- Nasreen Baig from Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson
Far down the food chain of petroleum production, eons away from the giant machinery of extraction and fractionation and tucked away in dusty unmapped corners are the kerosene sellers. Their wares are kept in tiny grungy, sticky plastic jugs, brought from distant pumps tied to battered lorry sides, unhappy donkeys or, finally, atop dusty head cloths.
Late afternoons the sellers set out their merchandise in small plastic bottles for the evening market. By now the portions are small enough to attract the well rubbed coinage and single digit crumples of the poor. Kobos, centavos, francs, shillingis are counted out with a precision outrivaling anything on Wall Street to carry enough trembling light to darkening hovels.
Carefully the small tin containers are filled and the cotton wicks lit. Smokey flickers drive enough of the dark away to allow a meal, fiercely concentrated reading and late night lessons. Never enough for more than an hour or two and never more than a glimmer but, still, enough to continue living despite the darkness.
Hope doesn’t come in tanker trucks along paved roads. It isn’t in mammoth pipelines scarring landscapes. Hope comes in the tiny bottles of light that solve one problem at a time, give light for part of the night of darkness already gloaming. It is seeds, ideas, tiny flickers of change that, for brief seconds, give light a chance to reach forgotten webbed corners.
Vendors of hope seldom see the inside of air conditioned corporate offices. They often get missed as the visiting professional drives by in four wheel drive comfort. Their ideas are too small, too simple and, sometimes, too obvious to attract mega-watt attention.
But, in the end, theirs is the light that matters.
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