1
A WALK IN
THEIR SHOES
BY N.H. SENZAI
“You never really know a man until
you understand things from his
point of view, until you climb into
his skin and walk around in it.”
T
his quote is from one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, by
Harper Lee. In this passage, Atticus
Finch, a southern lawyer, is giving his daughter, Scout, a crucial piece of advice that
guides her development through the novel
— to live with sympathy and understanding
toward others. The lines have always struck a
chord with me and are a variation of a proverb from the Cherokee Nation, “Don’t judge a
man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.”
It beautifully evokes the sentiment of how
you cannot truly empathize with the plight of
others without experiencing the life they live.
As a writer I know that a way to walk in
someone else’s shoes, so to speak, and experience the trials and tribulations of another’s
life, is through literature. Through the pages
of a book a reader can crawl in to the skin of
an orphan in mid-century London wanting
more porridge, a refugee fleeing Afghanistan,
or a professor on the track of an elusive code
through Paris. Through the pages of a book a
reader journeys in the footsteps of the characters, vicariously experiencing their plight
and emotions. Nowhere is this truer than in
the literature for children, since stories play
a huge part in a child’s social and emotional
development.
48 | JOURNEY OF HOPE
Reading allows children to look into a
window of another world — it sparks their
im Y