Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright©, 2005
Tokens of Hope
by
Frieda Groffy
She is young, tall , slender, blond, beautiful, with a face that would be a credit to the cover of any
women’s magazine. We sit enjoying the sun in the garden of the backpacker's lodge in
Johannesburg where we are both staying for awhile. It’s a friendly, international environment
where talks start easily.
I tell her a bit of my background story and she, in hesitating bits and pieces, gives me hers. She
just finished a six month’s contract in Angola, working in a refugee camp, in a hot, harsh, remote
region with only the most basic comforts possible. She tells of confronting the sheer endless,
futureless misery; of the frustration of dealing with a corrupt government that doesn't care for the
well-being of its people, and directs the goods and money from International Aid Programs into its
own pockets, with just a very small part getting to the ones that are desperately in need of it.
You can see it in the look in her eyes, drifting away, that there are visions etched on her mind
screen that will diffuse and dim with time but remain there forever as a scar not well healed.
She speaks with a soft voice when she tells me she had to come back to the ‘luxury’ of civilization
to keep her sanity - to put things back on track - to get her life back in balance, as if she wants to
ask me not to blame her for this weakness.
She is Canadian; the first day of her arrival I saw her sitting in the Jacuzzi for hours, delivering her
body to the smooth caress of the warm bubbling water, while drinking large pints of coke with lots
of ice cubes in them as if she never, ever wants to be thirsty in her life again.
She is only one of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of young, committed people working all over
the globe in all the places where people are in extreme need of help due to military conflicts, or
nature’s catastrophes such as earth quakes, floods or whatever. These young people leave the
comfort of their own safe, mostly Western, habitat in an inner urge to help, and also, to give value
to some deeper meaning of their lives - to leave the emptiness and superficiality of that ‘home’
world that fills them only with discontent.
When I told her how much I admired her courage and drive to do what she had done (and
probably would do again), she blushed and gave me a shy little smile. I felt how that smile
touched my soul, and I knew it would remain there to shelter me for any sad day to come.
Contributor's Notes...
"Tokens of Hope" was written after Ms. Groffy's summer 2004 stay in South Africa where she was facilitating
at writing workshops in the townships. Ms. Groffy has a spoken word CD out, inspired by her first visit to
South Africa, called Voices with Scars. Find out more about this Belgian poet/author through her website:
http://www.friedagroffy.be
