She loves her cat.
I didn’t know for a long time why such a small detail about Benita, the little Desert Flower I donate for each month, resonated so strongly for me. When I signed up as a sponsor with the Desert Flower Foundation I received a brief biography of a little girl who lives 5,700 miles and a couple of worlds away from my home in Central Texas. And yet that detail about a girl all those miles distant from me kept looping through my head. She loves her cat.
And finally, after much thought, know now why it hits me so hard- why that small bit of information somehow feels so important. It’s because it is a flash of connection between us. All those miles. All the years difference between our ages. And yet… I too was a small girl once, who stood on a dusty road and hugged a lanky cat that I loved dearly. And if one such moment of our lives mirrored each other’s so perfectly- it strikes home the fact that there are others. And that there will be many others as she grows older. That we all are so much more connected then we realize.
Sometimes we know things in our heads, but it takes knowing them in our hearts for them to really strike home. This was one of those realizations for me. Benita and I are not so different. She and I are the same, not because we love cats, but because of our fundamental humanity. It makes the fight against FGM so much more important in my life. I am not helping a fight. I am not helping Benita’s fight. This is my fight too- it is all of our fight as living breathing members of the human race!
It is beautiful and powerful to realize such a fact of our human interconnectedness; and I will forever be grateful for the Desert Flower Foundation for giving me that gift, because my life and how I look at the world is forever changed by it. And it all started with just four little words:
She loves her cat.
