My name is Adimiv Dalila-Hasini Jabarl and when I was six National Geographic changed my life and the lives of all of my friends in my Tanzanian village. That one moment of pure joy is manifested in the photo taken by National Geographic. It was the day they told my village about the gift we were to receive.
It had been a week since I had eaten, so I chewed furiously and futilely on the back end of my fork, but this was a proud moment for my mother, aunt and two brothers - Jabari, and Bakari. A Western magazine company had come to our village to talk to my friends and I. They had come before, two rain seasons ago, to set up a small school and poke our arms will long needles.
They brought truckloads of materials to build the clinic and taught my aunt to administer the pokes and clean simple wounds with stinging water and gauze. But this time they also came with books, tables, chairs and pens. The moment they arrived the entire village was filled with a buzz of excitement and the heavy thuds of the workers building the school. My aunt and mother worked hard to provide for our family but the money they made and the food they grew and harvested wasn’t enough to put me through school.
Fortunately the magazine company realized the predicament that I, and many other families were faced with so they sold the pictures from their last encounter with us and, using the profit, were able to pay for both the school and teaching staff. Construction was due to be completed within three months.
The three months it took to finish building the school was the most agonizing time I have ever spent. Every day after I finished my chores I would sprint to the construction site and watch the men lift mud bricks and pour the concrete filler. And finally the moment came, we were given the school and interviewed about the changes it would make it our lives and how we hoped to use our knowledge to improve the world. Sadly to say I was still too small to start school but waited outside windows to catch fragments of discussions and parts of lectures.
Those hot summer days spent rushing through my chores and baking under the sun to catch fragments of knowledge were just the beginnings of my constant yearning for knowledge. That gift and the gift to my community changed my life forever, and I know it will be many more seasons until something is ever as pivotal and influential as that single contribution from National Geographic.
