Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
During my third day in Africa, I met a boy named K. While taking photos of a local village in [name], Kenya I saw him in the distance wearing a bright green t-shirt and red shorts. He was plowing the ground in a dense corn field and as I slowly approached him he put his tools down and looked at me. I introduced myself and told him that I was interested in photographing him. I asked him where he went to school and I was greeted by a silence. With some difficulty he admitted that he didn’t go to school. Being the breadwinner of his family meant he was forced to work long hours, forgoing school, to provide for his mother and his sister. As I took photos of him working, his deteriorating house, and his elderly grandmother, his indigence weighed down on me. When I finished, I went over to my partners and discussed the issue with them. Though we had spent years fundraising to build a school in Kenya, we knew we had to take action once again. After calculating the costs and discussing the logistics with the headmaster of the school, we returned to tell him that he should dress for school tomorrow, because we had paid for all his high school expenses.
Coming to Kenya, our mission was singular: to see the completion of our first classroom and the end to a three-year-long project. In the summer of 2013, two of my friends and I created our own non-profit organization, [name] Foundation, with the goal of providing education to those in impoverished areas around the world. In order to raise the funds for our first project, a school in Kenya, we hit the ground running: going door to door to over 3481 houses, crowdfunding, and working with schools and companies to put on money drives. From the beginning of our fundraising campaign, I had conjured up the idea that the more money we received from donors, the more I would feel a sense of fulfillment because I was helping the kids in Kenya. Thus through each fundraiser my only motivation was to solve the massive problem of education, an abstract concept, that didn’t provide the level of satisfaction I was looking for. Even though I could feel myself becoming more passionate about the pauperized children without a school, something about just fundraising didn’t match the gratification I had hoped for in providing education to kids around the world.
K, however, became the answer to my problem. Upon hearing that he had received a full scholarship, K broke his stern face, smiled, and shook our hands. In that moment I realized that this was the origin of a completely new life for him. The scholarship would provide him with a future, different from that of working in the fields all day. Even though K was only a microcosm of the whole project to provide education, he inevitably did what I needed the most: a gratification beyond any other. In those three minutes of interaction, I received more contentment than I had with three years of fundraising. Helping K brought out the individual and humanized the problem of education for me and this individuality in charity provided me an ethereal feeling that I had never experienced. Through K I saw the humanity in simple actions and felt the connection with a recipient that I so desired.
On the plane ride back to America, I came to the realization that though our biggest accomplishment in [name] Foundation was building an educational infrastructure able to teach 70 kids a year, K had become the true takeaway from that journey. K had a story to tell, and it was something that I could look back on for motivation and inspiration. It was a blooming reminder to provide more scholarships to unfortunate children. Though a few hundred dollars was able to redirect K’s future, it also has changed the course of my life forever.