Through the lens of Hope

First day at the camp, Arts and Crafts workshop:
while everyone else is drawing, a little boy is trying hard to glue a couple of sticks together.
“What are you doing?” He doesn’t answer right away.
Looks at me, smile in his eyes, and a few moments later grabs my hand saying:
“My friend, me help!” I follow him outside.
He had drawn a kite in a paper sheet and had found a way to make a structure for it;
puts a sewing thread in my hand and, somehow finds a way to let me know he wants to fly the kite and how I’m supposed to help him.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s me” he says, with the same certitude as he would say about anything else he’d find,
I would notice. He tries again and again but there’s no way to make it work…
“It’s too heavy, honey, it’s not gonna fly…” He still tries. It doesn’t work. He’s disappointed.
I tell him: “We’ll find a way, ok? Not like this, but we’ll find a way.”

I had just met the one to go to whenever you need something – whatever - at the camp.
A few days later we needed some sticks to create a structure for a puppet show.
I asked him: “Can you help us finding something?”
The next moment we saw this inch and a half boy climbing a wall and disappearing.
He’d be back in a few minutes with a curtain rail, more than perfect for what we wanted…
“Where did you find that?” No answer. He had just found a way to make it possible.
He’d always find a way…

Through wars and suffering and pain, they always find a way... bringing with them each scar, each moment of despair, which you won’t notice unless for the inside agitation that translates into turmoil action. Still… they find a way to get through the day with a smile and a will and a hope that everything is possible, even when what is needed to do it is missing.
He always found a way…

On my last night there he got his kite. “My friend, no good!” he told me, as the kite wouldn’t fly as he imagined it would. For some reason I wasn’t able to explain to him that no kite can fly without wind… Sooner or later he will surely notice that while external conditions are not favorable all we can do is to try our best, and actually I’m pretty sure he already did…
The next day, when he noticed I wasn’t there anymore, O. found a way to make a bracelet and give it to someone for it to reach me. I probably won’t ever see it, as he may have never seen that one kite flying as he wanted it to, but we tried, we both tried, and out of it the great possibilities that only great impossibilities can bring to existence were forged.

Trying is, in fact, the most important thing; as long as it’s done whole heartedly and with an unbeatable sense of hope. That hope, I’ve learnt, will one day reward the ones that don’t give up on it with the wind needed to help kites and wings to take flight.
If in the meantime we can manage to use some colorful lenses – of trust, resilience, liveliness, unending curiosity and resourcefulness – the way will surely be more joyful and impossibilities will lead to something worth the while...