I am a mother of three children. Grandmother of six grandchildren. The most tender in the world are children’s cheeks and hands. I fell in love with them with my children.
I’ve been around the world, worked as an entrepreneur, seen wealth and poverty, but only in 2017 did I notice and start looking at African children’s hands.
This in the photo is Revocat’s hand in mine. I’m holding her for the first time.
I remember the sadness that filled me then. A tingle down the spine and a thought, “Why does an 8-year-old boy have the hands of an old man? Why does an 8-year-old boy have hands that seem to have worked for 80 years?”
Yes… I already wrote about how at that moment I was ready to lose my head, pride, everything… if only he didn’t have such handles. At only 8 years old, arms cracked from pulling bushes, tired from carrying water canisters, worn out from working in the fields.
I watched documentaries about Africa. I looked at the “fake beautiful things” that show how these kids dance and jump. Yes… they dance when someone pays them. Then they do their best for only 1 dollar.
I looked at beautiful African girls made up and filmed in some studio in Chicago or New York.
And it’s all a lie. A blatant lie to appease themselves and others. That not everything is “black” in Africa.
And it’s black, it couldn’t be blacker.
Their eyes and teeth are photographed. It is true that these children have beautiful teeth, but they also have the saddest eyes in the world.
Take a closer look at the photos. No one ever mentions those hands. I will.
No photoshop, no makeup. It is, as it is. Their hands are the saddest and most tired in the world.
When they tell me that there are hungry children in Croatia too, I skip the answer. Or I just say “aha”.
What should I say? That every other African child is hungry, but really hungry. That they eat two to three times a week, that death from hunger kills them more than Covid, that it lasts for decades. And that they don’t even have a container – to get something out of it. That they have neither electricity nor water.
I woke up this morning with sad thoughts.
We are going to Kondo, even poorer than this place where we are now. In advance, sadness comes to me, it overtakes me. Because of children’s hands.
So I think, why does this world talk about anything and everything, but not about those little hands? There are them everywhere, white, black, yellow, hands that work to the point of exhaustion just to survive.
Are we embarrassed to talk about it? To hide all that we destroyed? To sweep under the carpet what we all failed at?
I have no other explanation. I have not.
