Unfiltered Hope
There is not much I adore more than being able to catch up with kindred spirits online. Last night was one of those times. I sat on the floor in my bedroom—no electricity—practicing my labor exercises. And I looked to the screen on my phone to see April sitting in her office at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of her Friday morning.
“The first week of school looked fabulous on Instagram,” she said.
“So, what was it REALLY like…you know, the unfiltered version?” She knew from spending just 6 days with our team in January that the reality was different…harder…grittier than the still images captured by the genius of my sister’s glorious photographs.
The unfiltered version involved one too many 15 hour days, battles of tape and bulletin boards and lesson plans. Then, there are the lingering worries of starting a new school year…the parents who have sent their kids away to villages unable to pay for school fees. There’s the ache of not getting to say goodbye to children we’ve known and loved for years, worrying about where they’re sleeping, if they’re eating, and if they remember how precious they are. There’s the lingering fear that, like last year, we’ll once again be faced with a 5th grade pregnancy or a 3rd grade sexual assault case. We cross our hearts in hope that this won’t be a year we lose one of our students living with HIV and that we won’t have to hold one of our students as they lose a parent or their last living guardian to something stupid like Malaria or untreated Cancer. We wait. We pray. We hope.
But it’s the hope that seems the only thing worth hanging onto as we march into our third week of classes. And that’s what my sister’s photographs capture so clearly. Our students don’t always have the luxury of ignoring the difficult and crunchy reality of their lives, but for a few hours a day they come to a place that invites them to hope for something better—God’s goodness for their lives. We’ve grown weary of the global coverage of this continent. African images so predictably showcase poverty, starvation, and utter despair, but that’s not the whole story. There’s hope here too, brightness, and a vibrance of life and community I’ve known in no other place. There’s the hard work of sewing seeds for a brighter future. I work with teachers everyday who tend to that sacred work. And in a few of the photos you might see on our Instagram you can almost see the hope and glory and goodness happening here…almost. If only the filter was a bit brighter, a bit more vivid, a touch more glorious. If only they made a filter for that.
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