Murk...

I am at my barest self a Christian a Mother and a writer. Although I have dabbled in photography, I am surely NOT a photographer.

Being a writer, I write...I write because it is my way of truth telling, my way of speaking. I speak for, against and mostly out!

This is the first time a photograph has moved me to write...a somewhat backwards process for me. Generally I write as moved and then find the right picture to express my emotion and hail you the reader with an image to go with the string after string of words.

This photo has changed me yet again, as a profound photo will do, the photographers job is to do just that and he has done it well.

This image will not ever leave me for it has brought even more urgency to what we are hoping to accomplish here. Let us bring the ugliness out of the shadows, let us allow ourselves some real truth. Let us be moved to act as the kind and compassionate human beings we were created to be.

I am a single mother and have been for many years. I am stubborn in many things I do and stubborn about my convictions so I do not do well married. I do better as a mother than a wife.

I know poverty and I know pain. I know the frustration of loving a child that needs shoes that have to wait a bit too long at times and snacks that aren't there but hopefully dinner is. I am in comparison to so many a very fortunate human being and I never lose sight of that.

I have a roof over my head and that of my child, I have food in my refrigerator 90% of the time, I am spoiled in comparison to millions upon millions. I thank God for my food at night and again in the morning. I take nothing but his love for me for granted and truth be told I don't take that for granted either, I rather trust in that.

The concept of people wearing $600 shoes while this boy drinks from a filthy, mosquito infested puddle is one I will never come to terms with, I am not capable.

Material things that held allure for me years ago had threatened to rob me of my sense of what is right and eventually of my soul had I let it. I am an enormously grateful and wealthy woman living well below the poverty level.

The tug on my heart becomes more ingrained and stubborn for every disturbing photograph, article or piece of information that finds me. There is not the thought of turning back ever as Africa has it's hands on my heart now.

God Bless us all...

Malaika~

"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair"