Sad Reality

After spending two care-free weeks splashing around at the beach and traveling throughout Ghana, I returned to my village only to be met by some sobering news. Dakio Ruth, a girl in my youngest class, died over Christmas break. One of the few girls in the class, she was one of my best students, girl or boy. She had just turned 14 years old.

Ever since I got here - in fact, since well before I got here - I have been bombarded with numbers: poverty levels, AIDS rates, life expectancy figures. This many million people die of malaria every year. This many million are starving and suffering from malnutrition. This many million children won’t live to adulthood. The numbers all start to sound the same. Even having lived here for as long as I have, even having worked and played and talked and laughed with the same people whose very lives make up those numbers, I can’t say that all the statistics have had any great effect on me. I hear the numbers, I “feel concern,” then I go back to doing whatever I was doing.

This changes things. Those numbers just took one of my students. Which number it was, I’m not sure. “She was bad in the throat,” my director explained. Another teacher claimed it was malaria. The thing is, whenever anyone is sick with anything, the first diagnosis is always malaria. I guess it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I’m sure it doesn’t make a difference to Ruth’s family whether it was malaria or AIDS or malnutrition that caused their daughter’s death. In some sense, I’d like to know so that I could recognize which statistic just got much more real for me. But the truth is, all of those statistics just got much more real for me. All of those overwhelmingly large, impersonal numbers now have a face.