In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.
Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more
I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories.
I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.
It isn’t about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.
The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.
I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.
Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.
I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.
Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.
I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.
Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.
The sun’s brightness painted our shadows on the ground.
My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.
As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.
We all find joy and radiance and a reason to move on even in the most dire of circumstances. Even in chaos and madness, there’s still a beauty that comes from just the vibrancy of another human spirit.