Somewhere Out There

The pit split the Afghan soil like a gaping wound. I followed my translator and guide down the steps into this brick factory. Walls of clay and dirt rose up around me—blocking out the horizon. At one end of the pit stood a chimney that would billow heavy black smoke as the bricks blazed in the inferno.

I looked at the ovens, molds, and piles of broken bricks strewn about me. Across that war-torn country, these brick factories teemed with workers who toiled long hours in blistering heat and soot-laced air to scrape together meager livings. This back-breaking work paid roughly $4 per 1,000 bricks. Most people entered these pits to pay off debts—few of them ever left. Families labored together, conscripting their children who were as young as five and six to haul bricks into the ovens for 12 hours a day.

Nearly half of Afghan families put children to work in places like this (according to Save the Children). Now, with the country back under Taliban control, the number of children working in heartbreaking conditions continues to rise.

It was 2010 and I was visiting Afghanistan as a writer for a non-profit organization. At the time I was living in England. The media team I was part of had an office in an old English manor house on a hill surrounded by lush gardens. My work took me across Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. I was living my dream. After this trip to Afghanistan, I would stop in Dubai for a 24-hours where I would eat at an Outback Steakhouse by the Burj Khalif and then snow ski in one of Dubai’s malls.

I climbed out of the pit and wiped the dust from my pants. I looked across the dirt road and saw a young man about my age walk past pushing a cart full of bricks. He looked up at me and for a moment we made eye contact. We didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

He put his head back down and pushed his cart down the road, while I stood at the rim of the pit and watched him disappear into his home—a mud hut next to wheat fields that stretched to the mountains of the Hindu Kush far away on the horizon.

Somewhere far beyond those peaks, over deserts, and across oceans was my childhood home—a modest parsonage, made of bricks, nestled among the wooded Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. It is still hard to imagine my life exists on the same planet at the same time as the life of this young Afghan.

I know nothing else about him.

I assume that like me he began his life in the arms of a mother who loved him and a father who wanted to provide for his needs. He likely had hopes and dreams. Surely he, like me, had also stared at the mountains near his home and dreamed about what his life could become if he could just make it over the horizon.

Our stories only intersected on the rim of that pit for a moment but I am haunted by it.

I would return to America after having traveled the world. I would get married to an incredible woman, have two amazing daughters, buy a home with a backyard where I built a treehouse, go on date nights to fun restaurants, ski, mountain bike, and camp. Sometimes I stare at LinkedIn and get jealous over friends’ promotions. Sometimes I watch too much Netflix and eat too many cookies. I worry if my daughters are going to ever grasp long division or if they will fall in love with basketball or ponder how long we can avoid getting them phones. I think about how our kitchen could really use new counters. I dream that one day I can write a New York Times bestseller.

I live life.

But sometimes in quiet moments, I think about that man.

I wonder if he is still in that pit.

Is he right now scraping clay from the Afghan ground, putting it into wooden molds, casting them into an inferno, and then pushing a laden cart up the ramp to be loaded onto a truck? Do his children toil beside him? Are they locked in an endless struggle to repay debts that can never be paid? Do they watch the sunset over the foothills of the Hindu Kush and imagine a life beyond??

Yet, I still dream. I long for a better future. I look at our kitchen and imagine what it would look like with new countertops. I hope my tomorrow might look better than my today.

What am I to do with those longings? Should I be crippled with guilt because people like this man don’t have the luxury of dreaming big dreams? Should I give up everything I own in solidarity? Should I stop chasing horizons and just be content with what I have? Should I move over there and be like the girl who throws starfish back into the ocean—making a difference for just one? Should I take the advice of parents at dinnertime and stop complaining and just eat my meal because there are starving kids in Africa? I’ve got nothing to complain about.

Who am I to sit in my cozy American life, with a beautiful wife, and two healthy amazing daughters, and have the audacity to long for something more? When this whole time I know that man might still be in that pit? Why can I not just get it together and be thankful and content for what I have when there are kids slinging mud into brick ovens?

Who am I to dream that somewhere out there is a life better than the one I am leading?

Maybe it’s because ‘somewhere out there’ actually exists.

Maybe the dreams I am dreaming are too small. Maybe the longings I have go deeper than career aspirations and new kitchen countertops.

Maybe my story--maybe your story--is part of a bigger story that is being written—a story that is not just somewhere out there but is here, now, and bubbling up through the cracks, crevices, and broken pieces of this world.?

And maybe that story is big enough for people like me and people like him.

#SomeWhereOutThere