Eyes as windows

It was in the eyes. It was in the eyes of the children, the sixth grade boys, in the mud-floored classroom, sitting three abreast at their little desks on benches, their school uniforms soiled because of the lack of water in the camp with which to wash them. It was in their eyes, despite perhaps the four books that they had to share amongst the entire class, the flimsy sheet of a quiz that one boy held, creased and itself soiled like their uniforms, worn from the hundreds of times that that very quiz have been taken over and over and over again. And I mean that sheet of paper, that very quiz, that had been taken over and over and over again, written on top of by countless boys in the mud-floored classroom with one window and no chalkboard, the mud walls themselves used as a surface on which to write.

The thing that was in the eyes of those boys, a brightness, a spark, while they jostled on common benches, was in such remarkable contrast to their surroundings.  I feel cliche even writing it, but the vibration of energy from those boys, who have nothing else in the world but hope, was palpable. Our guides asked that we share things with the students, such as inspirational messages, through our translator, and we did, but as is par for the course, I said nothing, nothing, that is, until we were walking out the door. I decided that I could not leave without adding my own words. I told them, in all earnestness, that working hard in school was so very important. But I also told them never to stop dreaming, for I cannot imagine a life in which one cannot even do that. Later in the day, however, I saw that life.

I saw that life in the blank and faded eyes of older men in the town hall meeting, where we bright and scrubbed, well fed Americans sat in front of over 100 refugees, some of whom had been there for nearing twenty years, and some of whom had known no other life at all, in fact, though their faces belied chronological youth. I saw a hardness in some, a frustration in some, but in most I simply saw nothing at all, the emptiness of waiting for something, something at all.

Most of these men will be resettled somewhere on this great globe that hopefully welcomes them, the nation-less men that they are, supposedly Congolese but not really, supposedly Rwandan but not really, unwelcome by both and unable to live in either country, unable to call any place home.  Desperate for a better life, some, others simply seemed resigned to nothingness, forgotten, pushed out, discarded, barely having escaped with their lives, beaten, shot at, and having endured unspeakable atrocities. Or can I call this a life at all?

Somewhere between the eyes of a sixth-grade boy and a hardened man, the spark flickers. Perhaps it gets rekindled once he gets to a new reality in a new country, but on this afternoon, on this side of the Atlantic and on this barren hilltop above the eucalyptus trees in Northern Rwanda, the embers are strewn thin.