John Dau

Last night I attended a talk at Augsburg College by John Dau, one of the "lost boys" from the Sudan. For the most part it was a hurried (he arrived 1/2 hr late because of a delayed flight), inspirational speech, focusing on perseverance and glossing over the gory and undeniably painful details of his flight from his home village to an Ethiopian refugee camp and later, Kenya. His talk had a lot of intriguing and heart-breaking points, but one thing he said really stuck with me because of its application to all people and circumstances. He said,

"today may not be okay, but tomorrow will be better."

This was something he used to tell the younger "lost boys" whom he was in charge of in the Ethiopian refugee camp when they didn't have food or milk, and he believes it sustained many of them through the hard times... He didn't really know that things would get better, but by encouraging these boys to hope, he believes he helped them hold on for another day. Can words really have such a powerful influence on a person's life? If you go through life truly believing that the day after today will be better, how could you possibly give up?

Sometimes I forget that the premise of hope rests upon this belief: that the future will be better than the present. Barack Obama offers hope that our country can turn itself around. I work on immigration issues because I hope that future generations of immigrants will stand a better chance than yesterday and today's immigrants. Common Hope offers hope to individuals and families with education, health care and housing... but we also have hope that these individuals will make tomorrow better than today.