Writingwheel

Hey fanmily, what's up?

Last time, I shared with a vision that I had over the years that I kept buried under the rug.

Guess what

We finally brought it into light.

Hop into the train let us take a little ride.

Tada! 🤗🤗

Ladies and gentlemen, permit me to introduce to you

YOUNG VOICES INITIATIVE

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Young Voices Initiative (aligned with SDG 4: Quality Education) is a dialogue-based character education platform focused on Character building, critical thinking, and responsible citizenship for teens and young adults through structured debates, reflective thinking and guided dialogues.

To more details, visit our official hands on Facebook on voices initiative and Instagram on young_voices_initiative

This is a call for every lover of goodwill to join hands in shaping the future we hope for.

The Lantern Maker's Gift

In a quiet mountain village lived an old lantern maker named Elias. His hands were calloused from decades of bending bamboo, stretching paper, and painting delicate patterns. He was respected for his craft, but he lived alone in a small workshop, filled with half-finished lanterns that glowed softly in the dusk.

One autumn evening, a fierce storm swept through the valley. When it passed, Elias found a woven basket at his doorstep. Inside was a newborn baby girl, wrapped in a faded red blanket, her tiny fists waving like fluttering moths. A note pinned to the cloth read only: "Please care for her."

Elias stared at the child for a long time. He was old, set in his ways, and tired. He had no family, no apprentice, no one to carry on his craft. Raising a child meant sleepless nights, endless worries, meals to prepare, illnesses to nurse, questions to answer responsibilities he had happily avoided his entire life.

He almost carried the basket to the village elder. Almost.

But then the baby opened her eyes and looked straight at him. In that moment, something shifted inside the old man’s heart. It wasn’t duty that stirred first, it was wonder. This tiny life, so fragile and new, felt like a lantern suddenly lit in a room he hadn’t known was dark.

He named her Liora, which means "I have light."

The years that followed were exactly as hard as Elias had feared. Liora cried through the nights, spilt paint on finished lanterns, asked endless questions, ran through the workshop with muddy feet, and once nearly set the whole place ablaze chasing fireflies with a candle. Money grew tighter, sleep grew shorter, and Elias’s back ached more than ever.

Yet every morning, Liora’s laughter rang through the workshop like wind chimes. She danced between the hanging lanterns, making shadows play on the walls. She learned to paint before she could read, creating wild, swirling colours that Elias would never have dared. Villagers began coming not just for his steady, traditional lanterns, but for Liora’s bright, imaginative ones lanterns shaped like dragons, stars, and laughing fish.

One winter night, when Liora was ten, a great festival approached. The village needed hundreds of lanterns to light the mountain paths for the New Year procession. Elias fell ill and became too weak to work. For the first time, he felt the full weight of responsibility crushing him. How would they finish in time? How would he provide?

Liora didn’t hesitate. She gathered the village children, taught them to cut bamboo and stretch paper the way Elias had taught her. They worked day and night, singing as they painted. On the eve of the festival, the paths glowed with more lanterns than anyone could remember with each one carrying a touch of Liora’s joy.

That night, as Elias watched from his window, too weak to walk but strong enough to smile, he understood the truth he had only glimpsed years before.

The sleepless nights, the worries, the endless tasks, they had not been taken from him. They had been given along with something far greater: the gift of Liora herself. Her light, her laughter, her fearless creativity, the way she turned hardship into beauty and strangers into helpers. All of it had filled his life with a warmth no solitary craft ever could.

The responsibility had not been a price to pay for the gift.

The gift had made every responsibility sacred.

And so, in the glow of a thousand lanterns climbing the mountain like ascending stars, Elias whispered to the night, “Thank you for trusting me with such a treasure.”

Children are not the first duty we endure.

They are a gift we are invited to unwrap slowly, daily, for the rest of our lives and in unwrapping them, we discover we have been given our own light back, brighter than before.



©️ Omaka Gloria Onyemaechi