to pitch in to give her the chance to succeed at a top notch private school. Elena was simple, the cause of her sparkle was a new backpack which she could proudly carry to her second grade classroom.
Yes, these were gifts from afar but what caught my attention was the way these generosities opened a door and the door became a pathway and the pathway became a river. Anna went out into the community as soon as she had the strength to walk again and talked to those who were both sick and hidden as she had been. Her aim was to inspire them to go to the doctor, to know HIV was not a death sentence, to see you could hold your head high despite the HIV sickness. She became an instrument of hope. Eulender, too, became one of those relentlessly light filled bubbles in her community as she worked each night till two in the morning to learn Afrikaans and English, to read her assignments and prepare for her tests. She is in college now and when she comes back to the village children mob her for tales and stories, inspiration and hope. In this world which I have watched so closely for twelve years, hope birthed more hope, the bubbles multiplied.
I freely admit my need to hold high the torch of hope but this time, thankfully, I am backed by Kristof and The New York Times and data driven truth.
Enjoy!
