by Youma Kromer
When we shift the lens, we shift what’s possible.
Shift the lens an inch, and watch the whole world turn,
The door that looked like an exit was an entrance you’d yet to learn.
Your perspective is the government that rules you from within,
deciding, before you’ve noticed, where compassion should begin.
Do you call it justice if it lets you sleep at night?
Or do you call it fate if it means you never have to fight?
For opportunity and insult can be carved from a single stone,
the difference isn’t in the world. The difference is your own.
We do not choose the voice that first taught us how to see,
It moves in before language, before we learn to disagree.
But somewhere past that first voice, another one can grow,
The one that finally interrupts, and asks: is that still so?
So walk into the viewpoint that unsettles you the most,
not to lose your footing, but to see the wider coast.
Every mind you leave still leaves its fingerprint on you,
and every mind you enter teaches you a self that’s new.
What is a lesson, if not the pain, that finally chose to speak?
What is real understanding, if not the will to seek?
Do not trust the eye that never doubts its sight,
The surest gaze is often furthest from the light.
For growth is never what the answer hands you on a plate,
it’s what you find still asking, long after you were told to wait.
Your perspective is a choice, remade with every day,
So tell me, truthfully: what will you choose to see today?
-yk
This is where Rwanda enters the conversation, because it’s impossible for me to talk about perspective in the abstract when I’ve watched, in person, what happens when the world refuses to update its lens. For decades, the dominant narrative handed to outsiders about Rwanda was one word: tragedy. Fixed. Frozen. Filed away in 1994 and never reopened. That narrative isn’t false, but it is catastrophically incomplete, and incomplete stories, when repeated enough, start masquerading as the whole truth.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write about resilience from a safe distance and call it insight. I did not grow up under any of such conditions. I have never had to rebuild a life from the outline of a burned-down one. Whatever I understand about resilience, I understand secondhand, as a witness, not as someone who has earned the word through survival. What I can offer instead of false authority is attention: the willingness to actually look, to ask instead of assume, and to treat curiosity as a form to build respect.
Because when I spend actual time there, the tragedy narrative starts to look almost insulting. What you find instead is resilience that has been rebuilding itself daily for thirty years, ambition that refuses to give up, and a complexity that pity was never sophisticated enough to hold. Chris Pine said it better than most philosophy syllabi manage to: “You don’t have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it.” Rwanda didn’t get to choose its history. It absolutely chose what it built on top of it. The least the rest of us can do is choose to actually acknowledge that.
And this, finally, is where perspective stops being a personal growth platitude and becomes an ethical obligation, especially the moment you decide to do something as loaded as “volunteer” in a place that isn’t yours. Show up with an unexamined perspective, and you will, with the best of intentions, recreate the exact hierarchy you think you’re dismantling. Show up willing to be wrong, willing to ask the harder question instead of the comfortable one, and something else becomes possible: not charity, which flows one direction, but exchange, which asks something of everyone in the room.