By Anna, 23 July 2018
Maybe the others would have believed me. Maybe not. But I wasn’t going to tell them. This was just for me. – Vera
Every summer, all of Vera’s friends go off to camp. She never has. Now she is.
Vera is Russian, and as much as she tries to fit in with her American friends, she still feels like the odd one out. After a bit of a disaster with her birthday sleepover, Vera hears about a Russian camp called O.R.R.A. from a girl at her church, and she is determined to go there. She thinks that she won’t be that left out, because everyone else would be Russian, like her. She isn’t prepared for the camp ahead of her.
“There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.” – Sarah
In A Long Walk to Water, not one, but two Sudanese children fearfully and desperately endure the worse conditions conspired by humans and nature. Nya lives where water is scarce and seasonal, and access to this life-giving elixir is dictated by the vagaries of an ancient tribal war. Twenty years earlier when Salva was Nya’s age, he fights for survival in his war-racked country. Sudanese of one faith are aggressors, using violence to oppress, extinguish even, the lives of the non-believers and the less powerful.
Minli lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a dusty brown village, nestled in the shadows of the aptly named Fruitless Mountain. The little girl is barely nourished by the grains of rice that her parents coax from the poor land. However, her spirit is sustained by the stories that her father regales her with each evening. These stories have been handed down like precious family heirlooms from so many generations before that they sparkle with magic and the fantastical, and surely, must be ancient figments of an overactive imagination.
Stories That Stay With Us 