Keeping hope alive

The lights turned red the instant she reached the crossroads. Instead of trying to beat the red light this time, Leila sighed and braked abruptly. She couldn’t afford any more fines. The countdown timer digitally displaying 45 seconds to zero would take forever, the 30-year-old thought fleetingly. She would just have to sit tight. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man, who looked indigenous. He was propped up on a lamppost and a young girl, perhaps around 8 years old, was clutching his leg. The hunched-over man was holding a torn sign that was handwritten in Spanish. Leila read it hastily as her time was nearly up. Her mother tongue was Portuguese, but she understood Spanish well. The sign that these two strangers were holding said that they were from another country, they were hungry and needed food.

Leaving the scene behind while pressing her foot firmly on the accelerator, Leila drove off to her destination, a language school where she had been teaching English for the last 5 years in the city centre. After parking across the road from The Language Academy, Leila waited on the curb for the green light for pedestrians. Experiencing what seemed like a déjà vu, she noticed an indigenous woman with a screaming baby in her arms holding a very similar sign to the one she had seen 10 minutes earlier. In a hurry, as usual, she walked straight past them and into her cosy place of work.

Leila’s first student of the morning was waiting anxiously for his first English lesson.

“Hi, Jorge! Let’s go!”, Leila said to the young graduate in English.

The student, who was wearing a smart pair of jeans, brand-new trainers and a designer T-shirt, followed Leila into the classroom.

“So, tell me a bit about yourself. Why are you learning English?”, Leila asked.

“I study for go to London where I’ll work in a bank”, the young man answered.

“Interesting!” Leila replied and continued to conduct her needs analysis. 

After giving three lessons, Leila informed the receptionist that she would just pop out for lunch. The scorching sun blinded her eyes as she left the building, and once again she caught sight of the weary-looking woman, this time rocking her baby to sleep in a homemade sling. Something stopped her in her tracks. Perhaps it was the fact that she had the means to eat and the grubby piece of cardboard right in front of her eyes had the word “hambre” (hungry in Spanish) in bold letters scribbled on it. On a whim, Leila decided to stop and talk to the woman, which was most unusual for her as she normally strode everywhere at a fast pace thinking of what she had to do next, totally oblivious of life around her. 

Leila dug deep into her pocket and found a coin. She tossed it into the woman's hat on the ground and sparked up a conversation:

“Hello! Where are you from?” she enquired in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish.

“We come from far away, almost 10,000 kilometres. We had no jobs, little water and electricity in our country and food was running out. We came here to have a better life, but it´s really hard,” the woman blurted out in Spanish with tears welling up in her sunken eyes. 

Leila felt a pang of empathy hit her chest like an ice-cold shower that came as a shock to her system. For the first time in a long while, she felt present, in the moment, listening to this poor, tired woman.

“Come on! I'´ll buy you lunch!” Leila took the lady by the hand and forged ahead to a nearby restaurant. Looking bewildered, the woman obeyed the order, quickly picked up her belongings and scurried by Leila’s side carrying her baby. 

Rice, beans, meat, toasted cassava, greens and creamy rice pudding for dessert. The woman, who had been begging on the street 30 minutes earlier, was in heaven. She had not eaten a proper meal for as long as she could remember. Leila asked the restaurant owner for some milk for the baby, and soon a smile appeared on the little one’s face as she guzzled down the warm liquid.

Leila learnt that the man she had seen earlier at the traffic lights was Maria’s husband and the little girl was their daughter. This close-knit family had crossed the border into Leila’s home country three months ago. All sorts of problems had hindered their plan: prejudice, having their savings stolen, not being able to find a job, and no more funds for food, which had led them to despair and a tough life on the streets. Leila couldn’t even begin to imagine what they had been through. Suddenly her issues seemed so small and petty compared to theirs. 

Back to her afternoon lessons, Leila found it hard to concentrate as she was reflecting on the woman’s harrowing story. What’s more is that she had left the stranger and her undernourished baby in the same place she had found her under the burning sun. Ideas, a feeling of guilt and uncomfortable feelings were churning around in Leila's head. At the end of the day, she made up her mind to talk to her director about a brainwave she had been mulling over. 

Patricia, the director listened attentively and nodded now and again, sympathising with the detailed account Leila was giving her. 

“My idea is to invite this family to the school to tell their story to our Spanish students. Maria told me she adores cooking and perhaps she might like to demonstrate how to make a dish from her country.”

“I am impressed by your sense of empathy, Leila. I'd like to meet the family first and then maybe we can put your idea into practice,” Patricia verbalised.

After getting to know the family, Patricia agreed to Leila’s plan. A date was set and the students, who were learning Spanish at the school, were invited to the get-together. Maria and her husband told anecdotes of their unnerving experience and the students interacted by asking questions. Then, Maria used the school’s kitchen to show everyone how to make tequeños de queso (cheese sticks). The participants savoured this delicious snack and noted down the recipe in Spanish to try it out at home. 

On the following day, there was a surprise visit to the school. Diego, a restaurant owner from the city had been in the audience on the previous day and had relished Maria’s cheese sticks so much that he had a hankering for more. Diego offered a job to Maria in his kitchen and also put the family up in a small house he had at the bottom of his garden. After a while, Maria’s husband started working as a waiter in the evenings and Maria worked during the day so that they could take it in turns to look after the children. 

The family were forever grateful to Leila who had taken notice of them and helped them get on their feet. Leila was also eternally grateful to this family as she had become more mindful of the present moment instead of racing ahead all the time to the future. Maria's motto from then onwards was: “Keep hope alive”. Today she leads a non-governmental organisation helping thousands of immigrants in her new, welcoming country.