This is Silas (pronounced See-luh) in the in the orange t-shirt. She's standing next to Gizela, Leonora, and her brother Felex. You may be wondering why she's so happy.
This is Silas taking off in a Boeing 737-200 last Tuesday. Let me explain.
Last week, we sent some kids down to Beira for higher education/career training. I put up a post about the five of them a week or two ago. Well, the post that I put up was made the day they left, and things changed a little bit. Simply put, the kids that are at Young Africa Institute trade school are in an incredible position. After Victor went down to set the Claudia up in the dorms (they only have dorms the girls) and the boys in a rented house, he went and checked out the campus and met with the instructors and the head of the school. Here's how one conversation went.
Turns out the nice people at our trade school not only teach, but then aggressively seek out jobs for the kids to enter in to. They're not quite at 100%, but they try their hardest. In the excitement, Claudia also switched from management to secretary and human resources (with an emphasis on computer proficiency. Helder is still cooking, and Carlitos is still studying accounting. Which brings us back to Silas.
The director of the school asked what happened to the other girl we were going to send down. We had met and decided that it would be better for her to stay in school for another year or two rather than go to the trade school right away. High school around here is kind of like hitting the double bonus foul shooting in college basketball. You don't always get there, but if you do each trip to the foul line is twice the opportunity to score. Meaning: high school is not necessarily a prerequisite for careers here, but every extra year of schooling that you have gives you that much more opportunity to succeed.
After seeing what a great place the trade school was and the job opportunities and placement program, I got a call. It was Victor. The gist of the phone call was "Holy cow this place is freakin' awesome get Silas here everybody loves it they have jobs!" Yes, there was much excitement. The other part of what he said was something like "Lessons start tomorrow and Silas needs to get here as fast as she can". A few minutes later I got a text with an reference code for a plane ticket in Silas name. Seems like the hard work of figuring out how to get here a 18 hour drive away was already done for me.
Silas grabbed a suitcase from Christina and was almost in tears because all here clothes wouldn't fit. Silas is always the most fashionable person here and has managed to take excellent care of all her clothes so much so that when we get new clothes for the kids and most others have worn theirs out hers are still fine and she ends up stockpiling faster clothes than nukes during the cold war.
So I took her, her brother and a couple other gals to the airport to see her off. The airport is about the size of a modest bingo hall, so we were able to wander anywhere we wanted and wait for her to take off. Since this was the first time anybody from the orphanage other than Victor, Christina, or I (and Yohani) have been in an airplane I spent the whole hour explaining to her how it all works: How to find her seat, store her luggage, wait for her baggage when she lands, look for the kids already in Beira to pick her up. These things are all second nature for anybody who has even flown once but so foreign to someone who has never even seen an airplane except for in the sky.
There was a brief moment of panic when she started complaining because she had been so excited she forgot to eat lunch (a good thing in my mind in case she got sick and ralphed all over the place). I told her that they had food on the plane and then she started crying because she didn't have any money with her and she couldn't afford it. I told her it had already been paid for and all she had to do was accept it. (I feel like there's a gospel allusion somewhere in there...)
Other than Silas having the time of her life and calling once she got to Beira so happy and giddy she was impossible to understand, there was something incredible that came out of it. As Christina put it, so few people here will ever have the opportunity to fly that its the same thing as if an American were to get to go up on the space shuttle. Its so foreign that you just have no idea and you don't even consider it something to be within your reach. These days, unless you're in the Air Force and have multiple PhD's or a Russian billionaire, space flight is a little out of reach for the average Joe.
What came out of it was for the next three days it was all anybody could talk about around here. how Silas got to go up in an airplane. They were saying one day they're going to be successful enough to have a job where they need to fly. They'll go to Maputo for business or Pemba for vacation. More than just getting Silas to Beira ASAP, it gave all the kids the realization that something like flying on a plane is something that is within their reach. It gives them something to reach for.
Silas is attending beauty school, presumably work for Claudia once she opens up her own salon.
"a modest bingo hall" hahaha, as opposed to a normal or ultramodern bingo hall? yep, i just used ultramodern.
ReplyDeleteWhat a cool story! Go Silas!