Do You Have It?

I'm still not sure what Africa smells like. It all just smells like set pieces to me, but the exhibit it pretty powerful nonetheless.

You go through the experience with headphones and an mp3 player that narrates "your life" for you, encouraging you to become that child for a few minutes as you look at pictures and artifacts that immerse you in the sights and sounds of the story.

At the end, you enter a health clinic and find out whether you are positive or negative for HIV. All of the children featured have lost at least one person to the AIDS virus.

I know that quite a few people came out of it feeling like they really had lived the life of the child whose story they heard.

By far, the most fun group to send through the experience was the high school kids from church. Instead of having normal Intersect this week, they all went through the exhibit.

I think that some of the World Vision staff were concerned at first when they heard us giving the kids a bad time both before and after the exhibit -- doesn't really fit with the whole "smile, and be kind and welcoming" thing -- but they eventually figured out that we knew them and weren't just being rude to random exhibit guests. (Really, after a four hour shift of greeting people and trying to help them get signed in on the computer, what are you supposed to do with a massive line of high school kids, stare at them somberly in preparation for the stories they are about to hear? Not so much.)

Quite a few high schoolers decided to sponsor children, though, and it was fun hearing them talk about what they were going to send in their letters and whether they were going to write to the child's whole family or just the kid themselves.

There was a lot of, "Look at my kid." "Look at the one I got." "Did you see mine's name?" etc going on. Terri's response to Malia picking out a child to sponsor was "Oh. I feel like a grandma now!"

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