According to my résumé, I am a recent transplant into the Mississippi Delta, a wide-eyed idealist who had dreams of closing the American achievement gap. Yet, the woman speeding home from school is anything but an idealist, frustrated and exhausted by the reality of a day in one of America’s overlooked schools.

It’s on such days that I desperately want to bury my head under my comforter. Unfortunately, my Chihuahua waits for me at the door, impatient for his evening walk and completely unsympathetic to my depleted state. Grudgingly, I wrestle the jumping ball of pent-up energy into his leash and we begin to wander down Main Street.

In my grouchy mood I sneer at every flaw in the crumbling infrastructure. The downtown, like the city’s school system has fallen into disrepair. I shake my head at a gigantic hole in the middle of the street marked off by a sign that asks me to "pardon the appearance while we make the city beautiful” or some jazz like that. "It's going to take a lot more than a new road to fix this hellhole," I think while taking in the broken glass, boarded-up doors and peeling paint.

Then I see it. On the side of a church, on a wall that could have been any one of those sad walls, in a location that is hardly central or special, is the mural that a fellow teacher painted with his elementary students last year. "The Tree of Dreams" as it is titled stands abstractly, vibrantly, for the world to see. I look at the names of the student painters and recognize a few from these female empowerment workshops that I help out with sometimes. One of them, Tiara is a spunky young girl who wants to be a professional cheerleader and a pediatrician someday. At eight, Tiara has already sacrificed her Saturdays to learn about goal setting and healthy relationships. Taking her future medical career very seriously, she raced through an obstacle course set up to help girls learn the parts of the female reproductive system. With cheerleader-like pep she shouted the names of its different parts, bellowing “vagina” without even a hint of a giggle (I was not so successful).

In the paint of this mural are Tiara’s big dreams, just as vibrant and grand as the tree before me. Suddenly, this painted wall is not a mural but the symbol hope for Tiara and every little kid born into this town.

I start to cry.

An elderly man passing on the sidewalk stops and looks at the mural with me for a few seconds. "You know, we call that an island," he says, "It's an island in this place."

I nod and we exchange a look of understanding, pausing in the glow of the mural in the setting sun. Then, slowly, we continue in our opposite directions, each a bit changed by that moment at the "island" when this town didn't seem too bleak to have hope.