Cost of Hope

The bike that saved the day

Hopelessness is a disease, one that completely robs the body and soul of all joy and self-worth.  It slowly creeps into your heart and starts to grow like a cancerous tumor. It makes smart people foolish, turns the active lazy, and the aspiring complacent. Hopeless people aimlessly go through life, feeling helpless and powerless to deal with whatever life throws at them. It manifests itself in many people, on different spectrums of life. However, it is always amplified during times of stress and need.

For one teenage girl from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, hopelessness took hold on her way home from a trip to the hospital. She had just been diagnosed with Chikungunya, a virus that spreads through mosquito bites. Although there is no cure, medication can ease the severe fever and pain that the person endures. Her family is from a far out community and sent her to Puerto Cabezas to go to school. She lives in a one-room wooden house with her two cousins. None of them have any money to buy the medicines that help control the extreme symptoms. The nurse tells the girl that she will just have to endure the high fever and joint pains for the next five days, until her body gets rid of the virus.

She collapses on her front porch, totally exhausted from the five-minute walk from the clinic to her house. With the next five days weighing heavily on her mind, she hears her cousin talking to their neighbor. She knows that he works for Wings of Hope, flying patients from remote communities to Puerto Cabezas. A small hint of hope begins to build within her, as she hears her neighbor's motorcycle head down the street toward the pharmacy. This inkling of hope transforms into a reality as the neighbor returns with the medicine. The next few days are full of healing as her body, with the help of the medicine, fights the virus. On her way to school on day four, she excitedly tells her neighbor that she has fully recovered and is so happy to return to school.

For the neighbor, the cost of hope was only a trip to the pharmacy and two dollars worth of medicine. But for the young girl it meant everything – four days of her life being properly cared for with less suffering.

Hope is what fuels change and development. It is essential for dreams to become reality. If you don't have a desire or an expectation to do great things, those things will never be accomplished. Sometimes, the cost of hope is more than a $2 pharmacy bill. Other times, it costs nothing more than a helping hand or an understanding spirit. But with the promise of what can be accomplished by people with hope, it is an investment that the world needs to make.