* * *

In The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a 3-year-old girl is crying. She’s sad beyond words and hurting beyond pain because earlier that same day a man broke into her house, killed her parents, kidnapped her brother and brutally raped her. She was left for dead on the dirt floor of her own home. Three-year-old rape victims exist. Do you?

* * *

It feels something like a leg.

Like a leg, bent for too long, slung over the edge of a bit too high chair so it doesn’t quite make contact with the ground and slowly falls asleep. It feels like that leg. Like that leg, its blood pinched at the knee, dysfunctional for fear it might topple the world and disappoint those watching. But then, just as the leg begins its insidious decent, a shift, and blood slams through veins and arteries and the entire chaotic awakening sets sail right into the midst of a squall, spinning out of control because it’s been asleep for three hours and all that life pouring back in like a bursting levy, tiny corn fields smashed by all that withheld water, overwhelms the leg till it screams like a river after a hard rain. Like that leg wants to escape itself so badly it explodes out of its own skin just to relieve the pressure, a living, atomic leg filled with a trillion tiny needles relieving itself as it wakes.

* * *

In Ethiopia there’s a woman. She’s blind, rather; she has no eyes. Ten years ago the Lord’s Resistance Army tied her to a tree and forced her to watch as they murdered her sons in front of her. And then they, as if to sear the memory in her mind and keep her from seeing beyond that moment, slid a military grade knife into her eye sockets. They cut the eyes from her head like scooping seeds from a squash while her hands and feet tore away bark on the neighborhood tree. This woman exists. Do you ever question anything?

* * *

And you’ve never had anyone tell you anything but a leg feels like a leg.

But sitting there with your laptop or reading this on your $600 phone, you realize you’ve never had many people tell you much of anything at all, have you? Maybe most people won’t tell you that your life is like a comatose leg dying of radioactive fallout. But maybe most of what you hear doesn’t sound all that great or strange anyhow, and maybe this advice is just as good as anything else streaming from reality TV. Because most conversations aren’t really conversations, are they? And most of life isn’t spent actually living, is it? So you sit, gazing at your glowing tool on your comfy couch in your warm, well-lit house and think this kid must be absolutely crazy or doped up or protesting something because he isn’t making any sense and even seems a little upset with the world.

And maybe you kind of like it.

* * *

There’s this girl. This girl feels like pieces of freckled, internal cloud anatomy. Dissect a cloud, you’ll find her there. Like one of those wispy, white, powerful clouds descended and surrounded your entire body and you can feel her on every hair. She feels like that first, perfect kiss; like a floating cloud orgasm. And this girl has a lot of great ideas, but she has no idea what the hell she’s doing here. But she’s trying to figure it out. She’s trying to figure it out, and I’m just trying to get to class, yet somehow our worlds collide. And all of a sudden, I’m in a cloud.

* * *

In Kenya there’s a teenage girl. The Lord’s Resistance Army approached her one afternoon while she was collecting wood. They tied her down and cut off her lips. They took a knife and peeled away the soft flesh of her mouth and then proceeded to cut off her right ear. This teenage girl is real, and she is living today. Are you angry yet?

* * *

How can one person try so diligently to understand life, love and God whilst simultaneously dealing with such frustration and irritation and the next person not try to understand anything yet simultaneously claim to know everything about life, love and God?

* * *

Because sometimes it feels like a hill. Like a grassy hill that feels different during the day than it does at night when no one else is around and the sky is black besides trillions of stars speckling the spectacular darkness. And we used to sit on that hill for hours talking about life, love and God and whether either one truly existed and if they did, whether or not they were friends. It feels like a hill sometimes, sloped just enough so our legs don’t have to hang off of anything. They simply lie there, extended, perfectly aligned with the rest of our bodies, not falling into a coma or dying slowly or any of that. It feels like a hill where two unique souls can tangle in the messiness of life, love and God and not have to worry about who is more right, whether pot is more sinful than alcohol or if politics is worth it. And we think about Africa, cry over her as we gaze at the stars. And it feels like figuring things out without figuring anything out at all.

I’m awake. And nothing in my leg explodes.

Inspiration for African stories

I was recently published in the October issue of LiveBetter Magazine! Check out my column on the water crisis in Mozambique here!

A big thanks to Africa Water is Life for taking me along as photographer and story collector to Mozambique last January and to Jessica Kiefer at Bohlsen PR for working to get us in and to LiveBetter for taking a chance on the article.

Thanks!

The aim is to eliminate the walk. By drilling clean water wells close to home, a comparably extraordinary large amount of time for education, job creation and other important, personally and socially beneficial activities is freed up for millions of young girls all across sub-Saharan Africa. We want to trade Jerry cans for text books, sweat for time and dirty water for clean.

Mozambicans walk everywhere.

Starting out before sunrise to avoid as much of the mid-day, plus 100 degree heat, as possible, they walk to retrieve water, gather food, go to school if there is a school to go to, and attempt to find work if there is any work to be found. Mozambicans walk for miles, and I literally mean, without exaggeration, miles. We spoke with a group of young girls who walked an average of eight miles a day to the nearest hand-dug well. These girls were teenagers who should have been in school yet were unable to attend due to the time constraints of retrieving water for their families.

If you cannot walk, you cannot go to work, you cannot go to school, you cannot retrieve water. Walking is a way of life in Mozambique.

Insert Jordan. Jordan is 22 years old. He lives at home with his mother and four brothers. He has never owned an Xbox; never had a backyard pool party; never gone to prom; never filled out a college application; never played little league baseball, never driven a car. He didn’t received a formal education. His family is totally impoverished. And when I say impoverished, I mean absolutely deficient in regards to any adequate supply of general living materials. Jordan’s father abandoned them seven years ago, severing all ties and means of support. Jordan’s mother, Raela, farms the land. What she can grow, they eat, yet it is hardly enough to support her family. Jordan, unlike his father, is a brave, young man. Jordan is also physically disabled in both of his legs. The locals say he has “withered legs.” Jordan, whose real name is Jordao, moves around by walking on his knees, lacing old shoes to them to help cushion the impact. He is in a constant state of being lower than everyone around him.

Jordan approached us the way a grad student approaches potential employers at a job fair. He believed we could help him, he just didn’t know if we would. Timidly, cautiously, humbly he sat with us under a blue makeshift canopy composed of tarp and string and told us his story. In the end, we asked if there was anything we could do to help. He told us that if he could get about easier, if he could sit at the same level as other men sat, then he could work. He could sew or make something to sell. He was quite determined. I suppose you’d have to be to walk around on your knees for 22 years. So we agreed to try our best to get him a wheel chair so he could sit eye to eye with his peers and support his family.

Coming back to the States, one post on Facebook and several compassionate donors later, the funds needed for Jordan’s new wheelchair were raised.

{The three photos of Jordan sitting in his new wheelchair were taken by a World Hope team member. My photos of Jordan were taken this past January on a trip with Africa Water Is Life. We are working hard to raise awareness and funds to drill clean water wells in many African nations, including the beautiful country of Mozambique, as well as provide for the basic necessities of our adopted villages as we are able.}

This woman struck me as an individual possessing great, internal joy, protected by an exoskeleton of hardness. After spending a week with her, she finally let down her guard, smiled and entertained us all with her dancing and laughter. I was blessed to capture these portraits of her on the day the drill team from World Hope hit clean water for her village.