GODSTUFF

AN OPEN LETTER TO A HEARTLESS THIEF

An Open Letter to the person who broke into the SIFA African Children’s Choir van on Sunday afternoon in Lawndale:

Maybe you thought you were taking things from people who had more than you do.

Or maybe you thought you needed the money you could make from fencing the laptops and other items to slake a habit or make ends meet — more so than the people who owned them did.

But I bet you actually never gave any thought to the people you were stealing from, even as you watched the troupe of African children in their matching uniforms cross the street from the van to the City of Refuge Ministries church.

You probably didn’t stop to consider you might be stealing things from children who have nothing. Orphans. The poorest of the poor.

Let me tell you a little bit about what you stole.

Sure, the two laptops, camera and memory sticks that were in the backpacks were valuable. Between that gear and the GPS device the choir’s chaperones have used for the last six months to drive the kids through 22 states, it would cost about $5,000 to replace them. (And a very kind Chicago businessman, having heard what you did, showed up Monday morning and handed the choir a check for $10,000 to do just that.)

But you took something that cannot be replaced. Ever.

On those laptops and memory sticks are photographs of many of the children’s parents. Parents who have died or are going to die very soon, from AIDS. You took the only pictures the children have of their parents.

What price can you put on them?

They’re of no value to you. So give them back, please.

The smaller backpack you snatched belongs to a girl named Olivia. She’s 11. Those were her dolls inside of it, and that was the $66 she had scrimped and saved to bring back to her village. The snapshots are of her parents. Her father’s dead and her mother is so gravely ill that the choir’s tour director, Carrie Harless, told me she wasn’t sure if Olivia would make it back to Uganda in time to see her mother before she passes.

Olivia and the 19 other children in the choir, who range in age from 7 to 17, have been traveling in the United States since April to help raise money to build group orphan homes and a school in their tiny village. They live in the bush of Uganda, 12 miles from the nearest paved road.

More than 80 percent of all the adults in their village died in the late 1990s from HIV and AIDS, leaving 70 orphaned children. They live in mud huts. They have no running water. They have no electricity. They get up every morning at dawn to gather firewood and water for the day. Then they walk three-to-five miles — each way — to attend state schools that are so substandard they make the worst Chicago public schools look like Yale.

They live on less than $1 a day.

A charity called Glory Children’s City International, is trying to build group homes and a school that will provide a better education for the orphans and 500 other children from surrounding areas. Hence the choir tour.

These are big-hearted people. The van you broke into was donated. Chicago is the first and only big city the SIFA choir kids are visiting during their six-month tour. They spent the first week at a hostel downtown on Congress, wowed by skyscrapers, the el and the parking garages they call “parking sandwiches.” You tainted their wonder with fear. Shame on you.

Geoffrey, the kind 14-year-old I talked to Monday, told me how much he and the other choir kids had looked forward to visiting our city. “We were so excited to come to Chicago because that’s our mission, to minister to different types of people,” said the teen who lost his mother when he was 3 and his father when he was 6.

When I asked him if he was upset by what you’ve done, Geoffrey thought for a moment and answered by telling me about his God.

“God has known this story before,” he said. “God is our savior and God is the spirit and God knows what’s going to happen before we know. God has made a plan for us to be here. . . . I know everything’s going to be all right.”

Do the decent thing. Return what you took. Right the wrong.