"Your Future is So Bright, My Eyes are Burning!" Oprah to South African Orphan Girls…

Last updated on: January 9, 2007 at 5:28 am by Desh Kapoor

"Your Future is So Bright, My Eyes are Burning!" Oprah to South African Orphan Girls… 2007-01-09T05:28:04-06:00 Desh Kapoor

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Oprah Winfrey has started a school in South Africa which is going to educate many little girls and provide them a future that they never could dream of. Great gesture.

What I found intriguing is that it cost her $40 million and counting! That is quite a lot for a school in that part of the world! Anyways she is doing her best there. She recounted – in tonight’s Anderson Coopers program – the time when Quincy Jones talked to her when she got the contract for her program – the famous Oprah Winfrey Show and told her:

“Your future is so bright that my eyes are burning”! That is what she said to the girls of the school!

I’ve been covering this continent for a dozen years. There’s very little about Africa that I haven’t seen, heard, smelled or felt.

As a reporter, I’ve been in parts of Africa that can only be described as Godforsaken, covering stories as varied as famines in Niger, civil wars in devastated regions like Darfur and the victims of civil wars in Uganda and Sierra Leone and mass rapes in the Congo.

I’ve been up close and personal with the most bizarre characters in war-ravaged places like Liberia, people who preferred to go into combat dressed in ways more fitting for a circus than a battle zone and rubbed shoulders with child soldiers barely old enough or tall enough to be carrying weapons of war.

And in nation after nation, one recurring image will always haunt me — the faces of those children scarred by war, famine, disease, children forced to become adults in the blink of an eye, children who will never be able to just be kids again.

These are times that I, as an African and as a reporter, ask myself, “How much worse can things get for my people?”

But there are rays of hope. We saw one last week. Oprah Winfrey’s decision to spend tens of millions of dollars of her own money to help educate children she’s never known in a land so far away from her own.

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