 |
|
|
|
Eight-year-old Davien
has 2 pet dogs and loves pizza. His favorite color is blue and his favorite sport is football. His favorite book is Flash vs The Evil Hawk. At school, his favorite class is gym. Later in life, he would like to be a football player
.
|
Joy Road
Davien's First Wish - Buy Homes for Everyone
by Pam Good
One of the most difficult parts about our work at Beyond Basics is bearing witness to the extreme suffering in our communities and our inability to wipe out this literacy crisis in a meaningful way.
The work we've done is truly a drop in the bucket, but for that drop and the children we reached, it i
s life-saving.
I felt the weight of this crisis while reading a story written by second-grader Davien Woods, author of the month in May for Sampson Webber Leadership Academy. Here is his story.
"The Best City In The World"
One day I met a genie who told me I could have 3 wishes. I wanted to have the best city in the world so I came up with 3 wishes to make that happen. My first wish was to be very rich so I could buy homes for everyone because everyone deserves a home. My second wish was for every family to have a car so they could travel to fun places and go to work and make money. My last wish was for there to be lots of fun things in the city for people to do. The genie gave me all the things I wished for and my city became the best city in the world.
You might wonder why reading his positive, uplifting story weighs on me.
It does because it is the same story written by the children we have served for the past 18 years. These children see people not having a place to lay down their head at night. They always want to buy homes because, as Davien so aptly wrote, "everyone deserves a home."
This is always what they wish.
It saddens me that day after day these young ones see so many people suffering. I wonder, at what point do they get crushed and stop hoping?
I think Beyond Basics provides this ray of hope and the skills they need to climb out of poverty. Literacy is only a starting point.
This is a crisis as devastating as the hurricane in Houston yet we haven't called in the National Guard or truly started to answer the call to prevent the death sentences of these children. Everything in life requires this essential skill; even our faith requires we know the written word. Yet the stark reality remains: our children are drowning from illiteracy.
When will we wake up in this country and do what's right for the children and for the adults who slipped through our broken system without learning the written word? I pray that day comes soon.
Literacy empowers people to take care of themselves and those that they love, and that is life changing for all of us.
Joy Road is the journey I began that has led to Beyond Basics. It all started when I took Exit 9 to Joy Road years ago to help out at a school in Detroit.
