By Sophia Bird
Sophia Bird is the daughter of South Central Indiana Kiwanian Loni Dishong. After serving as president of the Jackson Creek Middle School Builders Club, she moved on to high school and was elected president this year for the Bloomington, Indiana, Key Club. Sophia travelled to Sierra Leone with her grandparents Jerry and Linda Christiano.
Standing in a small village full of people from an entirely different walk of life, who didn't live or act like me, I could somehow still feel completely at home. Sierra Leone was like that—full of friendly people who just wanted to make you feel welcome.
Being welcome in a place, however, very clearly doesn't mean that you belong there. The place doesn't belong to you and you don't belong to it. It's like that all the time in America. We don't belong to this world, we breeze through it. There, it was different. They belonged to everything from the ground they walked on to the homes they build for themselves. And they belonged to each other.
As I was walking through this small village in the Kenema district, I always had a large group of children stumbling about my legs. But it was here, when a little girl stopped me, that it really made me think. She took my arm in her hand, and she looked at it. She turned it around, and examined both sides. By this point, many other children had gathered and both of my arms were covered in little hands. It wasn't until the first little girl started rubbing her skin up against mine that I realized they were marvelling at the difference in the color. At first I could only laugh and watch, so it was a few minutes before the true power of the situation hit me.
It was incredible. I couldn't tell if they wanted to rub their skin off onto mine, or my skin off onto theirs. Thinking about that, I know it doesn't really matter either way. Although they may live differently, look differently and even act differently, inside we're exactly the same.
People laugh in Sierra Leone. They cry, dance and sing. People wash their laundry and scrub dirt off their cars. People have families, and they mourn when a member of their community passes away. Just like the people I see every day. Just like the people who go to my school and whom I pass on the street. We all love and feel. All of those things that make us beautifully human are still there on the other side of the world.