An Albino's Journey ...

Last week, I met a young boy, Ikra Jailos, the "albino" child shown in the picture above.

Beatrice, Ikra's mother, is shown in the background.

Ikra is squinting due to his extreme discomfort with bright sunlight - a common experience for an "albino."

Ikra's father is also black.

Try to imagine Ikra's life experience both today and in the future.  

He is now two years eight months old.  

As he grows older, he will face the world surrounded by brothers and sisters, extended family members, and a village full of families who hold a common and powerful difference - the color of their skin.

It's one thing to be a white child in a white family in a black world or a black child in a black family in a white world.  

Imagine being a white skinned child in a black family in a poor black village in rural Malawi.

How will Ikra be treated?  

His skin tone will make it very difficult.  His peers and family spend almost all of their waking hours in the hot, African sun.  There are many challenging cultural stigmas and spiritual beliefs around Albino's in Africa.  Different tribes view this skin condition in very different ways

Stories exist from Tanzania and other areas of tribal healers ascribing special powers to an albino's body parts.  This, of course, can lead to bad outcomes.

In Malawi, Ikra is likely to feel a sense of separation and discrimination that few of us can fathom.  

Perhaps, an African American in a white neighborhood with racist tendencies in America may feel some of the same emotions.  I want to believe that our community in the United States has moved well past this, but I recognize our fear and our ability to inflict silent and visible pain continues.  As a global community, we are not great at seeing past the color of another person's skin, especially when this individual's skin color is different than our own.  It is hard to be conscious of all the ways we discriminate, the emotion and history we attach to our view of skin color.   

In this case, Ikra has the same parents as his brothers an sisters, yet he is vastly "different."  I want to believe he can be accepted and embraced as fully as his siblings, but I know this is difficult. 

When I met Ikra, I was reminded of a conversation with a good friend about ten years ago.  We were in the midst of idealistic pondering.  I asked him how he would change the world if he had just one wish.  He said he would create a new condition for all human beings.  He proposed that on January 1st of each new year, each of us agree to wake up with randomly modified skin color and, if we were not married, accept the possibility of a shift in sexual orientation.  

This one change in our lives, he argued, would not transform any aspect of our personality or our inner spirit, but it would radically impact predujuce and the pain of discrimination.  Wow.  This would, I admit, be powerful medicine.

Until we are able to feel empathy, to walk in another man's shoes (or skin), it is hard to come together as a global, national, or local community.  We tend to act as though we are radically different, unlike each other.  Yet, in many ways, at the core, we all seem to share more than we differ.  

Ikra faces a tough path.  

Unfortunately, in addition to his skin tone and the other complications of being born as an "albino," Ikra's family is very poor.  

As a result, Ikra's parents has little food to feed their children.  

Yes.  Poverty and malnutrition are color blind.

A month and a half before this picture was taken, Ikra exhibited the symptoms of severe acute malnutrition.  He was in the midst of crisis.  Without treatment, he was likely to die.  

Fortunately, he is recovering on a promising path.  Over the last six weeks, through the use of "Chiponde," Ikra gained close to four pounds.

Now, Ikra's footsteps into the world continue.  

I hope for the best.