The Waste of War

When my son was young, I had the opportunity to tutor a refugee from Guinea*. She was beautiful and happy and easy to talk to, even though English was not her native tongue. She was in middle school and her math was horrible. Addition was a struggle and the times tables were nonexistent. I assumed it was poor education in Africa. However, like so many things, I was wrong. It was a childhood robbed by civil war.

A few months into our tutoring and little progress, K* was study properties of discrete math. You remember Associative, Transitive, Reflexive, Symmetric, Identity, etc. She had to draw the concept. We came up with some very clever drawings. They escape me now but I do remember ice cream factoring in many. While we were doing this I was struck by how quickly and completely she got it. It was that day I realized war had robbed her of elementary experience. While my son got to hammer out math problems, K's family was escaping bombs and moving to unfamiliar countries. As a world we are wasting  valuable, nonrenewable resource such as K . Not to mention how precious she is as a person. 

The magnitude of that lose came flooding back to me as I looked at this photo essay: Syria's Children by The Atlantic. I expect in 10+ years we will hear of amazing tails of child refugees from Syria who overcame the odds and became great. I would prefer to stack the odds in favor of the children of Syria, and of New Orleans and of Nigeria. I wish for the "non-story". The one where everything was done right, so nothing had to be done different.

While my prayers for Syria are tired and weak, they are what I have to give today. They also enable me to be prepared when there is more I can give. Thank you to The Atlantic for giving us the face of that tragedy.

*Note: K is not her name. Guinea might not even be her country. I guess the benefits of a poor memory is it is easy to protect someones identity.

and now this melancholy song by the Avertt Brothers  "Head full of doubt/Road full of promise"