The Question that Keeps Coming

If we were to create a visual representation of The Merasi School, it would look something like so many Jackson Pollock's piece collaged together. Not because we're in a perpetual state of chaos, but because the most constant pattern in our work is unpredictability and the Great Unknown. While many painters gave us predictable scenes of cheery fruit and stoic portraits, Pollock produced works of unsettling beauty. And that's the most common pattern at The Merasi School. While poverty creates time structures with no rhyme or reason, our fierce little students' determination and grit make beautiful perseverance the foundation of our work.

So, the question that pops up all the time, over dinner and at coffee, among new friends and old ones, is almost always: "Why do you bother? What's the point? The situation is so bleak, the need is so high. How effective (and this part is always said very gently) do you hope one school to really be?"

And they're right...in some ways. Oftentimes, it seems as though the size of our solutions is dwarfed by the size of the problems. But you can't just walk away from that. There's an excellent Fitzgerald quote that goes something to the tune of "One should be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise." We can hold two opposing realities in our hands: the bitter caste system and the tremendous hope of education and while the world may suggest that one is more important than another, it is our prerogative as thinking, acting beings to constantly reshape the value of realities towards the realization of justice.

Now have we fully realized that at The Merasi School? Absolutely not. Far from it. We are a perpetual work in progress. But we know that at least part of our effectiveness is embedded in the fact that we'll get up everyday with these two opposing realities in front of us and commit to making more space for the unsettling beauty that lies before us.