Skip to main content

Today we lost Belide

Today was a sad day for us at A Little Gesture. We lost Belide. Belide lost his life. 

I was at Pilates at the end of a tough week. After a rough start with a visit to the A&E and a bloody head with the little one, the rest of the meeting was focused on work - meetings, power point slides, initiatives, strategy, KPIs. At ALG, all I can think about are the accounts, getting them done, getting Joana trained so I can sometime start wearing my CEO hat. All mundane, all put in perspective the moment I saw the message coming into my watch. Belide died. 
I felt that was the one thing I could not add to my day, to my week. So much time spent trying to give each child an opportunity, and now this one is lost forever. 

Belide was barely 18 years old and he was part of our HIV day center. He was an orphan. A bright kid, with a touching smile. He feature in our 2015 Xmas Calendar so I can share a bit more about him: 
"Always on time at the HIV Day Care Centre, he plays a lot and he’s finally healthy eating his meals with appetite. Belide is also very bright, he’s in the 5th grade during the morning period in SLM. He has a remarkable attendance record and a stellar school behaviour. His grades are 16 and 17 at Maths and Sciences. We are so proud of Belide, he’s the best student at the Centre!"

Today was a sad day and all the team is coping less than well. Belide was a known name to us. We have many children, and I admit I no longer no all the names, but this one was one that we had been following close by, seeing him grow in age but not diminish in willingness and effort. 

In ALG, we are always focused on successes, not on failures. We know we are operating in a tough place. We do "lose" a lot of kids along the way - that choose not to study, to have children at young age, to just take to the streets or move to the mines in South Africa. And because we focused on successes, we had focused on Belide for a while. It is hard to see him go. 

I leave you with a picture of him, below it says "Day Center HIV - I am Happy". I am grateful we were able to provide him with a place to spend his days, to become healthier, to be more comfortable, to have food and friends. I mourn that he was not able to grow out of it as one always dreams is the case. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Flying Sunday

It's been a while, I know. But time is really a precious asset and I have not been leveraging on it well enough... But today I did and I am proud. I threw all the plans out of the window and took the irrefusable offer I was made "Do you want to go flying today?". How does no work as an answer there? Here is one of the c. 30 airplanes you could see there. First reaction from our pilot: "Why are all these planes here, don't people realize it is an amazing day for flying?". Well, I had not untill he told me so! But the best is still to come, as the only girl in the group I got to ride in the front, get first view in take-off, listen to the radio of the air control all the time (we get Boston airport frequency), check the map, speeds, everything... I guess throughout the way we were some quiet passengers, in the wonders of realizing you are on air, the curiosity of identifying different places and the struggle to take the best pictures as we pass the Harvard...

The Best Self

The last classes in Leadership try hard to make you think and figure out what to do about yourself. So we talked about our best self, not just about what it is but more of when it happens. We had to ask a couple of former colleagues, friends and family to give us three examples of when we were at our best. The point is not to skyrocket your ego, don’t worry. It is about understanding what are the environments that make your strengths come out. Because if you know what they are, then you will look to pursue a future that exhibits these characteristics. A “what brings the good in you” kind of thing. It was interesting to get that feedback. More than interesting, it was insightful. It was amazingly consistent throughout and it was curious to see the examples that people remember about you. I do recommend to anyone in need to find a bit more of where they should go. The thing about the examples is that they do have something in common, whether they came from people I worked with recently o...

Short one: D-Day

It is D-Day today :-) I took out the braids, and the clock is ticking. Bernardo will be in Maputo in two hours. We have plans for the weekend and so much to catch up on. I doubt I will be blogging soon, hehe