Makambi, Zimbabwe.

A teenage girl limps barefoot across a dusty street laden with jagged pebbles. Exhausted, she perseveres, cradling her precious, heavy book bag in her bony arms. She nearly faints from the unrelenting heat of the blazing, scorching sun glaring down at her, but she refuses to give up. Keeping her head down, she refuses to meet the mocking, judgmental scowl of the school boys, as they scamper along the streets and kick pebbles at her.

Finally she reaches her destination: a ramshackle, run down building with crumbling concrete walls and a rusted corrugated tin roof.

The youngest girls huddle outside under the shade of the bushwillow tree, struggling to recite the faded words on their worn out, tattered books, illuminated only by the dappled beams of light threading through gaps in the tree’s leaves. 

Inside, her eyes take a few minutes to adjust to the darkness of the room. With her classmates, she studies for several hours, struggling to absorb as much information as possible. The teacher, a wiry, frail woman just a few years older than her students, writes onto a faded, dusty chalkboard, carefully preserving the last, precious stub of chalk. Education isn’t just a privilege; it’s a chance for freedom.

As dusk nears, she rushes out of the school into the deepening twilight, anxious to reach home before nightfall. She struggles to see her way home through the inky darkness of the night, with only the dim moonlight and myriad of sparkling stars to guide her through the wayward, dangerous streets.

Once home, she begins to prepare dinner. There’s not much food left on the shelf. Most of the food left is spoiled and inedible. It’s been like this for weeks. The markets are empty and bare, the farmers unable to carry enough of their wares in their hands as they trudge into the grungy, dried up town. The precious fruits of their labor lie waste in the fields, spoiled.

She takes what little scraps of food are left, a small handful of rice and a few old vegetables. She lights a fire, fumbling around the dark for firewood. As she breathes in the toxic fumes, a hacking cough wracks her body and she doubles over, wheezing.
But she continues to cook, because someone has to feed her six siblings and ailing mother with HIV/AIDS.

In the darkness of the house, five gaunt faces stare at her silently. Their glazed eyes reflect her own skeletal face, lined with pain, in the dim, flickering light of the smoky wood fire. She serves dinner to the five siblings. She doesn’t eat a bite, they need it more than she does.

A baby’s wail breaks the eerie silence of the house, a cry of despair and pain.

She checks her one month old baby sister. She’s burning up with a fever and can barely breathe. The doctors couldn’t do anything. They don’t know what’s wrong.

Her mother lies on the only bed in the house, a rickety wooden structure covered with flea ridden, tattered sheets.

A cough racks her mother’s frail body, too exhausted by the AIDS to even feed her own child. The baby continues to wail with hunger and pain. Soon she’ll die, the young girl knows this.
It’s happened before, it happened with three of her siblings, they all died, and now this baby is dying.

They’re all slowly dying, everyone around her is dying.

She can hear her siblings fighting over the last scraps of food, weakly shouting and crying their hunger.

The teenage girl, her stomach growling and aching, grabs her books and sits by the dying embers of the fire. Her eyes strain to see the dark inked words on the fragile pages, illuminated only by the faint, flickering light of a few glowing embers and a weak beam of moonlight that fights its way through the filthy, warped square of glass. Her throat burns and her eyes ache, the words turning into blurry swirls of faded ink on torn, tattered pages.

She studies as much as she can, pushing herself. It’s the only thing she has, a futile dream to one day become a doctor. Sometimes, when the sun shone warm upon her face and her mother was well enough to smile, she would allow herself to dream. She dreamed of wearing a white lab coat and bringing new advanced technology and medicine from the West. If she was a doctor, she’d make sure no one died.

But at the end of day, when it was dark and cold, and her stomach ached with hunger, she knew it was nothing but a dream, a dream that would never come to fruition. She’d never become a doctor. She’d give birth to dozens of children, most of them would die at birth, and then she would waste away in a rickety old bed with torn, tattered sheets as her newborn baby slowly died with her.

She puts her books away and stands still in the silence of the house.

The baby has stopped wailing.

The teenage girl, the girl who carried the weight of the world of on her frail shoulders, collapses to the cold dirt floor, letting the failures and shortcomings of her life wash her away the last vestiges of her strength. She needs to get up, bury her newborn sister who will never get the chance to feel the warm sunshine on her face, or see the silver light of a full moon, or have the chance to break this endless cycle of poverty, of oppression, of never ending misery.

She never gets up.

~*~

Ashburn, USA.

The teenage girl skips across the street, chatting and smiling with her friends. The glowing yellow medallion in the vibrant sky painted with cornflower blue softly drips sunshine, warming her pale skin. The sweet, shy teenage boy kindly offers to carry her cumbersome, heavy book bag, grinning at her from under floppy brown bangs.

The sprawling, brick red school building looms over the clumps of students milling near the entrance, enjoying the few minutes of freedom before the bell rings and the school day begins.

Dreading the dreary monotony of her classes, she trudges into the school building. Her eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the bright fluorescent lights. The day’s classes pass by in a dull, tedious blur of routine and rote memorization. She secretly texts her friends, hiding the iPhone behind the screen of her laptop , when she’s supposed to be typing notes from the slideshow displayed on the bright projector screen at the front of the classroom.

‘School is such a bore.’ she and her friends whine, while riding the school bus home. ‘It sucks so much, I mean, like, the school computers are so old.’

Her face presses against the thick glass window, the air conditioner blowing golden strands of hair against her rouged cheeks. Outside, glossy, gleaming cars in all colors and shapes whiz by, illuminated by the setting sun. The sunset drips to the horizon like a saturated watercolor painting of warm pink and cool purple.

She stays at her friends house till nightfall. They study and watch TV in the brightly lit, air conditioned house, laughing and gossiping. Stepping out into the dark night, illuminated by dozens of street lights lining the paved streets, she tilts up her head to see the stars. Only a few stars manage to break through the light pollution and scatter themselves few and far across the night’s inky velvet. 

She strolls home, where the warm yellow lights seeping from inside the house smile at her, welcoming her home. Once inside, she finds her large family getting ready for dinner. A pot bubbles on the gas stove and the air is filled with the scent of air fresheners and fancy candles. She helps prepare dinner, pulling out fresh produce and meat from the refrigerator. Her five siblings bounce around the kitchen, setting the table with smiles on their ruddy faces.

After dinner, the girl heads upstairs, her stomach full of the hot food. Her one month old baby sister giggles and gurgles in her crib, toothlessly smiling.  Turning on the lamp on her desk, she pulls out her laptop and thick textbooks and sits at her polished mahogany desk, a frown on her face and a furrow between her eyebrows, to finish her studies. She despised schoolwork; the never ending pointless monotony of memorizing useless information.

Some days, when she saw a news report on extreme poverty, or epidemic, or genocide in some impoverished part of the globe, an unfamiliar feeling pulled at her gut. She’d put aside her phone, her endless piles of homework, her shiny laptop, and allow herself to dream for a second, briefest flash of what could have been. She’d dream of limping barefoot, her stomach aching with hunger and filled with fear, her gaunt face lined with pain, across a dusty street littered with jagged pebbles beneath a scorching sun, while school boys tossed pebbles at her, suffering through it all just to learn. She’d dream of coming home through unlit, dangerous streets, to a cold, dark home, with a dying mother, wailing baby sister, and starving siblings. The guilt would spread from her gut through her body, till she’d had enough of dreaming.

The girl imperceptibly shakes her head, blonde curls grazing her cheeks before pooling at her shoulders like melted gold. She grabs her phone, texts her friends and posts a selfie on Facebook, pushing away the unpleasant thoughts, letting the gilded, false feelings of happiness and fulfillment swirl over her, washing away the blemishes of the world. She let the feelings repair the puncture that’d let in a few drops of the real world into the fragile bubble that sheltered her.

She puts away her laptop and stands still in the warm chatter and liveliness of the spacious house; her baby sister giggles from her crib, her siblings laugh while watching TV, her parents discuss politics, and deafening thoughts ring through her mind on an endless loop.

The teenage girl collapses into her warm bed, allowing the velvety soft fabric and sleepy contentment envelop her. Only then, and only then, does she allow herself to part the shades enclosing her life and peer outside the sheltered little bubble to see the world around her.

The next morning rays of gold sunshine fight their way through a crack in her curtains to wake her from her deep slumber. She rubs the last remnants of sleep from hazel eyes, telling herself she needs to get up. She needs to get up and repeat the same rehearsed routine of repetition, going through the same mundane, continual procedure  every day like a broken record.

With a sigh, she gets up.