Thetford Academy student Lizzy King. (Valley News - Jennifer Hauck)
Part Three
The next hour passes swiftly. We quietly watch young gorillas chase each other in circles and swing from branches, mother gorillas cradle babies in their arms, the male silverback (the group leader) doze on his stomach. Lizzy especially is entranced, taking more than 100 photographs with her digital camera.
The otherworldly quality of our time with the gorillas is shattered after our hike back to the Land Cruiser, where children jostle for cashews that Cindy distributes. We see more children on our ride back to park headquarters. A little boy wears a shirt with no pants. A little girl's top is lifted up to reveal a swollen belly; nearly one-quarter of children in Rwanda are malnourished, according to UNICEF.
Watching children walk along the road carrying water, potatoes, even babies, Lizzy is struck by how they didn't opt to be poor, just as she didn't decide to be born into relative privilege. "No one has the choice to be where they are," she says later. "It's the luck of the draw."
She knew this before, intellectually, but not in the visceral way she does now. Previously she was aware of a big gap between the world's rich and poor; now she's beginning to fathom its dimensions.
During a conversation with me one evening in her room at Centre Christus, the Jesuit-run retreat where we're staying, and after returning home, Lizzy takes the opportunity to examine her reactions more fully.
Witnessing Rwanda's problems firsthand has provided focus to her dream of becoming a doctor like Paul Farmer, whom she heard speak at a global health conference last spring about his humanitarian work to improve the health of people in developing nations.
Now that she's seen the great need for medical services in Rwanda, she'd like to serve as a physician here. The trip is inspiring her to work harder in school to make that dream a reality.
"It (has) made me think about all the things that I can do and all the things that they can't," she says. "It makes me want to do it (become a doctor) and get the most out of everything that I can."
Already she's had to overcome her inhibitions about a disease that's devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Before the trip to Rwanda, Lizzy had never met anyone she knew to be HIV positive; now she realizes she's interacting with lots of people who are infected, many of them her age.
"Before, I thought it would freak me out and that I would be really scared to be around these people," she says. "But these people are like you. They want to live. It doesn't make me feel any different to talk to them."