Preez's Kite Runner

And at 12.50am, as I read the last sentence in the pages that opened before me, I wept. I had just finished reading The Kite Runner.

I wept for those I had known and those I would never know who had suffered at the hand of injustice. The injustice that prowls like a lion seeking who it might overwhelm and or overcome in every life, every family, every city, every town, and every nation. I wept for the very apparent lack of simple humanity in the hearts and mind of many who wage deceit and war in the name of God and or ‘Me-ism’.

What had happened to our world? What had happened, I pondered again? What had happened to me?

Cancer
Raw on the emotions side, I was distressed and disturbed. A few days before I had heard news that a dear friend, with who I had looked forward to sharing decades with in friendship, had passed. Cancer.

There’s a word for you. Malignancy, growth, tumor, malignant cells. All words used to explain the evil. I wept for my friend. Wept for the solitude with which she had come and gone; and I thanked The Lord nevertheless that she was at last in a place where there is no more sorrow. I thanked God that she had died in Him.

In my numbness at the weekend I picked up The Kite Runner. An acclaimed piece of writing. I had bought a copy of the book over a year or two ago but was yet to read it. Once I read the first paragraph, I found it difficult to put the book down.

The Kite Runner
I deliberated at the apparent ease at which life could sometimes deal you a deep blow; a deep injustice.

As I read through The Kite Runner, I guessed that I may just as well have been reading about a family in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Zimbabwe or Angola. For although the setting of the pages that lay in my hands was Afghanistan, I knew that a similar injustice, a similar cancer, had permeated through individual lives, families, towns and nations all around the world.

The injustice in the decisions made by national and international leaders to claim and or reclaim a nation; to attain and or remain in power illegitimately; to overthrow a legitimate government; to deny a people asylum in a safe country because their ‘papers’ are not intact even though the very apparent reason someone might want to receive asylum was precisely because their very perpetrators were those in authority and who they could never approach for legitimate papers.

I thought of families broken and separated. I thought of family generations thereafter suffering deep mental and emotional trauma as a result of the very negative and very deep externality of physical war and conflict on a parent. The broken relationship that such a parent might then have with their spouse and or their children – for which man or woman would not be broken having suffered rape, having suffered the violent and sudden loss of all the things that gave you surety and comfort, having witnessed the murder of members of your family, and having lost hope in amidst of all of the above?

Visiting cancers of the fathers to the third and fourth generation
The children who then grow up not knowing the love of a parent, nor the comfort of a ‘normal’ family home where mother or father is not suffering from schizophrenia or any other mental or emotional illness which means he/she cannot hold down a wage and thus a living. Children then traumatized by the world around them as a result. Looking to comfort and acceptance in the awkward places of the bottle, the brothel; pot or needle.

The broken children that they themselves might then bring up within and without marriage....

A friend who is a psychiatrist once told me, having just returned home from a prison visit where he was assessing mental health of inmates, the world might be a better place if all those who had serious mental illnesses were denied the right to reproduce.

And all the human rights lawyers cried out: ‘foul play.’

Foul Play
Foul play it is. But foul play it also is when such offsprings, perhaps following years and years of counseling which has given them some respite, then seek to make a better life for themselves in a second country and all they get in response from the officials at the other side is a firm: ‘I am sorry.”

Worse still, they get thrown in a detention center. Worst still they are fortunate enough get out of the detention centre and secure employment as a menial labourer and all the people of that nation cry that foreigners are taking our jobs. We don't want foreigners.

Cancer confronts the abused and confused immigrant yet again. Better to, I say, for those who don't want foreigners to confront their political leaders and demand that their foreign policies and international relations promote peace, not war. Peace has many synonyms: justice, responsiveness, transparency, accountability, democracy.

Yes I cried for the injustice all around us. The cancer all around us and the cancer that had taken away my friend. The cancer all around us that, if not detected early can spread to other vital organs of the body – particularly the mind and soul, rendering the body to succumb to a life lived in iniquity, misdemeanor and malignancy, for indeed sometimes the cancer we fight, the war we wage is not in battles fought with all forms of missiles, bullets, shells and AK47s.

Deliverance and thanksgiving
And I pondered yet more. I had a deep need to appreciate God for all the misfortune He had ensured that I escaped. For all the misfortune He had protected me from; and for all the misfortune He will pull me from. I thanked Him that in every situation I have always known peace and hope in Him, and yes: I always knew mercy.

I was reminded that there could always be a meeting place, a respite and a rest even in amidst cancer of all forms. For me that respite has been Him, Christ Jesus. He was also my late friend Priscilla’s respite.

Many times in the midst of her pain whenever Priscilla called me or I called her on the phone she always, always, always comforted and encouraged me. Forgetting all of herself, all of her pain and all of her needs, she always focused on and enquired about me, my wellbeing and the well-being of my family. She joked once when I had called her that she couldn’t really talk right now and that I should call some hours later - so many people were with her in the hospital room, but she knew that I was driving home from work in the Lagos traffic and she would have loved to have kept my mind off the Lagos traffic in conversation.

Christ Jesus: Priscilla's Kite Runner - He can also keep and numb your mind and pain off the traffic of the world that threatens to envelope you with all sorts of cancer.