For six hours we shot through the landscape of the Karoo desert in South Africa. Just rocks and sand and baking sun. Knowing our journey was ending, Daniel and I just wanted to remember all we had seen and done. He used a camera. I used words. I had already finished three notebooks and was into the fourth, a beautiful leather notebook I’d bought in a market in Mozambique.

Southern Africa was full of stories. And visions. We were almost drunk on sensations. The roaring of the water at Victoria Falls, the impossible silence of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. And then the other things: dogs in the streets, whole families in Soweto living in one room, a kilometre from clean water.

As we drove towards the setting sun, a quietness fell over us. The road was empty—we hadn’t seen another car for hours. And as I drove, something caught my eye, something moving next to me. I glanced in the mirror of the car; I glanced sideways to the right, and that was when I saw them. Next to us, by the side of the road, thirty, forty wild horses were racing the car, a cloud of dust rising behind them—brown, muscular horses almost close enough to touch them, to smell their hot breath. I didn’t know how long they had been there next to us.     

I shouted to Dan: “Look!”, but he was in a deep sleep, his camera lying useless by his feet. They raced the car for a few seconds, then disappeared far behind us, a memory of heroic forms in the red landscape. When Daniel woke up an hour later I told him what had happened.

“Wild horses?” he said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I tried. But they were gone after a few seconds.”

“Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

“You were the one who was sleeping!”

“Typical,” he said. “The best photos are the ones we never take.”

We checked into a dusty hotel and slept the sleep of the dead.

In 2005, Calvin Echevarria was on top of his game. He had two jobs, bought a house and was raising a 3-year-old daughter with his wife. But suddenly, it felt like it was all being taken away. He could no longer work as a FedEx driver because he was going blind.

He was diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy (糖尿病视网膜病变). “I lost my sight and the job, but I don’t care about that. All I care is about my wife and my daughter,” he told CBS News. “How am I going to see my daughter grow?”

Echevarria at first worked on developing independent living skills like walking with a cane (手杖). But he wanted to learn more-like skills that would be useful for a job. That’s when he found Lighthouse Works in Orlando, a company that creates jobs for the blind.

“Seven out of 10 Americans who are blind are not in the workforce,” said Kyle Johnson, the president and CEO of Lighthouse Works. “And we knew that people who are blind are the most highly educated disability group on the planet. And so, very capable people, who want to work and contribute. So, we created Lighthouse Works to help them do that.”

At Lighthouse Works, nearly half of the employees are blind. Echevarria works in the call center. In his work, Echevarria uses a system called JAWS to “hear” the computer. The system reads the computer screen to him in one ear a she listens to a customer call in his other ear. Now he has gotten good at it and can listen to JAWS on a dramatic speed. “”It gives me a purpose. It makes me feel better because I can provide for my family.” he said.

His original worry was not being able to be there for his daughter. Now, he is her mentor (导师), because she’s an employee at Lighthouse Works as well. He said, “Little kids come to their parents, and all of a sudden when they become teenagers, they go away. Now, we’re going back again to those days that my daughter used to come to me all the time. And I still feel needed.”

It was summer when I was asked whether I wanted to go to Malibu (an island in Canada) with my church to serve the military families. At first, I heard this and thought, “You are asking an eleven-year-old in his last weeks of summer if he wants to go on a trip with his mom to Canada to serve other people?” Of course, I responded with a kind refusal, but my mom found a way to convince me to go.

When we were on the ferry to the island, a thousand thoughts were running through my head, such as “What am I going to do here?”, “Am I even going to be useful?” and “Why am I even here?” When we got to the island, I was asked to do the childcare. I was actually somewhat excited because my friend said he would help me. The first time I met the kids, I got to know them pretty well. They were all between the ages of four and six. Some of them stayed behaved and a few of them started acting crazy and would even hit and push the other kids.

With those kids, I was very strict, but I still tried to be positive and keep a smile. After all, they were just innocent kids. In most of the time, I needed to help them with things like washing clothes, and setting tables. Even though it sounded dull, I enjoyed every second of it. One of the things I did in my free time was to play pool(打台球). I made friends with a few kids there. They were really easy to talk to. Some of the things we talked about were sports, food, video games, and most of all pool.

Even though I was only at Malibu, Canada for one week, I feel like I made spiritual changes in some people’s life. You don’t have to go above and beyond to have an influence on someone’s life. In the end, it all comes down to what way you changed them. It could have been in a spiritual way or a mental way as long as you had a positive effect. So go out and try to make a difference in this world.