When I was in elementary school, I didn’t give much thought to what lives were like for others beyond the horizon. Then a guest speaker came to our class and spoke about the famine in Ethiopia. She showed us pictures of children with spindly limbs and bloated bellies. It was the first time I understood how different life could be. There were people whose daily struggles, finding food, finding water, were things I’d never had to think about.
I never forgot that moment. And years later, when I visited Nicaragua, it came flooding back. I watched women collecting water from a river that served every purpose for their community: bathing, washing, drinking. It was their only source of water, and it was making everyone who lived there sick.
Knowing something and seeing it are two completely different things. Those pictures stirred something in me, but standing in Nicaragua, seeing their reality with my own eyes, deepened that compassion in a way facts and photos never could. For the first time, their world felt as real as my own.