Silent Voices

They are unheard and hurting, drowned out by the wails of mourning for one more gruesome murder. They have blank stares as they are at a loss of what emotion to evoke as yet another loved one’s life is snuffed out mercilessly. Their table is set with unpleasantries and they ingest the unpalatable accounts of the unsavory details of death that elicit in them a taste for revenge. They are vulnerable and their lives are unstable. They don’t have a voice, nevertheless they have much to say about all the horrors they have encountered. They are our children, submerged in a deluge of violence and in addition, they are now suffocating from a sinister virus that stunts their development and stifles their socialization.

This past week was a tough one. I brought a birthday cake, two days late, for one of my children. I arrived not long after a young man was shot and pronounced dead at the hospital. With cake in hand she looked at me querulously and queried, “Aunty Nicky, you know how much people dead on my birthday?” I didn’t answer. I wanted to keep the moment light. I am glad I did because unknowing to me, nearby stood the child of the man who was just killed. I wondered why she had looked at me with such sad eyes, but dismissed it as a little girl who had been disciplined. This however, was harsh punishment for an innocent child not much more than six who was now just made fatherless. My other fatherless child after remembering her ill-fated birthday, looked at me scared and demanded, “Get out now, I don’t want you down here.” She was worried about my welfare as she looked up the street which was her usual route of escape from the community to go to church or an outing. She knew she couldn’t leave, but wanted me to leave her behind so that I could be safe.

Many of our children are left behind physically, emotionally and spiritually. As adults, many of us wallow in the anxieties of life forgetting the numerous children around us who are suffering silently with no place to let off their frustrations. They are seen, but not heard. I will not say much more, but instead let them tell their thoughts in the videos below. Let us remember that Jesus is telling us, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14) It is time for introspection to see if we are hindering these silent voices in any way.