What are you willing to give up? I know it's a strange question at a time when so much seems to be taken from us -- our savings, our homes, our dreams for a financially solvent future. But the question is a fair one: What are you willing to give up to make someone else's life happier? The someone else -- a stranger perhaps. Someone you'll never see on the evening news or shake hands with...but someone who co-exists on the planet with you.
What if you knew that by giving up something dear to you, there would be so much to gain? I found this out a few weeks ago. My story began in June, when I found myself attending a Muslim bridal shower in the worst slum of Nairobi. Seated by the broken window in the Kibera Academy (a primary school), I found myself riveted by the sight of the children's playground just outside the window. It consisted of a weed-covered field, a battered metal slide and a half-buried tire. As the women around me danced and sang for the benefit of a young bride-to-be, their children threw rocks at each other and listlessly played on the slide.
My imagination went into overdrive: I pictured a playground similar to the one my own daughter played on in our leafy suburb of Washington, DC. Swings, climbing structures, playhouses, and monkey bars -- all cushioned with a spongy surface. But mostly I focused on a swingset. A means for these children -- who have less than any children living in poverty in the U.S. -- to escape the bonds of earth for a few seconds, to laugh with joy, to see their world from another perspective.
I returned to Virginia with swingsets on my mind. A friend made fun of me, insisting "those children need food more than a swingset." While this may be true, I couldn't get over the fact that there was not one swingset in a slum of one million people. Not one! How can any child grow into adulthood without experiencing the bliss of closing her eyes and leaning way back in a swing as it heads toward the clouds?
That swingset became my obsession. I saved my money, I let my roof leak a little longer, I cajoled my friends. Through a friend in Nairobi, I located a man who lives in Kibera slum to build and install the swingset. And two weeks ago, just as the school year began in Kenya, I received photos of children on the swings. They are laughing, as I knew they would be. A friend of mine painted the slide and the swingset in playful colors. It doesn't look anything like the high-tech swingset I imagined that afternoon in June. It's better because it's of Africa and for Africans. And it's the embodiment of what I am willing to give up -- roof repairs, the granite countertops I've been craving, a weekend in the Big Apple.
And what did I get? A picture of children who live in corrugated metal shacks laughing with pure joy. The urge to build more swingsets because how is it possible for there to be too many swingsets in the world? A tiny piece of sharing in responsibility for our fretful world. You too can have a piece -- perhaps you can pay for the monkey bars?