By Patrick Atkinson

The educational degree I admire the most in people cannot be earned in a classroom. Nor can it be learned on the streets. Still, you know when you are talking with a graduate.

Young or old, their eyes are deeper and their words more thoughtful. Their need to command is softer too, because they already know they are in full control.

I met my first of these graduates 34 years ago, when I began to work overseas. His name is Mateo.

Like children everywhere, Mateo one day heard the soft cry of a frightened animal. First he stopped to listen, then he lay down his school books and crawled on hands and knees through thick knotted bushes and inches-deep mud. Eventually he pulled a scratching, clawing little beast to safety.

Placing the trembling kitten warmly under his coat, Mateo ruined a brand new white shirt. He gained forever, though, the knowledge of what it means to have charity, compassion, and love.

It would be great if the story ended there but, of course, it doesn’t.

Twenty minutes later, 12 boys and girls rushed loudly through a group home I founded, ran into the shower, grabbed soap and shampoo, and shouted out the kitten’s new name.

“Pfeifer,” they said. In honor of actress Michelle Pfeifer’s role as Catwoman in the Batman movie.

The children were clearly content to let me sit speechless at my desk.

They were watching the kitten. I was watching them.

These were a dozen orphaned children who just months ago had lived in garbage dumps and slept wherever they could.

They were boys and girls who had known abuse and neglect since the day they were born. Many had already learned to distrust the world.

And since they knew first-hand the bitterness of violent, alcoholic homes, only now were some beginning to have a sense of security.

They could have kept all of this to themselves. Instead, they decided to make room to accept into it yet another one of God’s suffering creatures.

Coming from the shacks and slums that surrounded our small home, these were beautiful kids trying desperately hard not to go insane. I wished they would all make it but knew some who would not.

In much of our world today boys and girls grow up to be 18 years old without having ever spent a day in school, simply because no one takes the time to enroll them there. No one asks these children how they spend their days or where they are at night. They are surrounded by friends who become sexually active at 12, and get tempted into drugs and gang life about a year later.

Mateo and a few others knew this and even as tiny children didn’t want any part of it. They desperately wanted to run away and hide from this reality, but had nowhere else to go.

So they dreamed of a different place where their world was safe and they didn’t have to grow up alone.

They erected castles on the fertile grounds of their imagination, and planned to escape from the fetid soils of torn childhoods. Their ship to freedom was going to be school, they knew.

I made the children lunch one day and when I served Mateo his lunch he said, “Gracias, Papa.”

Thank you, Dad.

There was a moment of silence and then the other kids broke into laughter. Over these past 34 years, hundreds of boys and girls have slipped and said those very same words, but seldom when they’re surrounded by 20 of their friends.  Mateo started to cry.

After lunch, Mateo came up to me and apologized for having called me Papa. He would understand, he said, if I was mad and wanted him to leave.

After we talked, I wrote Mateo this short note which he still has to this day:

For the love of God, Mateo, keep coming back. Come and be a part of us, and please keep dreaming.

“Dream of what you want to be and dream of what you will not.

If your dreams die, Mateo, you too will die because your doors will close in front of you.

So keep them alive, son, and let yourself grow. Learn. Stay free.

P.S. Call me Papa anytime you like.

Mateo, like others you may know, is a graduate of a deliberately thoughtful life. He’s also now a very wise man.  

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Bismarck-Native Patrick Atkinson is the founder and CEO of The GOD’S CHILD Project’s international network of award-winning charities, which includes the ‘Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons.’ For more information, visit www.GodsChild.org and www.ITEMP.org.