The Intense Moment on the Field

Duncan!" my teammate screams passing me the ball. An orange blur is heading straight at me. My head's pounding and my lungs tighten. I square up and jog to the 3-point line.And that's when I realise that the ball isn't in my hands anymore. I turn around and all I hear is the swoosh of the basket and a loud cheer.

Timeout

And I'm on the bench.

Ladies, gentlemen and adjudicator in that moment my hopes and dreams of winning were dashed in the blink of an eye.

My dream of becoming the next NZ member of an NBA team shattered at the tender age of 13!

Hopes and dreams. Everyone sitting in this room has them, Admit it! Even adults dream of the day teenagers will do things without being asked- like waking up in the morning without them banging on our doors. Dreams are there even when we aren't thinking about them. They shadow us wherever we go and whatever we do.

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Take the typical NZ teenager- what do we spend our lives doing? We play sports, go to school, watch netflix, go to the mall, play video games, gossip, go on social media and we sleep. We might hope to be the next LeBron, Eliza Mccartney or Beyonce. Some of us want to be more popular than others- so we go to the mall and pay way too much money to look cool- wearing clothes we don't like to be just like our friends. We want to fit in.

This is where social media can be a hunting ground for our hopes and dreams. We can flaunt how much we are loved to billions.

So why are we interested in our popularity on social media? It's simple. The likes, favorites, shares and followers boost our self confidence. Our hopes and dreams of belonging. But is the delusion of social media warping the genuine hopes and dreams of today's society? Is it just an illusion of manipulated self-image, self-promotion where we share our "best bits"making us more selfish and self absorbed? But our hopes for popularity can also be dashed in the blink of an eye through bullying, leaving us feeling disbelieved, vulnerable and lowering our self-esteem. Creating first world problems if you please.

These problems got me thinking about a young girl I met on a trip back home to the Philippines.

Her face was jagged and coarse. A halo of hair matted with dirt- a chaotic, scraggly bird's nest framing her cheeks. She tapped on the window gazing at my sandwich. I looked at her stomach, it was a deep, black hole. Her hunger ever present from dawn to dusk, it seemed to gnaw at her. She tapped on the window again and pointed at her raw, stoney hand. She was like a dog who had seen the biggest bone ever. But like a beaten dog she wouldn't look me in the eye. "Pahingi ng pagkain" she rasped. "Food please".

I can only imagine why her eyes were dazed and distant- why they looked so dead. She was a discarded, tattered, doll. She only hoped for food.

She was one of the 1.8 million orphaned children in the Philippines who can only dream of the luxuries and comforts I enjoy as a NZ born Filipino. Her problems were a far cry from my 'first world' problems of losing my weekly basketball game or getting some negative comments on social media.

When she wasn't begging, she was probably rooting around in the rubbish dump in Tondo, Manila's largest slum, looking for old chicken to boil and eat. Like the 100,000 people who live there scavenging for things they can sell or trade. I could only wonder how she could fulfil her hopes and dreams and what her future would be.

Whether we dream of being the next Steven Adams, whether we hope to fit in and be long or whether we hope to find food to fill our empty stomachs there is one simple fact: if our hopes and dreams are genuine, we need to work for them, we need to build towards a future. Like the little girl, she might not get a big chunk of food every day or every week but despite her third world problems