Let me tell you about the story of Nicole.
Nicole is a stellar undergrad student. During her summer break, she decided to set up a programme to help children in a certain orphanage. Teaming up with her friends, she created this programme to teach the older kids in the orphanage how to build their CV, how to write resumes, how to tackle interviews etc. The programme was executed successfully and ran for 4 months, and at the end of the programme Nicole and her team bonded really well with the children at the orphanage, and the children of the orphanage saw them as their sisters who care and love them.
And outside of the orphanage, everyone was praising Nicole for her work: her peers, her family, her friends. They commended her for taking the initiative and giving these kids in the orphanage these skills and equally, if not more importantly, showed that they are there for those children and will always be willing to lend a helping hand.
If the story ends there, it is such a beautiful and inspiring storybook story. A ‘happily ever after’ fairy tale, one might say, yet Nicole has other thoughts.
Sure, on the surface, this is a great achievement for Nicole, or at least there is a sense of accomplishment there. She founded a programme that helps these orphanage children to be better, and this will definitely look very impressive on her CV. The children of the orphanage also feel this sense of being loved by Nicole and her team, that there are people who care about them. However, are all these feelings genuine, underneath all that, is it just a false sense of feeling?
While the children of the orphanage see Nicole and her team as loving sisters, to put it harshly, does Nicole and her team really care about the children of the orphanage that much? Or are they just focused on getting the programme done? Realistically speaking, after the day the programme ended, will any of them return to the orphanage to visit these children that called them sisters? Will they keep in touch, will they even remember them? To sum it all up, while Nicole is helping the orphanage children in the short run, is she doing more harm than good in the long run, by “pretending” to care for these children for a few months, then disappear forever as her own life gets in the way?
That is what Nicole was thinking when everyone was praising her for her work with the orphanage children.
What I take away from this story is that the truth is often hidden by a facade; many things are not what they appear to be, yet many people will choose to believe in the beautiful lie instead of facing the harsh truth, and honestly, I get that. We would all prefer to live in a fantasy land where heroes come to save the world and everyone lives happily ever after, and we try to project this fantasy into real lives, and choose to ignore some of the very harsh realities of life that do not fit into this fantasy land we hope to live in.
After her summer break, Nicole returned to university. Assignments were due, project deadlines were coming up, and finals were slowly approaching. As she became increasingly busy, the orphanage children who called her a sister slowly faded away and became a block of text in her CV.