The art of dislodging your head.

So my brother in all his juvenile wisdom , had heard about my dark phase and then decided to bring me down to this place.

For your information, next time you want to kill yourself, please don't inform your mother about it . It just kills the purpose.

But it did get me a free holiday. Man, I should have tried this earlier. Hmmm

Amma, I feel like killing myself, totally depressed, life is not having any meaning, so goodbye. By the way, I heard Paris is great at this time of the year.


So I have been here for about 3 days now and I should be really depressed.

Trust me, its not easy to get your head out of your arse once you have managed to put it there.

Thing is this place is doing something to encourage young people who have gone through some terrible events in their life, survived through it and now wants to give something back to the society. Man, Iam just depressed typing that.

Now hear their stories.

There is a young guy from Tibet, blind, who was sold off to be beggar when he was a child. He was rescued later on by an NGO. Now he wants to start a Braille Library and a Braille printing unit in Tibet.

There is this lovely girl from Kenya who is an albino. In Kenya, albinos are considered lucky. So lucky in fact that they are normally murdered and their body parts are harvested as lucky charms. It gets worse during the election, when the budding politicians wants to have lady luck by their side, even if its a piece of her. She wants to go back and start an awareness programme back in Kenya about people with her condition.

There is a guy from Liberia who when he was a kid, watched his family being murdered by the rebels during the civil war and was made to watch the rape of his sister and then was made to drink her blood. He wants to go back and start a center for rehabilitating the war orphans.

There is a guy from Sierra Leon, whose family had to escape to the bush to avoid being killed by the rebels. They survived in the bush , coming to the town to forge for food in the night. One such night they are captured. His sister was dragged away. He escaped. He later on learned that she was raped and then killed. He wants to go back and set up a center that can give micro loans to war widows so that they can sustain themselves.

There is a young blind girl from Tibet, where blind are considered as bad omens. Their condition is thought to be the result of their evil deeds in their past births. People cross the streets to avoid them and to reinforce their intention , spit on the ground. She grew up along with her blind twin younger brothers and a blind father in that surroundings. Only her mother was sighted. She grew up friendless. She wants to start a kindergarten in her village in Tibet, where blind and sighted children can come to.

There are more. Victims of human trafficking; victims of mine explosions, of war, of human violence.

I sit in the corner of their class, away from everybody, absorbing. Iam just here to heal. They are here to prepare themselves to go out there and realize their dreams. Their experiences are going to be their sales pitch to some potential funders.

This is the world we live in. In an ideal world, they shouldn't be here.

I can see the worst side of humans in their tales. Which kind of men would throw all the children of a village in a well and seal it? Where one can hear their cries for three days before it dies out? What kind of men asks a pregnant woman to predict what sex her child will be and then verify it by cutting open her stomach to pull out the foetus?

Then you see these bunch.

From situations that can destroy souls, these came out stronger. They see no need to let the situations overcome them, they overcome it by raising above them. They do something about it. They are all going back to the same situation that made them. This time they are going to fight back.They are going to save as many as they can.

They are warriors in training.

If this cant get my head back where it belongs, ie on my shoulders, I dont know what will.

I think I will go swim in the lake at the campus and pretend to be a hippo for a while.

That always cheers me up.