Close your eyes and picture an African child.

What do you see? Likely a child hungry, impoverished, orphaned, weak, dirty, sad, diseased, in need.

Before I went to Africa the first time, I had an image in my mind of the people, and especially the children, I would meet. I’d seen them on the news and late-night infomercials for my entire life. Growing up in Catholic school, I remember their images from the milk cartons in which we collected change for them during Lenten appeals. I’d seen their huts, their sickness, their war-torn villages. I’d stood with Hands Across America, and my little brother even sang We are the World in our school talent show. I knew, and had a deeply felt sympathy for, African children. Empathy was impossible, though, because their situation was simply too foreign for me to truly grasp.

But somehow, in all that I’d seen over a lifetime of learning, and multiple degrees, I’d never, ever seen Gideon. Not on the news, not in a book, not on a commercial. Never. Not once. Believe me, I’d have remembered, because he would have so profoundly stood apart from the stereotypes and categories I’d formulated in which he should fit as a child of Africa.

Gideon is a 10-year-old boy, a fourth grader at Shepherds Junior. First and foremost, he’s a child. He’s got an infectious giggle and an imagination that is ignited by my incessant questioning. When I asked him to draw a picture of what makes him happy, he drew himself playing in the rain, and on Thanksgiving, when I asked what he was thankful for, he cheerfully exclaimed that he was grateful “because Christmas is coming and I’m going to eat!” He’s just a kid, not at all unlike those you’d find on any playground in your own neighborhood.

He’s got an innate curiosity. Recently, one evening after dark shortly before the new school was opened, Gideon snuck off to investigate the new classrooms, while his worried parents wondered where he’d wandered. He came home, excited and out of breath, with the good news. “Daddy, the school is so wonderful!…The classrooms are big enough, there is enough light and air because the windows are big.” Gideon’s father, a welder who donated his own time to fashion those windows in his own workshop, quickly forgot his worry and celebrated with his son.

His dad also told me he has to watch carefully to make sure Gideon does his math homework at night, like I watched my niece do her long division before dinner last night. Gideon’s a little boy, like some you may know, who dreams of becoming a rocket ship pilot when he grows up, though he’s never even stepped foot on an airplane. His Dad wants him to be an engineer. He recently played one of the lead roles in the school’s play about the woman’s role in Tanzanian society. He’s a budding photographer and loves elephants.

If you asked me to describe Gideon, his poverty wouldn’t rank anywhere in the top 10 adjectives I’d use. Admittedly, he lives in one of the most impoverished countries on Earth. Admittedly, on more than one occasion I witnessed him lovingly wrap leftover fruit, chicken or potatoes to bring home to his family for whom these items are likely expensive luxuries. He is, by our standards, undeniably poor. But he is not defined by his poverty.

All too often, our portrayals of African children focus on their lack, and implicitly convey that their poverty is somehow their core attribute, their essence. Not only is our portrait radically incomplete, it is, perhaps worst of all, self-perpetuating. After all, as Gideon’s father so eloquently told me, “if you tell a man he is weak, he will be weak; if you tell a man he is poor, he will be poor.” Like many children of Africa, Gideon is not the fragile child of our uninformed stereotypes. It’s not that simple.

He’s just a kid. A bright, strong, playful, funny, hopeful, sometimes mischievous, 10-year-old boy.

While his poverty has absorbed our attention, it’s actually his potential that’s far more interesting, and in which we’re investing at Epic Change.

We’re not supporting Shepherds Junior because it is a school that serves poor children. We’re partnering with this school because it’s a place that empowers all its students, regardless of their economic status, with the education they need to become leaders in their country, and to overcome their poverty. We’re supporting it because it provides these children with role models, in Mama Lucy, the teachers and the parents’ committee, of strong local leaders who are intent on improving their own lives and their own community. We’ve chosen Shepherds Junior not because it has so little, but because they do so much with the little they have.

We are investing in Shepherds Junior not out of pity, but out of incredible respect, awe at their potential and a shared hope for the future of children like Gideon and the beautiful country they call home.