Our stepmother prevented us from going to school. She has us stay home and care for her own children instead.

I was extremely happy, even beyond happiness. I went back home and announced the amazing message to my family. Indeed they were so happy and proud of me because they believed I could make it to the top.

The explosion made my family’s poverty worse. All the wealth was used for medical treatment. Because of that, we all had to drop out of school because we did not have money for school fees.

My heart was pierced by the sword of suffering. Her illness continued from bad to worse. I turned to my uncle for help,.

We worked through challenges together that these young women face at school, as women, as refugees, as international students. And there is no shortage of obstacles to overcome.

Mercy Beyond Borders’ staff are, for now, safe in Gros Morne, though any travel beyond the small town carries extreme risk.

I’m an ordinary-looking piece of paper, but I just might be the most powerful piece of paper you’ll ever touch.

And they know that no South Sudanese family could survive long without me.

I am the one who allows women to carry their heads high, wearing their freshly-pressed best dress to church on Sunday.

I left South Sudan in the back of a pickup truck, one braid among hundreds of others, headed for the camps across the border, where a quarter-million refugees were hungry for a taste of home.

We are a collective. We burrow, unseen, in huge colonies as deep as 18 feet below the surface. Each colony houses up to one million of us.

I do not merely rid the ground of litter. I clear it, smooth and open, so that nothing can hide there. Snakes and scorpions and poisonous spiders and camel spiders (eek!) prefer underbrush and clutter.

Almost always, it is women’s work to fill me, hoist me onto their heads and walk the long miles back to their village.

Most neighborhoods in Haitian towns have a coffee woman who filters out the piping hot coffee & fills cups, urns, or any other vessel with the rich black goodness.

Whether round or rectangular, I am found in every Haitian home from the heart of the city to the remote mountain homesteads.

While not everyone believes in my powers and my purpose, I can assure you that the very mention of my name stirs emotion.

In the rural provincial towns beyond Port au Prince, I am most commonly spotted in the hands of those working in their gardens and on their farms.

Don’t they know that cholera still lives in the soil, and that mangoes picked up from the dirt can spread that plague?

In the wee hours of the morning, my familiar “thump, thump, thump” wakes even the roosters and goats before the sun peeks over the horizon.