HandReach Video Competition

The Hole

I burst into tears this morning as soon as chores were done. I stood at my kitchen sink and heard the sound of the tears falling onto the stainless steel. Outside my kitchen window was a big round spider web. My husband and I had just been commenting the previous morning about how amazing spiders are—how we wished we could see how they get those enormous, complex webs started. Do they just jump from bush to bush to lay that first thread? I dried my tears and went to the back yard to take out the vegetable scraps, an offering to the ecosystem that sustains us. As I came back in, I was stunned by yet another big round spider web outside my back door. “Halloween is coming,” I thought, stepping in from the October air.

Five years ago, in October 2004, I met a little girl on the streets of Beijing. She had been burned from the waist down, apparently by a kerosene explosion in her home, and she was now crippled by severely contracted feet. Her parents had her sitting on a blanket on the street, begging passers-by for help. Something compelled me to approach them—I can scarcely describe what it was—and by the time I finished talking to them, I had somehow committed to the universe that I wanted to do anything in my power so that people didn’t have to suffer like this little girl now had to. I had a vague dream in my mind that there must be somewhere in the world that could help. I’d never seen such a place, but I knew it must be there—a place where caring adults provided for children in unspeakable pain like this. I was a graduate student at that time and had no real means myself to afford the reconstructive surgery this little girl obviously needed, but when I went back to the US, I carried her photo around with me in my bag. I took it out and prayed about it a lot, aching for a way to help. I had given the girl’s family $200 from my little nonprofit, HandReach, so that she and her sister could go back to school, but I had yet to find out how things were going with them.

The next October, in 2005, I was sent on assignment from my job at the Voice of America to Albuquerque, New Mexico to assist in filming a few TV feature stories with a Chinese videojournalist. Our big story was the International Balloon Fiesta; it was my job to locate a local ballooning family so that we could do a feature story on the process of maintaining and flying a hot air balloon. For some reason, I spent time praying about the family we should choose for the story, and I was drawn to Ben and Bonnie Northcutt, a local Albuquerque couple. As we finished up our work with them, Ben mentioned in passing that he was a Shriner, speaking with special pride about the Shriners’ “free burn hospitals for kids.” I got chills, rushed home, and launched off a letter as soon as humanly possible to Shriners headquarters in Tampa to ask if they could accept the young girl I’d met in Beijing for treatment. They could; she could be admitted to their burn hospital in Boston the following summer. One of our HandReach Board members arranged for free airfare from American Airlines, which initiated a press campaign about the girl’s story. I finished my Ph.D. as quickly as I could, and brought her to Boston in early June of 2006. The girl’s name was Zhou Lin, and she arrived off the plane from China into Boston’s Logan Airport at age 14, deformed feet hanging in the air as she was carried on her small mother’s back.

October of 2006 found me lodging in a YMCA just outside of Boston, sharing a room with the girl, her wheelchair, miles of gauze, several splints, bags of fancy bandages, wraps, rubber bands, and socks, and big boxes of donated clothing, stuffed animals, and art supplies. Zhou Lin’s feet had been amputated earlier that summer and she was still going through physical therapy at Shriners before starting on her prosthetics. Her mother had returned to China at the end of August, I had relinquished the contract for the academic “dream job” I had lined up, and my days now consisted of taking care of Zhou Lin—bandaging, splinting, washing, massaging, feeding, carrying, and teaching her. On one hand, I was having a nervous breakdown under the pressure of responsibility I now carried, and on the other hand, I felt a strange sense of liberation and destiny. Amazing people were coming forward to help, and I made yet another commitment to the universe to take the resources being thrown at me and turn them into a brighter day for other children like this beautiful young girl in my life, who was now beginning to walk on prosthetics, wearing ribbons in her hair, and giggling at Curious George every morning. Thanksgiving of 2006 brought the most unspeakable thing to be grateful for—a decision by Zhou Lin, her family in China, and my family in the US that she would now become a permanent part of our life and family. By Christmas, she didn’t need the wheelchair anymore, and we were settled in our home in suburban Maryland, buying her school shoes, and getting ready to enroll her in high school in January.

By October 2007, a very generous donor in California had given us a sizable donation to help my nonprofit, HandReach, grow from being a tiny volunteer charity into a full-fledged nonprofit organization that could make a difference in healing burn survivors like Zhou Lin. By October of 2008, I was visiting China to work with hospitals to fund surgeries for other badly trauma-injured children who would otherwise be without the care they needed to move limbs and function normally. We had hired a staff member in China, arranged surgeries and prosthetics for over a dozen children, and drawn together many volunteers in the US, young and old, who came forward to help in many various ways to connect resources from the US with the needs of some of the world’s most badly injured kids overseas. I was in the midst of teaching full-time at the University of Maryland, spending hours helping Zhou Lin with homework in the evenings, and teaching yoga in the little spare time I had left. With each passing month, I became more and more painfully aware of my inability to do everything that was needed—fundraising, accounting, management, care coordination, outreach, updating website, trying to lead a diverse team in a hundred different places, embarrassed by the feeling that I was always two steps behind.

So this morning, in October 2009, I stood crying at the sink. After taking the vegetable scraps out to the composter in the back yard, I went into a dark room in my house and closed my eyes to pray for answers. Suddenly, sparkling and radiant, a completely unexpected vision appeared in my mind’s eye—the spider web I had seen by my back door, complete with spider. As I gazed at it mentally, the spider in my mind’s eye spoke, saying, “Watch.” I watched her with rapt attention as she walked away from the center of the web. “What do you see?,” she asked. “A hole,” I said. “Exactly.” Tears started to fall. “Start with the emptiness, Brecken. There is emptiness at the center. That is right where you are, and where you always must be. Don’t be afraid, just weave the web, strand by strand. But stay at the center, where the emptiness is. That’s where you will find me, always.”

And then the spider in my vision disappeared, and told me to write it all down. Which is just what I’m doing. Starting from the hole, from nothingness.