HORRIFIC TRAUMA ON THE UTTERANCE OF GENOCIDE

Many of us will hear the word genocide and link it to Rwanda and actually don’t give it much thought. Some will read about it and leave the read pages to that, “read pages” some will watch the Hotel Rwanda or other related genocide movies and shade a tear and in no time forget about what they watched. Some who actually don’t think such atrocities happen will simply tell you “it’s just a movie and we are living in modern times where these things don’t happen. Well these things that you may think don’t happen happened to not very far from us, it happened right here in our neighboring country Rwanda.

I should say hadn’t his devilish act happened, Rwanda would have been one of the great and most developed countries we got in East Africa. Looking at Rwanda now and looking at it 20 years ago? The country is doing great, in terms of infrastructure, it’s the cleanest city African country and people here are great.

Well Back to the Genocide, it may have happened 20 years ago but believe me it still feels like yesterday, to you it may feel like they should move on already but we all know you don’t wake up one morning and say “am going to forget the loss of a loved one” Same thing for these people. The death of a loved one hurts so much when you have spent sleepless nights in hospitals hoping and praying they will get well but it’s very and once again very painful if you wake up every night for twenty years thinking and having images of how your loved one perished, it’s traumatic to have images of your Tutsi mother being slashed to death, it’s traumatizing to be in hiding and hearing someone screaming for help because they are about to be slashed to death. Now that’s Trauma. I understand the break down the victims of the Rwanda genocide go through every 7^th day of April. Everyone has their eyes on that day, everyone knows what day it is and every person who was present during the 1994 Rwandan genocide knows what happened so it’s natural to break down. People were killed in churches, people were warned that wherever they went they will be killed, there was no escape.

photo by http://clayjar.deviantart.com/art/African-Children-43497710
Children as young as these could have seen what happened and they may forever be haunted by what they saw.

We need to help the Rwandan especially the Tutsi to overcome the pain and traumatic experience they went through. There are various ways of helping them, psycho social support is the main help for them to get well, teach them of what happened, it wasn’t OK for the Hutu to do that but they did it anyway and they need to forgive them. Not talking about it makes them build something inside them which is not good. Under the East African community “One people one Destiny” lets join hands on 7^th April and send our love to the Tutsi in Rwanda and encourage them about talking about the manslaughter that befell them. Advocating for peace and love among all east Africans should be one thing that drives us. I light a candle for the departed during the genocide and I say a prayer for all the affected, the victims and the victimized.

For all those who perished during the genocide,our hearts are with you and may your souls rest in eternal soul. The candle of love will always burn for you.

TEARS DON'T NECESSARILY CONVEY SADNESS

Tears don’t necessarily convey sadness

An intelligent person will open your mind, a beautiful person will open your eyes and a loving kind person will open your heart. Tears at times can be special than smiles depending on the occasion at which you are shading them, We tend to assume that tears only convey sadness that’s not true! I shade tears of happiness when something too good happens to me, something unexpected. We all know that people cry when they are unhappy, it takes a very emotional person to cry for happiness.  These tears are so warm and beautiful.

The saddest moment is when you say bye to someone who helped you stand on your feet after falling when everyone else pushed you to the ground when your knees trembled; these tears are too much they never end, nothing can make you forget someone very dear to you, someone who lifted you up emotionally, someone who looks at you and tell you, “you will be up there”.  These tears change from tears of sadness to tears of happiness when we shade then look up there and smile with a thought of they are watching us from above and they will always watch over us. We know they are better of where they are because of the things we sometimes go through.

The endless smiles we get when we finally achieve that goal we have been struggling to achieve, through hardship and using our achievements to better yourself when actually the person who made you go through hell was helping you better yourself. We should always learn through all kinds of experiences, never look at someone who sends and gives you harsh instructions as a bad person. This person is teaching you how the world works and if you know what you want to achieve at the end of the day, just be patient for the dark days will someday become brighter and it will be time for you to shine. Never treat someone badly because someone treated you badly revenge only breaks you because that’s not the kind of person you are. A kind person no matter how they have been mistreated will always be a happy and person.

A once broken heart is the strongest for a wise person for she uses it to evaluate what is of importance to her therefore not paying attention to what doesn’t build her. A once broken heart doesn’t easily make the same mistakes because we are all supposed to learn from our mistakes.

Sometimes, you got to stand alone and see if you can. We should learn to be independent. Let’s not depend on people otherwise that’s the reason we get disappointed and forget that the people disappointing us are also human.

First step to success is taken when you refuse to be captive of their environment in which you first find yourself because you should always use the bad beginning as a stepping stone to that place you long to be. Hope you get there in one spirit.

WHY VALENTINES DAY IS A WASTE OF TIME.

WHY VALENTINES DAY IS A WASTE OF TIME

Valentines day comes every 14th of February every year, most people refer to February as a month of romance. People exchange, gifts, candy, flowers and spend expensively on dinners.

 St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. But who was Saint Valentine, and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? 

The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valenti nus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first "valentine" greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl--possibly his jailor's daughter--who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed "From your Valentine," an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic and--most importantly--romantic figure. By the Middle Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial--which probably occurred around A.D. 270--others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to "Christianize" the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat's hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.
Lupercalia survived the initial rise of Christianity and but was outlawed—as it was deemed “un-Christian”--at the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day. It was not until much later, however, that the day became definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of Valentine's Day should be a day for romance.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. (The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.) Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France and Australia. In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the 17th century. By the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes, and by 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings.

Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap." Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.) Women purchase approximately 85 percent of all valentines.
 http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day

Now why are we Africans celebrating valentines day? So we even know the meaning of the day? Just tike many other  things have been imposed on us i thin

k this valentines day is yet another of the many things we copy.

I don't celebrate it and i would say am ok with it.