I’m an ordinary-looking piece of paper, but I just might be the most powerful piece of paper you’ll ever touch.

And they know that no South Sudanese family could survive long without me.

I am the one who allows women to carry their heads high, wearing their freshly-pressed best dress to church on Sunday.

I left South Sudan in the back of a pickup truck, one braid among hundreds of others, headed for the camps across the border, where a quarter-million refugees were hungry for a taste of home.

We are a collective. We burrow, unseen, in huge colonies as deep as 18 feet below the surface. Each colony houses up to one million of us.

I do not merely rid the ground of litter. I clear it, smooth and open, so that nothing can hide there. Snakes and scorpions and poisonous spiders and camel spiders (eek!) prefer underbrush and clutter.

Almost always, it is women’s work to fill me, hoist me onto their heads and walk the long miles back to their village.

Whether round or rectangular, I am found in every Haitian home from the heart of the city to the remote mountain homesteads.

While not everyone believes in my powers and my purpose, I can assure you that the very mention of my name stirs emotion.

In the rural provincial towns beyond Port au Prince, I am most commonly spotted in the hands of those working in their gardens and on their farms.

Don’t they know that cholera still lives in the soil, and that mangoes picked up from the dirt can spread that plague?

In the wee hours of the morning, my familiar “thump, thump, thump” wakes even the roosters and goats before the sun peeks over the horizon.

Every day he scooped up the ash leftover from a dung fire and rubbed it on my horns and spread it all over my hide to keep away the biting insects.

We are no longer instruments of brutality. We are things of beauty! Who could have imagined such a transformation?

My existence is itself a contradiction. Built by men who waged war for a living. Built to shield children from death by that same war.

It begins with an incision from a thorn or knife. Then the raw cut is rubbed with ash or plant juices to further irritate the skin. The healed skin forms me, a raised scar.

She made me perfect for welcoming slivers of bright sunshine while keeping out the dangers that lurk. Have you not seen?