Being Leah Price

At school we are reading The Poisonwood Bible, and we did an activity where we walked around campus for 20 minutes, seeing the campus through one of the character's eyes. My character is Leah Price.

Today we visited a school in Hawaii. It was amazing! God must have placed his blessings upon this place, because it seemed almost too perfect to be real. The ground was covered in lush, green grass, and trees and bushes sprouted out of the soil wherever you looked! I even recognized some of the plants from Kilanga. I saw the same scarlet ginger that grows behind our house, and rows of frangipani trees in front of a large, cream-colored building. I wanted so badly to talk to the boys and girls here, but I had about as much luck with that as I did back in the Congo. Here they don’t have that haunted look behind their eyes, those married eyes, but there is something else. It reminds me of Rachel, that imperious, slightly haughty expression. They don’t stare into our souls, but glance at us, and then turn back to each other, uninterested. At least here they wear real clothes. It was a relief to hear people speaking english again, but even here I heard words I didn't understand. My family quickly dispersed, all of us making our own way through this new, exotic world. Rachel had found a group of beautiful girls her own age, and sat on a green picnic table with them, flicking her white-blond hair over her shoulder. Ruth May had marched up to a group of large, intimidating-looking boys and appeared to be bossing them around. They looked at her amusedly, eyebrows raised. Mother sat quietly in the shade under a huge tree, eyes on her youngest child. Adah shuffled across a path, dragging her bad leg behind her and seeming to see everything at once. Father had gone up to the chapel. He pointed out to me the small cross on the side of the smooth, white building, and smiled in satisfaction as if he himself had put it there. I followed him for a while, but got distracted by the olive-green pond that it was sitting in. I wondered if there were alligators in it, like the river in Kilanga. I wish I knew the names of everything here, so that I could write them in my notebook, right next to the names of the plants and animals from Kilanga. Imagine, another Garden of Eden, clear across the world! I wandered along the paths, stopping in wide, open fields to spin around in circles, arms out wide. There couldn’t have been a single sinner in the place; it was so beautiful, just like a storybook. I could have stayed forever.