Hoping...

The children stand by the road and wait all day for a vehicle to pass by so that they can dance in the air and wave with faces glowing. I think these children should be in school but they are young and turn to explore the dirt, mud and hiding places in the tall grasses that other children, for no good reason, have been taught to fear. They know freedom as all children should know it; the endless possibilities of adventure and rapscallionism that children were meant to know.
But these children know far more. They know hunger and want where other children are drowning in frivolous desire. They drink water the color of snot and find themselves in hospitals smelling of urine, vomit and antiseptic; their hair falling out because sorghum alone has the nutritional value of sand. Their mothers sit idly by and wonder why their child has no interest in eating - they are too tired; too worn out from living on little more than a bowl of brown paste and water filled with bacteria and parasites.
I want to have hope, to believe that I am here to somehow offer these children a future that doesn’t include an empty stomach or a gun. When I drive by and see their grimy, smiling faces it gives me hope and makes me believe that there is a chance for peace in this place; that these children will grow up and find something better than what their parents have known. But when I see them lying helplessly in a hospital bed, my pessimism returns. I am reminded, as a friend of mine likes to point out, that here it only takes ten years to make a soldier; you simply take your children and give them a gun. Hatred and mistrust are taught at extremely young ages. I was recently told by a father of a ten year old that he had emphatically assured his son that one day they would shoot the enemy.
I don’t want to live pessimistically. I want to be a voice of hope and peace in this place. I want to claim the reconciliation that has been offered to me in Christ and live out a reconciled life in this world that we have so clearly ruined in our attempts at independence and individualism. There are so many “me” and “yous”, “uses” and “thems” in this world, I hope that, even if only in small ways, I can be a voice for peace; that I myself would be able to find the commonalities that unite us and would grasp a hold on them.
I want for those children the future that their smiles make me believe in. I want clean water and plates full of rice and beans and tomatoes. Most of all I want peace and I want the One who’s name is peace to fill this place. My hope is set that it will be so.