Steve Peifer - A Dream So Big: Our Unlikely Journey to End the Tears of Hunger

T HE LIGHTS GO DOWN IN THE PACKED-OUT N EW Y ORK C ITY CONCERT hall. From my front-row seat next to my wife, Nancy, I look up to see myself suddenly projected onto a huge screen above the stage. The video instantly transports a glamorous, star-studded celebrity audiencedressed to the nines in diamonds, designer dresses, and tuxedosaround the world to a rural Kenyan hillside where a video-me stands looking out over the Great Rift Valley. And my amplified voice fills the auditorium, saying, Africa will change you. Africa gets under your skin and wont let go. The screen shot shifts from a rural setting to an African street scene as my voice-over continues. We were a typical American family I cringe to see my own much larger than life image, speaking and moving across the screen. I listen to my voice drone on and make what sounds in this moment to be a public confession: My wife has always wanted to be in Africa; I never wanted to be in Africa.

A part of me cant help marveling at what is happening to me here tonight, at a live television event being broadcast around the world. Yet a bigger part of me almost has to laugh out loud at what feels like just another very strange chapter in a strange life that is no longer my own and hasnt been for almost a decade.

Then a young makeup artist crouches down beside me and hurriedly tries to make me presentable for my acceptance speech. I want to tell her she has a hopeless job. Instead, I bite my tongue. And as she goes about her business, I determine to refocus on the screen and review in my mind the words Ive written out to say.

When the attentive young lady whispers, We cant have you looking all shiny up there, and begins powdering my entire countenance, three nearly simultaneous thoughts arise in my mind: Ive never before in my life worried about being all shiny, whatever that means. Its hard, if not impossible, to focus your thoughts on anything else while a makeup artist is powdering your face. And, I have found myself in more than my share of weirdly unsettling situations before, but this feels weird on a much bigger, harder-to-believe scale!

As the video rolls on, my mind wanders. How does the college guidance counselor at a hundred-year-old, rural Kenyan boarding school for missionary kids ever get nominated for, let alone win, the annual CNNs Hero for Championing Children Award? For that matter, how in the world did a guy living a normal American lifecomplete with a wonderful, loving wife, two terrific kids, a nice big house, and a solid career as a corporate manager with one of the worlds leading technology giantsfind himself residing on the far side of the earth feeding lunch and teaching computer skills to hungry African schoolchildren, some of whose families still hunt with spears and live in mud-hut villages without electricity or running water?

The answers to all those questions require a story that does not begin at a glitzy gala in New York City. Neither does the story end as the screen goes dark, the house lights come back up, and Tyra Banks, one of the worlds most famous fashion models and now also a television show host, stands at the microphone saying, It is my honor to present the CNN Hero for Championing Children, Steve Peifer.

That night, as unreal as it felt at the time, as nice an honor as CNN made it on such a big stage, is a small, albeit memorable, scene in a much larger real storya personal and family pilgrimage that began more than ten years before and far beyond the bright lights and big city. A story that has taken me to many places and situations where I have had to do what I did that special night in New York: stop, look around, pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, and wonder, How in the world did I get here?