“Is America’s lake as big as our capital city’s lake?” asked my friend Faduma, an older Muslim woman.
The question caught me off guard. First of all, America’s “lake”? Secondly, the capital city of Faduma’s country doesn’t have a lake. It sits on the African coast. It has an ocean.
But Faduma has never been to the capital, much less America. She has spent her entire life in a remote desert village.
THERE ARE THINGS SHE HAS NOT YET ENCOUNTERED, SIMPLY BECAUSE NOBODY HAS GIVEN HER THE CHANCE.
To Faduma, the idea of continents separated by vast oceans is a foreign concept. She has no access to anything like a global atlas. Like many others in her country, she has a mental map of the world that is completely different from mine.
It doesn’t help that Faduma’s language has only one word for a body of water.
Pond, lake, ocean. All wildly divergent in depth and size. And all lumped into a single word.
Because when you live in the middle of the desert and have never seen a body of water larger than a shallow pool in an oasis, why would you need a word for ocean?
SHE HAS NO ONE TO EXPLAIN THE WONDERS OF THE OCEAN.
Faduma has lived a lot of life. She has heaps of knowledge and wisdom.
But still, there are things she has not yet encountered, simply because nobody has given her the chance.” Read More
unengagedunreached 