He was unmarried, he had no children; he did not have any close relatives. His photography and his job was his life. What would he do when his vision completely left him? The thought of hiring a stranger to care for his every need in his imminent blindness repulsed him. He decided that he no longer had reason to live. His solution was simple. He would get a prescription for sleeping pills and down the whole bottle one night. There was no voice in his head telling him that his plan was immature, desperate and cowardly. He told no one of his diagnosis and his plan. Nobody could step in to help him.
Before he carried out his suicidal plan, he decided to complete his final assignment. He took a trip down to the war-torn land of Afghanistan. He went alone, bringing only a small bag with necessities and his trusty camera.
Upon his arrival in a village in Afghanistan, he breathed in the smell of dry dirt, musty tents and animals. He began walking around the place and snapping photographs of the villagers and their poor living conditions. With every step and photograph he took, his spirits sank deeper and deeper into a pit of depression that he had already dug quite deep since his diagnosis. Every face he saw was filled with terror, despair and desperation hard times had left them with. The villagers here suffered starvation, draught, loss of family members, the intense heat and worst of all; they had no hope in their eyes. He felt an overwhelming wave of empathy – he knew how it felt to be without hope.
The sound of laughter in the distance stirred him out of his thoughts. The laughter sounded out of place in this dreary, dry village. He let the sound of the laughter lead him to a corner in a village. He saw a large group of children gathered around somebody in the centre who was clasping what looked like a book and reading aloud. Was this a teaching session? He moved closer…some of the children glanced at him briefly then turned their attention back to the figure in the middle.
He realized that the person that held the children’s attention was a woman, and she was their teacher. He did a double take – why was her hand placed awkwardly over a page? He took a couple of steps forward.
As if sensing his presence, the woman stopped reading and looked up at him from her book. His breath caught in his throat when he saw her face; she was beautiful. She possessed the face of an angel. But what struck him the most was her eyes – they were piercing sea-green eyes, like dazzling sunlight reflecting off deep Pacific waters. Her eyes had an iridescent hue and they stared right at him, unblinking.
He felt inexplicably captivated. He realized he was staring. Regaining his composure, he tipped his hat and nodded at the woman. There was something different with this woman. She stared on right at him as though she did not notice his actions.
He glanced down to look at her book. It was as though a wire snapped in his brain. His mouth gaped open – the woman was using Braille.
She was blind.
He looked back up at her face, at her eyes. She was still staring right on at him. How could such enchanting eyes not hold the power to see? Suddenly, she smiled, as if it would answer his question. He raised his camera.
Click.
Then the woman looked down and continued to read to the children, moving her hand across the raised dots on her book.
He left the village – the country - in a trance. He could not shake the image of her face staring at him, those penetrating green eyes that he knew still left the woman in darkness. He developed the photograph and found himself staring at it for hours on end. He was absolutely inundated and floundered with a mass of emotions. He knew that he shared the same fate as her, to live without vision. But this woman…she lived in a war-stricken country where poverty and starvation amongst other problems were unresolved, serious issues, yet she lived through it without her sight. She even taught the village children using Braille. She was a beacon of hope to them, to educate them, give them a hope and a future.
He remembered how her eyes, though blind, had stared at him with what he just realized was like a hint of mockery and sympathy, as if she knew what his future and his plan was; as if she was challenging him.
The sight of the woman changed his life that day. He decided to accept her unsaid challenge. He would carry on with his life, with or without his sight. If a woman such as her could embrace that adversity in the condition she lived in, and still found the strength to inspire children by educating them, he would be a pathetic coward to end his life. He had so much more than she did, but she possessed what mattered most - wisdom, courage and integrity, and she had helped him find it.
