Cordelia Hart
Life is the most beautiful fairy tale of all.
St. Lucia, South Africa
Ever since I was a little girl, Africa has always appealed to me. Why? I am not quite sure. At the very surface it seemed to be a place with collections of stories that held vulnerability and hope. Underneath, even from a small age I knew that there was more to the story. Inside of the crippling pages and bound together at the spine was the pursuit of strength to rebuild, tradition and most importantly the most quintessential elements of what it is to be human. At nineteen years old I set off on my first international flight to Durban, South Africa. There I would begin to fulfill this lifelong dream of giving back. Throughout my lifetime I have been given so much, sometimes without even asking. It is my duty, as a world citizen to give what I have been given by tenfold.
At a crèche in rural St. Lucia, I found just how capable my heart was at loving.
In the open safari, I wore no mask, for the first time in my life. As vulnerable and raw as I could become I opened myself up to ten girls.
I set off to Africa to try and find myself. Instead, I found ten monumental, extraordinary pieces of my heart.
Saturday, January 19, 2012
Today is the last day with Ben and the girls. When you put a group of strangers in a foreign land with extreme conditions, you quickly learn how to trust and rely on people.
It's funny because I cannot name ten people from back home I trust completely with my life but I can name you ten people from the other side of the world: Ben, Ali, Brit, Iz, Tess, Rikki, Rhi, Jaime, Bronwyn, and Ashleigh.
I came on this short journey in search of myself. Instead I found ten beautiful souls and ten remarkable humans. IT was then through each of them was I able to collect small pieces of myself.
To think in our family of eleven there were eleven stories. All unique from one another and yet each of those stories led us to getting on an airplane, allowing it to take us thousands of miles away to uncharted territory. Surrendering to the journey.