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It is said that it is when the people you love most are gone that you feel the real pain - pain borne out of misplaced guilt. You blame yourself for any transgressions, however minor, you may have committed against them when they were alive. You wish you should have expressed your love for them more powerfully and more often. If you truly loved a person, you never feel as if you did enough for them when they were alive.
Sometimes you remember some great moments you shared with them and you smile broadly; but then, you remember that such a moment will never replicate itself, and you slide into deep melancholy. You recall the events that led to the loss and you try to follow your friends' advice -just forget the past and move on. You try - usually unsuccessfully - to fashion yourself some new lifestyle, without the one person you had planned to share your great moments with.
That is the situation I found myself in one excruciatingly painful night when Lona, my beautiful fiancëe, was forever taken away from me by a murderous political gang that had been roaming our country for months, killing perceived government opponents.
Lona, being a lawyer, and an active pro-democracy activist, had been in the 'long list' of those to be eliminated for allegedly plotting to turn the general populace against the government. She had been in the 'list' for quite some time, and had escaped death narrowly on several occasions. But on that bleak night, luck deserted her, and she was taken away from me forever, and in the most gruesome manner imaginable.
I learnt all about the horrible events of that night from one very lucky survivor called Temeka. He was a very young worker at the home where the massacre took place, and he heard the eerie screams emanating from the dying men and women in the room below, all this time while he was perched in the ceiling above the macabre dining room.
When I arrived there, I found him in a stupor, stammering hysterically to himself. He was a young and innocent boy, just a quiet lad who had never imagined men could be so callously brutal towards innocent souls; souls whose only 'crime' was that they loved their country with unrestrained passion, and often spoke out when the government pursued policies that were clearly anti-people.
The events of that night had been replicated in many parts of our beloved country, Rwanda. And like so many of our compatriots, we had no choice but to flee, leaving everything behind, for their was no time to organise one's affairs. We fled with nothing, apart from a small portable radio that kept us informed of the hell we had left behind.
We passed through forests we had hitherto thought were impenetrable - forests that would have offered the most hideous ghosts the perfect resting place during the day, before they went on with their nightly chores of scaring villagers at night.
It was Temeka and I, fighting the elements in the dense forests while we ran away from the smell of death and the smoking debris of houses deliberately set on fire by the all-powerful state sponsored militias. We could only hope God was guiding us in the right direction. And sure He was, for a few weeks later we arrived in the Eastern part of Congo. As refugees. Hungry, tired and totally worn out. But very much alive.
We were refugees for many months, walking around in tattered clothes like everyone else. Then, one day, God smiled on me
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