We asked ONE members for submissions to The Big Read book — a collection of stories from people around the world supporting education for everyone. Although only one member story will be published in the book, the runner-up submissions, including the one below from Shannon Mouillesseaux of New York, were so good that we wanted to share them with you.

You can show your support for The Big Read and help ensure a pathway out of poverty for children around the world. Endorse the book by adding your signature here.

Thanks for reading!

-Emily Stivers

Why Them?

By Shannon Mouillesseaux
New York

There, gazing at me, were two piercing eyes set inside an emaciated face, skin clasped tightly around small cheekbones. I hesitated to look back. The television screen separated him from me, but it was as if he was inside it and would step out, his swollen belly thrust towards me.

The school week had finished, and I was watching TV while enjoying a special dinner — golden pancakes swimming in maple syrup. I was lapping it up when I felt his intense eyes. He appeared my age, but his dark, sullen eyes suggested they had witnessed far more than mine.

The program’s narrator spoke of poverty and disease. The camera spun around a village of mud and dung homes, bodies of children wasting away on a red clay floor, their small bones protruding from their skin. They appeared dead. But, then, their eyelashes would flutter as a fly perched itself aboard their hardened noses.

I shoved my plate aside, having lost my appetite, and wished I could shove it into the television where hungrier mouths awaited. I feigned exhaustion with a yawn and retired to my room after being convinced to swallow a few more morsels of dinner. My mother tucked me into bed — my enormous bed that dwarfs the mud and dung huts I’d just seen on television. She flicked off the light, but images of the children I’d seen soon replaced the darkness. I lay there for what felt like an eternity, questions meandering through my mind: Why them? Why not me? Why was I lucky?

Inside the brick walls of a rural American classroom, I hovered over a school desk inspecting the word “tragedy”. My classmates and I squirmed in our chairs, turning our yellow pencils in our hands, as we contemplated the notion. We stared at this word for an entire day, dissecting it, whittling it into different sentences, altering its position within the same sentence and eventually determining its meaning beyond fairytales and Shakespearian novels.

As we discovered, tragedy refers only to sudden, unbearable circumstances that affect humanity. Unless much of the population is affected, it’s not a big deal. According to this viewpoint, moments that eternally alter the path of individual lives, even those evoked by the death of loved ones, are trivial when presented beside issues facing humanity as a whole.

But, I wasn’t convinced. My thoughts kept wandering back to what I’d seen on TV. How did the siblings of that boy feel? If something terrible happens to him, what would their lives be like? Would that not be a tragedy for them?

Alone in my bedroom late at night, I discovered a means of expressing these confusing thoughts. My hand groped around for my flashlight, hidden beneath my pillow. I found it, pressed the button and a beam of light projected itself onto my bed. Leaning over the bedside, I stretched my arm out for a spiral notebook I left there to record thoughts late at night. Perching my pillow upright, I placed the notebook beneath it and created a makeshift tent with the sheets, angling the flashlight just so and losing myself within my thoughts as I scribbled ferociously in my notebook.

Writing, I found, helped me make sense of the thoughts in my head. It was the 1980s and, haunted by the images I’d seen on TV, there was nothing I wanted more than to express and understand these thoughts as they wiggled their way into my mind. So, I wrote.

The resulting products weren’t juvenile masterpieces, but they hinted at the direction I’d take. While I wasn’t sure what poverty, hunger, war or disease meant in reality, I was certain that — if they existed in this world — I wanted to play a part in changing such a world. For me, even the unnecessary loss of one person was tragic. I set out to become a humanitarian worker to confront the world I’d seen on television.

Nine countries later, I realize the profound impact education has had on my life. For me, education was first in the classroom where maps, books and television provided me with a unique opportunity to access and explore remote countries and cultures I couldn’t visit at the time. Writing, then, provided me with a means to expound upon those experiences and continues to play this role as I transition into countries embroiled in war and varying levels of poverty.

Working with HIV positive women in Africa and Asia, many of whom enjoyed only limited education, I can’t help but wonder: “What would their lives be like if they had gone to school?”

Watching a Rwandan woman whom I befriended dwindle into a frail body reminds me of the word “tragedy”. AIDS is eating away at her body and mind. That, for me, is a tragedy. I know it doesn’t have to be this way. If she’d been able to study, perhaps she would have felt empowered and had the confidence to avoid risky situations and the skills to secure a stable job rather than resort to sex work. Looking at her two young daughters, I can’t help but fear their fate. Possibilities abound, but can they stay in school without their mother supporting them?

By advocating for more effective aid, universal education and protection against AIDS and malaria, ONE helps people, such as this Rwandan woman, ensure their children do not fall victim to such unnecessary fates.

As a child, I wondered, “why them?” We all should pose this question. Why did this Rwandan woman have to suffer? Why should anyone be denied education?

ONE recognizes that the challenges facing the world are many, but also that justice and world equality are necessary to resolve the larger issues we face. Equal access to education is just one small step toward combating problems ailing the developing world, such as disease, malnutrition and war, but it is also the most essential. It’s time to provide those most affected by poverty with the tools necessary to avoid more tragedies.