Compassion Blog Month
This week’s challenge is to choose a Compassion International photo and write a creative response for it. No rules. Love it! Because hunger, education, and poverty are risk factors that sweep children into human slavery, the Lord took my thoughts to a place somewhere between villages of Southeast Asia, pulsating cities, and the realities of trafficking. He merged names and faces of people real to me with others I’ve only prayed over.
Raina’s Shoes
When I sat here with my sister, she would read to me from a paper book when it was her turn to bring it home from school. Raina said when I grew bigger, I would go to school and take turns with other children who share my bench, but I’m still too small for school and books. I’m small enough to sit beneath the melon cart where my mother works in the market.
My sister is taller than I, but not much bigger. We’re hungry most of each day, but sometimes we get a piece of a broken melon from mother’s cart, and we save it for after our ball of rice.
When school was done, before the rainy season, a strange woman came to our village and talked to my sister. Then she came and whispered to mama for a long time until she cried. Inside the shanty, Raina was folding her blue and white checked school uniform and covering it with plastic for next year. Mama snatched it away and told me to put it on, saying Raina wouldn’t need it anymore. She was going to live in the city with a woman who needed a girl to care for her aging mother. Mama said Raina would go to school there, and the lady would send money to help us buy more than rice and broken melon. She promised Raina would come home each season to see us, but Raina’s eyes were full of tears.
When it was time for Raina to go, she brought her brown school shoes to me and told me I was grown up enough to wear them now. She said I was not big enough to go help a lady in the city and that if she ever came to ask, I should say I was too small. Mama held Raina very tightly when the man came to get her for the ride to the city, so tight it was like she forgot the lady’s promise to send Raina home. I crunched my toes in Raina’s shoes and thought about walking in her shoes.
But Raina didn’t come home. A neighbor lady wrote letters for mama. We even asked the melon man to see her when he went to the city, but Raina did not come home. We finally got a letter; she said the elderly lady needed her, and she didn’t want to come home. It didn’t sound like Raina. I pressed my feet into the soft leather of the shoes Raina once walked in, and I didn’t think our Raina would say that. I was sad the letter said she didn’t want to come home to mama and the melon cart and our shanty.
No money came either, but mama didn’t know how to bring Raina home.
The neighbor got tired of writing letters. Mama couldn’t find anyone to go get Raina. I wished Raina never left her school dress or her brown shoes or the book she brought home each week. If wearing her shoes meant I would disappear one day too, I didn’t want to wear those shoes.
Just when I thought there was no hope for me or mama or Raina, another strange woman came to the village. I crawled far under the melon cart, still wearing Raina’s school dress. But this time, the stranger peaked underneath and smiled at me. She talked to mama for a long time, too; mama didn’t cry. I asked her if the lady would take me away to work in the city, but mama held me tight. This lady was different. She wanted to help me go to school, to help us get fish for our rice, to give me new shoes for my now-tight ones, and to help us find Raina. She didn’t come to take me away. She came to give us HOPE.
The key to ending poverty and the evils that come with it is giving real HOPE. If you would like to sponsor a child, COMPASSION International can link you with a child like Raina or another who has walked in her shoes. Sponsor a child.
