By Aisha Simba
She wants to be a doctor so she can cure herself and her mother from HIV/AIDS.
With a missing father and mother who earns very little from fish mongering, Viola has dreams that humbled me. Each day she wakes up, takes her tablet for the day and sits in her uncle’s boat to take her across the lake to school.
I sat in the glaring midmorning sun on the rock at a fishing village and saw a beautiful child, a smile so timid and a future so uncertain. A child whose dream tagged at my heart with sharp razorlike claws that I have never been the same. Ever since I turned my back and walked away from Viola, I didn’t just leave my red cap with her, i left part of my heart on that rock. Not a day has passed that a tiny voice doesn’t whisper,”I want to be a doctor when I grow up like you. I was number one at school”
There’s alot more children like her. While I sit in a restaurant and spend the money she needs for school fees on a plate of food,Viola is somewhere at the shores, hoping to be great in the future.
I betrayed this little girl when I walked away.
I am going to find Viola. And even though I can’t change the stories of hundreds of little girls like her, at least her own will be different.
I pray she is the little woman from a fishing village that finds the cure for HIV twenty years from today.
One day, I am going to look at this picture and be proud of the woman she is surely going to become.
Her Dreams are valid.
#WeAreTakingATrip
Credit: First posted on Aisha Simba Facebook page
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