Often we get so caught up in life that we rarely notice the “extraordinary” in ordinary. In our center’s small kitchen, stands a little white water cooler. This ordinary item is one of the most used items among our students and staff members. During lunch, there is always someone by the cooler, bending down to fill up their water bottle, and especially after P.E, there is a line of thirsty students in front of it, waiting to quench their thirst. The water cooler has just been there, quietly serving its purpose, and perhaps like many other things in our lives, it goes unappreciated.
Every time someone goes to the water cooler with an empty cup, they expect clean, cool water to be filled in it; however, a few weeks ago, the unexpected happened: our little water cooler broke down. The first couple of days were more challenging; most of us at the center kept forgetting that the water cooler is not working anymore. We would casually walk up to it with our cups and hit down on the faucet, only to return with the realization and disappointment that there is no drinking water.
People say, “you don’t know what you have got until it is gone,” but perhaps the truth is that we all do know what we have, we just never think we’ll ever lose it. That is when we truly felt a tiny fraction of empathy towards thousands of people who suffer from the lack of access to clean drinking water. Nearly 1 billion people still lack access to safe water worldwide. We did not want to miss out on this opportunity of teaching our students about using empathy as a fuel to taking positive action.
During one of the morning assembly sessions, we sat our students down and discussed the lessons from this experience. As a center, we decided we want to make an impact and raise money for a water well in an underdeveloped country. We made a simple donation container and left it in the prayer area. By the next day, I was delighted to see the container filling up, but I was pleasantly surprised once I started to count the money. In one day, our center raised $352!
Allhumdulilah, Br. Rehan was able to fix the water cooler, and we have clean, cool drinking water again, but for millions of people, the
water crisis is real. There are women and young girls in Africa who walk miles to get“dirty” water. This experience made us realize the blessing of clean water. We hope that Allah accepts our effort and as I heard Sr. Attiqa say, “May Allah place barakah in this small intention and may we see the fruits of efforts like this on the day of judgement in each others company and the company of His Habib, peace be upon him, drinking from the River Kauthar. Ameen.”
At times we preoccupy ourselves with thoughts of things we don’t have and experiences we are missing out on, we need to just STOP, just stop for a minute and look around us. Are we not able to find endless things to be grateful for? According to Melody Beattie, a journalist,
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
So let us commit to take time out to reflect and pay attention to the extraordinary in the ordinary!
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