This post is from from my other blog here 
She is talking on a cell phone out behind the outdoor kitchen, a simple mud house with crumbling walls and a gaping hole in one part of the roof. This is where she lived before the roof came in, before she left, before she decided she didn’t want to be a big girl in a little school, sitting in a desk meant for girls half her age. This is where she hand washed her uniform, after she slept, on the pallet on the mud floor swept clean of debris and the inevitable dust.
Do you want to walk? I motion to her with my hands, and she hands me the phone.
Tell her, I tell Odette. We can talk now. Under the tree. Tell her we’re here for her, if she needs someone to listen.
I pass the phone back and she nods, gesturing toward the path. The little girls, without knowing, appear out of nowhere to pass her back the baby who is crying, who is tired, who is needing to know what will happen next, without knowing anything of the future or any trouble at all.
The young woman listens to Odette as we walk along the thistle/thorn bush fence. I try to make the baby smile, but it doesn’t work and then I ask to carry her on my back. The woman talks now, like every mother with her arms full, the phone in the crick of her neck, her arms shaking out the cloth while I hold the girl, not two months old. She positions the baby and wraps the fabric, once then twice, tying it first this way and that, until the baby settles secure and I bliss out, while she and Odette laugh–this crazy white girl playing African while the sun blazes hot across the summer sky.
She tells Odette her story, and my heart waits for the words. How she hoped, how she tried, how she thought it would be different, how she’d give anything now for that uniform, that house, that chance to learn again. I walk beside her and wait and listen, until we stand under the shade of a lonely tree and she passes the phone back so I can hear what my soul already knows.
With Odette’s voice and the girl’s eyes, I put the pieces together. She is being treated badly, but this is not what troubles her the most. She is wondering if she can be loved, if she is worth the sacrifice, if she dare risk pain of asking for what she needs, even if the answer must be an inevitable no.
In this we are together, I tell her with my eyes, speaking the words into the phone, as I line her story with the question that underscores the whole. I have that wondering, too, I tell her. It’s an old wound, but it can be healed. It hurts you here, I tell her, motioning to my heart, while she nods, eyes shining.
Odette adds her part to mine, reminding her she must be loved, that we love her already, that for any problem she has, any sorrow she faces, here is one she must not suffer: the suspicion that in the end, she is always on her own.
Her face softens, the furrow of her brow smooths. She murmurs sweet words in Kinyarwanda and the baby sighs on my back. I leave them for now, the best of it said, the worst fear behind, and go past the tree, to the part of the field where the brown-eyed susans grow. Even so far away, I can see her back begin to straighten, I can see her chin start to rise. She is trying on her future. She is considering the possiblity it might not be too late. She is letting herself believe someone loves her, that in the essential way she wondered, she is not alone.