by Naomi Zacharias

Having just returned home from the last trip, I find myself in a place that is a little hard to describe. I sit at dinner with friends eating sushi, and when they ask how things are going I don’t really know what to say. If I do begin to talk about what is on my mind, they begin to shift uncomfortably and I am aware that I am bringing the mood down to an uncomfortable place that seems depressing. The conversation shifts, but inside I have not moved. It seems like only hours ago I was standing in an IDP camp in the northern part of Pakistan and I cannot bring myself all the way home.

 

Over two million people have been displaced since May due to fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistan military forces. Standing in traditional dress, I had no peripheral vision. But a young girl caught my darting eyes. Her name was Rubelina, and she was living in a vacated schoolroom with her family and several others she only met weeks earlier. They have no home, they don’t know how long they can be there, or where to go when they leave; their meals are determined by the hopeful arrival of an NGO worker, vegetables are not an option, and no one knows where the water might come from. They have the clothes on their backs, the ones they were wearing when they fled their homes. And the few organizations working in the region are in danger of closing this effort due to severe shortage of funds. 

 

The stories run into each other. Weeks earlier I was in Bab’s apartment in Amsterdam, looking at modeling shots where she was the professional makeup artist. With a Wellspring scholarship she completed her training and now supports herself outside of the Red Light District. This moment flowed into twelve children’s faces in Cape Town, little ones with physical disabilities who were living in a small and cramped trailer before finding this home. This faded into Pinky, a young girl in India I met the day she escaped from a brothel where she had been locked in a room for eight years and violated countless times. She looked healthy and strong now. But something in her eyes was so familiar and I knew her immediately. She lives safely outside of Mumbai and continues to receive health care.

 

I am back home but my thoughts are frozen. I am grateful to see the growth in some lives, and I feel a heavy weight inside for others. As I walk down the street each morning to Starbucks, I have been making a conscious effort to look for things that I might have overlooked, to find something beautiful. Today it was in the little flower shop, the one with a woman with a full-bodied laugh who once told me she liked my shoes, and the owner, an attractive man in his 40s who sits in a wheelchair behind the counter. He shook his head at my flower choice, smiled, and told me to look in the bin by the door, where there was a red colored blossom that looked like a cross between a gerbera daisy and a peony, a flower I had never seen before. And it was lovely.