I went to Sierra Leone in the summer of 2006. I spent two weeks there and it utterly changed my life. We mainly worked in the village school and played with the kids all day. Adema was a young girl who didn't go to the school because she was very sick, basically an untreated respiratory infection from breathing in the smoke from the cooking fires indoors with no proper ventilation. Since she didn't go to the school we didn't get to know her much but almost everyone on the team ended up javing a picture of her. She was just the most beautiful girl. As we were preparing to leave the village to head back to the capital of Freetown, the organization we worked with was able to convince her parents to bring her to the city to get treatment. The culture has very superstitious beliefs and they are very wary of modern technology.

We arrived back in Freetown and dropped Adema and her family off at the hospital and we went on our way assuming that Adema would get treatment and return to the village a healthy girl. The next day we were waiting for our transportation to the place we were staying that night, which was of course late (everything in Africa runs on a different time schedule. Times are never, ever set in stone. You just get used to waiting around). As our van arrived we grabbed our stuff when the one of the staff received a phone call. We were walking out the door as she hung up the phone and said, "Adema has died." We were completely shocked. I think we sat in absolute silence for five minutes. As Westerners, we couldn't grasp the concept of a child dying from a perfectly treatable condition. As crazy as it sounds, it was only then that I realized I was in a Third World country. I had seen the unimaginable poverty, people living in the smallest spaces in unimaginable conditions and it took a little girl dying of a respiratory infection to truly open my eyes. I didn't know Adema well, but her short life changed mine forever. I will never forget her.