Band Aid or Bridge?

After reading through my blog from last year, I felt compelled to re-post a portion of my journal as it so accurately describes the conversation that is still taking place in my soul.  


...Time seems to pass but the weight of the suffering remains.  How do we stop the bleeding while creating a sustainable solution? How do you provide a band-aid while helping to build or discover a bridge? Is feeding a starving child enough? Should we be more future focused on the bridge even at the cost of human dignity and life? How do we live in the moment from the future?


It’s when I’m seated at a wheelchair distribution event watching innocent human beings, in their twisted bodies, being liberated as they are placed in their new means of transportation. Band-aid or bridge? What is the price of human dignity? Or perhaps it’s when I’m holding a 3 week old abandoned baby who was found just after birth in a trash pile with rocks jammed in his nose and mouth. Though stigmatized and disconnect from society, this baby will now have a chance at life in an orphanage. Band-aid, bridge or both?

I can't tell you how fulfilling it is to be a part of building a bridge of hope here in Kenya. This, however, is secondary to igniting the creative potential within these young people.  I have found that in the arena of human suffering, dreams and imagination are vital.  As Skye Jethani writes: “Without imagination, any solution we conceive will be rooted in the very system that we must transcend. How can a prisoner plot his escape if he doesn’t believe a world exists outside the prison walls?” I believe that it is here, in the fertile ground of our dreams and imagination, that both solace and solutions are found. What a challenge, what an opportunity!

-S