Small Framed Portrait

A long time ago, when I was young and naive and determined more than educated, I thought I would change the world.  I thought I would do something that would be hugely meaningful to humanity as a whole, or something that would rescue us from our own obvious destruction of the planet we call home.  I was idealistic and outraged (and maybe had a bit of a super-hero complex?) and wanted nothing more than to storm out the front door of my house and get started.  I was also 14. 
That is not to say a 14 year old cannot change the world, it is just to say that particular 14 year old did not change the world.  Somehow love and life and children and houses and dogs and jobs and other goals and aspirations nudged their way into the space between myself and my outrage, and suddenly I was 3o and had not changed the world. 
I am ok with that because life took me in different, beautiful directions. 
But I sit here in my middle class life, with my warm safe house around me, my healthy children tucked soundly in their beds, my husband due home from his good job soon, and my two well-fed dogs asleep at my feet, and I feel...not guilt, exactly, but a renewal of an internal pull in the direction of change.  I find myself wanting to to DO something.
What does a middle class stay at home mom do to change the world?  She looks to the need most close to her heart: children.  This SAHM, also an adoptive mom, looked in the direction of the world's orphans.
Written a few weeks ago (details changed for privacy):

It came in the mail today, a thick envelope with many stamps that had traveled across the country from Seattle to reach my mailbox. I knew what would be inside the moment I saw it. Half of me wanted to rip it open and read the papers within to absorb the information and feel good about what we had done, and the other half of me wanted to set it aside unopened, suspecting that unimaginable sadness was enclosed within it's white paper pages.
I opened the envelope carefully, and as I withdrew the folded paperwork a photograph fell out of it and landed softly on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and examined the face looking back at me. A boy. He has short, dark hair. He is thin and looks tall; he has the most beautiful skin, and eyes that bear the sadness and early wisdom of incredible, unfathomable loss. His cheeks look as though they would have wonderful dimples if he smiled, but he is not smiling.
I unfolded the stack of papers and held his photograph with my thumb at the top of the page as I read so that I would be able to look at him as I learned the hard facts of his life, the details that brought bits of his file, his life's story, to my mailbox on the other side of the world. He lost both of his parents to AIDS. Then his extended family, stretched too far with their own troubles (perhaps poverty and HIV/AIDS?) could no longer care for him and his younger sibling. They were brought to an orphanage, and then the boy in the photograph fell ill, too. He was tested. Then he was moved to an orphanage for HIV+ children where he is able to get treatment, but is separated from the last bit of family he has left, his younger sibling.  All of this happened to a ten year old boy within the last six months.
And here is what I know: the boy in this photograph in one of the lucky ones.  He is in a place where he will receive the miracle drugs that will turn his HIV+ status from a death sentence into a chronic disease.  He will be educated.  He is not begging on the street, and there is some hope that he and his sibling will find an adoptive family.  His odds are good. 
I put the papers back in the white envelope, but I tuck the picture into a small silver frame that had been kicking around our loft for some time.  I put the small framed portrait of a boy I will likely never meet on the sideboard in our dining area.  I can see his face when we eat dinner.  I see him when I sit and have my morning tea, and he is still there when my children are raucously eating their lunch.  I think about him, and I cannot help but be outraged that there are 5  million orphans in Ethiopia alone, a country 2/3 the size of Alaska, a country where generations of doctors, teachers, clergy, leaders, and parents are being wiped out by AIDS, and children line the city streets begging, being sold into prostitution, and dying alone.  It is unfathomable.  The sheer magnitude of the math goes beyond what my brain can comprehend.  But this is math that I can do: for $180 (or three nice dinners out, one night in an ok hotel, one day of Christmas shopping, one trip to the vet with one of my dogs, two weeks worth of groceries for a household of four...) we were able to help provide food, clothing, school materials, and anti-retroviral drugs for one orphaned boy in Ethiopia for six months.  SIX MONTHS.  That math seems simple, really.

Right before I turned 31 this year, we sent in our donation to AHOPE for Children, an organization I first read about in Melissa Fay Greene's book There Is No Me Without You.  Since then I have been in contact with people who volunteer at the AHOPE orphanages in Ethiopia and I know that our money, our expendable $180, is being well spent. 
And so I didn't turn out to be a super-hero; I didn't save the world.  But maybe we have made a big difference in the life of one child, and maybe when his updated picture and bio arrive, the boy in the small framed portrait will be smiling  and I will get to see the dimples I know are there beneath layers of heartache and loss. 
Maybe he will save the world one day.