Here I am, sitting in another noisy classroom observing yet another Macedonian teacher. I am here observing a young woman teach English to a typical group of Junior High students whose main objective seems to be chatting with friends. From my vantage point in the room I can observe both the teacher and the students rather unobtrusively. I take advantage of my viewpoint and I begin to casually glance around the room. As my eyes sweep by various students, I notice that most of the students don’t even care or notice that I am in their room with them. For many of them, I am just another “adult” to ignore. But then my sweeping eyes stop and lock with an intense blue-gray stare. Even if all the other students didn’t care if I was in that room these blue-gray eyes did. She knew I was there. She knew I was sitting here and that I was looking in on her world for this split second. The intensity of her gaze made me break eye contact, but my mind would not allow me to forget the look in her eyes. In that brief moment when our eyes locked I saw something much more than a young teenage girl. I saw pain. As I sat there during the rest of the lesson I found it difficult to focus on what the teacher said, or even what the other students were doing. The image I kept seeing was pain filled, blue-gray eyes.
Near the end of the class I dared to glance around the room once again, and sure enough those same blue-gray eyes were waiting for me. Again, we locked eyes and this time I realized something more. There was more than simple pain in her eyes; there was defiance. What I found in her eyes was an attempt at survival –a cold, painful survival.
The pain in her eyes was hopelessness.
I quietly watched as the students filed out of the classroom and headed back to their homes, and again I could not shake the image of one face from my mind. A circle of questions kept spinning through me: Will anyone else see her pain? Will anyone take the time to notice her eyes? Will anyone share a reason for hope with this girl? Here I was, sitting in her class on this one day, but I will never see her again. I will never be able to help this girl in her pain. Her eyes are still haunting me, and I want desperately to show her that I care –that there is a reason for hope. I want desperately to know her, but I cannot.
It makes me wonder, if I saw this pain in the eyes of a girl I met only once…have I missed the pain in the eyes of others around me? Have I missed chances to share hope, to care, to know someone? Have I allowed people I know to walk around with pain in their eyes when I could have helped them? How many times have I glanced past the blue-gray eyes of hopelessness? How many times have you found eyes of hopelessness?
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