Global Storytellers

Border or Balloons - by Barbara

At school, I was taught the world had all these lines. Through these lines, I learned which country is which. Then, one day, when I was 8, an astronaut on TV showed us a view of the world from his space shuttle. I couldn’t see lines anywhere! This changed the way I saw the world forever. It was quite some time before I understood these lines are a construct: a system that we either agree upon or fight about. And then I learned we call these lines borders.

Years later, I had a dream. I saw a little boy lying down on our globe. A few weeks before this dream, the boy had washed ashore a sandy beach. He’d drowned escaping a war with his parents and someone took his picture. He became an icon of modern life in a place that’s hard… In my dream, the boy sleeps peacefully upon the face of the earth. And then all the lines let go of the world and turn into little balloons that float up into the universe, an immense place where astronauts, and who else knows what, look down at us and see just a planet…with no lines at all.