au

Hope Pratt

Press Services International

Hope Pratt is an  American Australian starting my first year at University. My family and I lived in Afghanistan for 6 years before moving to Australia. I am currently living in Sydney, which has been my longest home yet.

  • Forget me not

    This October marks 10 years since my family moved from Afghanistan to here. It’s funny because after all this time, I still haven’t been able to forget that time and to be honest, more recently I’ve been trying to hold tighter to those memories and the times we had there.

  • For you, a thousand times over

    It was Valentine’s Day last week, which may invoke some eye rolls for some people because after all, it is a big capitalist holiday designed to sell you heart-shaped chocolate, red roses, and stuffed teddy bears.

  • All the small things

    The world right now feels like a mess, at least it does more so than usual. I’m not sure if it’s the constant flow of information but I feel like the world gets like this every couple of months and then we move on, and then it happens again, and then we move on again.

  • God help the outcasts

    For a lot of people film analysis is boring and I’ll admit I’m in the minority that think it’s not. I am a media student, so I’ll say that studying film, literature, writing and photography is all very exciting to me, and I absolute love procrastinating by watching Lindsay Ellis’s video essays when I’m supposed to writing my own essays.

  • Where and what is 'home'

    Home. A concept revolving around the idea of a place where we live.

  • Be Afraid. Or Else

    Fear is powerful and potent. It’s conniving and twists itself into every crevasse in one’s mind. It controls you.

  • Ordinary Miracles

    Miracles happen everyday. It’s a simple statement, one tossed around at times with an absent-minded smile. A miracle, according to The Webster Dictionary, is: “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” Often when we speak about this ‘divine intervention’ as something that happens in everyday lives, it is impersonal, grand, and at many times, far beyond reality.

  • The Face of God

    One of my favourite plays and stories of all time is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I was a kid my dad used to tell me about the musical and the story behind it and at one point downloaded the soundtrack, which I listened to non-stop. My sister and I would often blast the music through the house on our old Dell laptop.  

  • In the Eye of the Storm

    Recently, I have felt burdened and conflicted about a lot of things to do with faith, religion and morality. It’s like a war raging in my mind of whether what I’m saying and doing is right, whether what others are saying and doing is right, whether anything anyone says or does is right at all.

  • Finding Community

    Community is an, if not the central, idea of church—a group of believers coming together with one another to celebrate God. Another way that most people describe it is “fellowship.” Whilst my family lived overseas, the community around us were an integral apart of our work and growth. Our team became like a family and other NGO workers became our church family.