Looking up

As we left Realogile High School this evening, we haltingly made our way through the streets of Alexandra.

It is an amazing thing to be a small piece of this vibrant, cheek-to-jowl crowded, desperately poor, bustling, entrepreneurial community. Alex has half a million people jammed into a 20 square block area. There is barely space to breathe between the dwellings, shops and sidewalk vendor's stalls in this densely packed township. People spill out from the sidewalks into the streets, competing with the incessantly honking taxis that drive with great impunity through the narrow streets of Alex.

There is no room at all, anywhere...unless you look up.

Structures reach no higher than a man can stand. Homes are constructed from whatever can be found...preferably corrugated metal...but anything that can define a boundary of in and out and keep the strangers and the weather at bay is suitable building material.

But looking up...up past the haphazard network of wires and antennas that weave across the low-slung rooftops...you see sky. You see sun. You see the energy of the scuttling clouds. You see the approach of a storm. You see the bigger forces of nature.

Looking up you see possibility. You see unmarred sunsets. You see the glow of sunrise. You see the beauty of open space.

Open space to dream. To see beyond where you have been planted.

The sky is the limit, it is said.

And for the children of Alex, I would like to believe that is so.

The sky above their heads, the unsullied, uncrowded space of open possibility...space to dream. Space to try new things. Space to dare new things. The space to grasp possibility.

These children of Alex need adults to help them. Adults who will give these children space and time in their own lives.

Infinite Family mentoring sessions are only half hour a week. That kind of space in your life can encourage a child to look up past the overwhelming poverty that surrounds them to see new possibility for themselves, their communities and their country.

If you think that you can make that kind of space available in your life, let me know at dana.gold@infinitefamily.org.

Thanks for reading! Your comments are encouraging!