War: What Is Left Behind

Lucio: The book Persepolis by Marjane Satropi, shows the young Marjane seeing her family members suffer under the strain of war. When we read about war many of us see the winner and the loser, or the right and the wrong. Those who have the most to lose from war are the ones who didn't ask for it. It is sad to see that when a war comes to an end there is less smiles than one would expect. The civil war in my home country Angola is a sure example of the lacking smiles at the end of a war. The war stemmed from disputes between different ethnics groups after the country gained its independence. Most of the war to place south of the country, so most of us in the north didn't feel the sting of the front-lines  however even though I may have been young and in an environment that made me oblivious of the war, the lives damaged or lost in the front-lines were felt by my family and friends. In the aftermath, seeing people pick the ashes that used to be their loved one, seeing people living on the pebbles that used to be their house or seeing many fight for food that were the scraps left behind gave me a kind of survivor’s guilt for being so blind of my country’s saddening situation. It has been a decade since the war has ended and it now is on my (and all those who will inherit the future) hands to build a future that will make all that happened a fading dream.       

Malcolm X: War will never be something that causes cherry blossoms, in matter of fact, the one thing you can be certain of is that war is the home of tragedy. Although one may never want war to be a result of conflict, we need to stand for what we believe in. The wounds that many suffer in war may save the lives of those they are fighting for. I remember an your uncle who was truly traumatized by war and fled the battlefield; while many welcomed him for coming back to safety, I wondered, the only reason we were safe was because soldiers like him fought. I commend and thanked him for every gunshot, wound or scar he received for my freedom. Sylvester Stallone once said in of his famous Rocky movies “I fight so you don’t have to fight.”You know what, I think I'll quote myself "Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down." A decade after the civil war, there are tears on my left eye for seeing the destruction we caused and there are tears on my right eye seeing how much we have persevered, united and rebuilt from what used to be our damned land.

The reality of war

Building for tomorrow