To this day, this simple photograph is of the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed. I took this picture in Burkina Faso, Africa, in a very small village that I don’t recall the name of.
It was a ridiculously hot day, the kind where even the dogs just lay around and do nothing. We (the visiting medical team) had set up our free health clinic already, and were then gathered in a huge circle for some singing and dancing. There’s nothing quite like a religious ceremony /gathering in Africa; there’s drums, xylophones, and any other instrument that they could possibly make with their limited resources. There’s so much dancing, and even the elders and the women with babies tied to their back jump around to the music. And the singing is like nothing you’ve ever heard. People of all tribal languages, French, and English all singing together in one big chaotic (but, amazingly, still pleasant-sounding) voice. It’s something everyone should experience at least once.
After the dancing concluded, we all sat in the dirt and the grass while a member of our group gave a testimony. There were flies everywhere – there were cattle nearby and the outhouse wasn’t far away either.
I was sitting next to some small girls. It’s hard to gauge age with African kids, because so many of them are smaller than their American counterparts. I’d assume that these girls were 6 or 7 but no older than 8. They all crowded around my friend Molly and me as we sat. We were something foreign, something new and interesting, so they liked to come and touch our differently textured hair, or run their dark, tiny fingers down our white (and sunburned) arms.
A lot of the kids I came across in Africa were covered in mosquito bites. Mosquitos were EVERYWHERE in Burkina. They’re a huge nuisance, and they carry diseases like Malaria, so they’re bad news. Now, children usually aren’t too clean to begin with, and children in villages with no running water are no exception. As a result, the kids would get deep, weeping sores from the mosquito bites, because they’d scratch them and get dirt in them. These kids had them all down their legs and arms, and they were very infected and oozing. They weren’t pleasant-looking in the least.
As I said, there were flies everywhere during that meeting, and they weren’t just your common house flies. These things were huge. They were particularly attracted to the sores on the girls’ legs, and swarmed the poor things. They did their best to swat them away (the older girls helping the younger ones) but they simply kept coming.
What happened next was one of the simplest yet kindest gestures I’ve ever seen. You see, in Burkina, women and young girls wear head-coverings during church and other times of the day. They’re not fancy head-coverings, not at all. Many are just small rags just barely held together by a few threads. The oldest of the group of girls was the only one wearing one that day. I believe the other girls were still young enough that they didn’t have to wear them.
Anyhow, the girl removed her head covering and spread it very gently across the sores on the other children’s legs to keep the flies away. It was such a simple gesture, but an absolutely beautiful one to me. I don’t really know why I remember it so well, or why it’s stuck with me for so long, but it has.
Kindness doesn’t always come in the form of big, elaborate gifts or pretty jewelry, and you don’t have to be well-off to be generous. In my personal experiences, it’s the people who have nothing who are the most generous, and give the best gift of all – kindness.
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