Isaiah's Strength

So, there is always so much more to the picture than on the page, and I always follow my "gut" on situations that are not clear.  One thing that I will give Isaiah, he is loyal, to both his biological family as well as the family who rescued him.   I cannot believe or comprehend the changes in him over the last seemingly few weeks, but in reality, eight or nine, to where he has emerged to a place where he is not reliant on opinion, or, being coerced into a situation that he doesn't feel comfortable, or believe in.  He is in counseling in his school, because of the nature of the students that come into this program, and has learned to discern, and to recognize that "anger" is an emotion that is not responsible for it's fallout, or it's target, and that is to make someone feel either small, inadequate, or needing to make someone else feel good, no matter the consequence.

He has much pressure from sources that should know better right now, to bend, forgive, forget, all the atrocities he went through in Africa, and what for, their own needs, not his.  Memory is such a forgetful thing, if you let it.  His peers who surrounded him in the abuse he went through, suddenly have selective memory, and it is very easy for them to forget.  They were here in America, oh yes, in somewhat not so favorable circumstances, but, not in the heart of the interior of rural Liberia, suffering malaria, getting African chiggers dug out of their feet, not once but three times with sharpened bamboo, without painkillers, getting one meal if they were lucky a day, and having to learn to climb a coconut tree if you were really hungry.  Count in that you don't know the language, and can't for the the very "life" of you hunt a fish down with your hands.  Then, the worst imaginable thing, watching your young five year old cousin die from the disease your are suffering from, whilst she is lying on the pallet next to yours.  Seeing the elders of the tribe come to try to "spook" the evil spirits away, and then wailing as they picked up a body, heaving, convulsing, to the river, in the hopes that the spirits would be washed away and a small, five year old little African girl, would be spared.  She wasn't, but neither did her thirteen year old cousin from the Great America.  He stayed awake for ten days fearful that the evil spirits would come for him.

So where were these so called people who now say "oh forgive and forget"?  Just where they are now, in denial and oblivious to just what the facts of the actions that these people took in the name of whatever.  But, they can stay in denial.  I thank God Isaiah, Friday, does not.  He will always love his biological family, but will not be swayed by them, they did not live what he did.  He is becoming to understand that while his "other" families in the past demand, his current family does not.  You know why?  I trust this young man is an intellectual person who will define his own identity, and understand who has helped him to achieve that.  If that is not I, that does not matter, only the end result, him, whole, saved, moving forward in life, is my goal, and my wish for his future.