the greatest sin of all

No one sees the pain we etch into the walls. Instead they see malnourished kids in distasteful conditions. They see tears of grief but don’t feel the pain of losing a mother, a father, a child to weapons of destruction. They imagine the pang of loss we must feel, but they don’t experience the aching hunger for love and warmth and stability. They observe the lack of necessities and declare how we must be lifted from poverty, yet they don’t realise we don’t crave to be validated by numbers, dictated by the media, defined by statistics and measured by social constructs.

We sit amongst the rubble etching the alphabet into walls – the alphabet the Western world fails to use to vocalise our agonies. We sit in the cold to recite numbers; yet it’s much warmer than the cold shoulder of society when they recite the death tolls as if we weren’t humans. We return to broken homes that remain broken as the outside world attempt to stitch us back up with money and false promises.

So we decided to place our hope in education. We learn in the hopes that we can use our knowledge as a catalyst to bring about change. The privileged parts of the world seem satisfied to coexist alongside injustices and only dare to speak with volume when conflicts do not align with their best interests. The world is fuelled by selfishness and seems to be running out of kindness to strangers like us. They hesitate to deafen the corruption and in doing so sacrifice yet another body, with a beating heart, to the victors that speak in the mother tongue of injustices.

They pray for forgiveness, and they pray for mercy. They ask for guidance and preach lessons of compassion. And then they pray once again for the cleansing of the soul and ask forgiveness for all they have sinned. Yet we still live in a world that gifts wisdom to the old and naivety to the young; where one colour, one race, one belief, one gender weighs heavier on a scale than another. Oh what a beautiful world it is, to us, as we sit here with festering wounds as they passively watch the wounds being inflicted. Yet isn’t that the greatest sin of all?