Impossible Odds

were known by photo evidence to carry the highly lethal Russian AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
    But in the Chicago of 1993, the young future U.S. president was still far from the apparatus of power. He learned about the fates of the stranded American fighters down in far-away Africathrough the same channels and from the same helpless standpoint as any other observer.
    •  •  •
    At best, the story of downed Blackhawk choppers registered indirectly on Jessica. Her perch in life was that of a fourteen-year-old living at a distance from the city, safe from much of its danger.
    She lived close enough to feel its urban influence, but the city was there as a resource and never represented a trap. And while she and her teenaged girlfriends didn’t deliberately follow international news, sometimes pieces of it filtered into her line of sight for other reasons. In this manner the Africa connection for Jessica began with her awareness of child soldiers in Africa and the Middle East: girls and boys kidnapped by brute force and used as cannon fodder in local wars. Her sister, Amy, and brother, Stephen, had been raised with the same Christian values and weren’t immune to news of a foreign tragedy, but it was Jessica who found the plight of many children in Africa a source of torment that wouldn’t go away.
    She found to her surprise that the phenomenon somehow struck her at the core of her being. It was as if her bones resonated with the desperation of the families ripped apart by it. Nothing in her life up to that point prepared her to stare into such a pit of misery, and her own natural empathy staggered in the attempt to visualize what such lives could be like. News photos left her sputtering in disbelief. She waxed so indignant people at school began to notice and comment about it. Oddly enough, nobody seemed to object.
    Thus, instead of causing some sort of social backlash with her concern for faraway children, she found that as the daughter of an independent furniture craftsman she was expected to behave like a latter-day hippie. Her schoolmates just rolled their eyes andsmiled. In this way the stereotype protected her by establishing a handy identity. It freed her to explore her social concerns on a number of topics without whipping up a backlash amid the hyper–image consciousness of other teenaged girls.
    Whenever she studied Africa, the media obliged her curiosity with a fountain of stories covering the full range of human misery, but the worst always ended with the child victims. She came to realize no end to child warfare was in sight. Too many attempts to snuff it out succeeded only for the cameras, without lasting effect. It was as if the purveyors of child labor and child soldiers followed the cockroach rule and for every one you saw, a hundred more hid deep in the walls.
    She kept active enough to maintain friendships outside of cultural interests, and the good news in that year was Jessica was also having the much happier experience of feeling her self-consciousness about her height go away. Until then, the growth spurt that left her standing nearly six feet tall early in the sixth grade had caused her to fear a forced career in the circus.
    But now, at fourteen, something very interesting indeed seemed to be happening to everybody around her. Instead of mocking her for her gawky dimensions as they had in the past, they suddenly perceived her as fashionably tall and model-thin.
    The change in perception brought her first real chance to test her personal limits as an emerging young woman just prior to a school dance. Jessica had mixed emotions about going, and while her father drove her to the event, she talked with him about a book she had just finished reading. It was a true story about a girl who lived a life of great social service and made a real difference before her own untimely death. Jessica was as moved and stirred by the story as any idealistic teenager is capable of being. She confessed to feeling troubled because she couldn’t see any life path that made room for her as she wanted to live, in the middle of the world’s struggle to humanize itself.
    She had no idea how to visualize her own future. A conventional domestic lifestyle had no attraction to her at all; neither did a life in the business world. She liked the idea of being a teacher, but she hated the thought of the conventional life that went along with teaching, if she remained in her own