As I was doing my daily lunchtime news browsing today, I came across an unusual story of “Manon Ossevoort”, a young beautiful Dutch lady who is crossing the world with her green tractor, in a breathtaking journey began in Amsterdam. After passing through Belgium, France, Italy, Balkans, and north Africa, she’s now heading toward cape town in South Africa and eventually Cape of Good Hope, where she’s supposed to hitch a ride to Antarctica and her final destination, South Pole.
In this amazing adventure, she collects the dreams of every individual she meets on little scarps of paper. Dreams will accompany her to the end of the world (as she says) where they will be somehow magically fulfilled.
I have to admit that the sophisticated idea and the extraordinary courage and determination behind this exquisitely simple childish “Petit-Prince-type” dream was so poetic that I couldn’t stop my tears from falling.
The joyous moment was completed as I received an E-mail from my adorable friend “Bahareh” who has just recently left her well-paid job in Montreal to join “Engineers without border” in Burkina Faso, a country which reminds me of my childhood neighbor and best friend and elementary school class mate, “Behzad” who also left his town, Chicago, to teach Mathematics to unprivileged children there, in Burkina Faso.
However, this state of ecstasy was soon replaced with a stark sense of uselessness due to an inevitable comparison between what these people are doing with their lives and my valuable contribution to humanity!
Being unable to work on little extravagant details of some billionaire’s private jet, at least for couple of hours, was, I think, my conscience’s pathetic attempt to deal with the sense of guilt and shame that I was going through.
I hope the combination of “Not everybody should go to Africa to be useful for humanity” mantra and watching extremely gorgeous and talented “Sophie Milman” live in Spectrum tonight, would make me feel better.
For God’s sake, those poor billionaires truly need their glorious private jets and they need them on time, right?!
2 comments:
Her notes irritate me. She has no place in Africa. Please... why can't you all see it? She is not liked over there by most people. Weren't Dutch among the worst nations who destroyed Africa in the first place? How dare she get mad at them for begging...
Just read :"My visitors don’t say much and only stare or watch mesmerised. Sometimes we try a little Amharic. But more often than not it is, for the first time this journey, annoying. Because they beg and ask for pens, bottles, T-shirts, and money without any concern for respect or their own dignity. Sometimes even in an agressive way. It’s hard to keep down the anger that sometimes arises from deep inside of me. And one time I can’t help boiling over; a man at the roadside picks up a rock and pretends to throw it at me, and after he sees that it scared me he starts to laugh. I jumped from the tractor, grabbed him by his shirt, and shouted in his face, ‘Don’t you ever do that again, who do you 8u4uthr think you are, grow up!’
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