Pain (May 14)

How do we come close to understanding pain? I have never experienced pain if I begin to compare myself with the faces and stories of the people of Uganda. One set of sorrowful eyes looked deeply into mine tonight and just began to scratch the surface the life he had led. “Suffering, suffering, suffering,” he uttered as his eyes looked away from me.
Charles began to speak to me as I sat down with him. He smiled widely and put his arm around me while his other hand held tightly to an AK-47. It seemed so surreal. He began telling me about his sister who had six children. She was a single mother and had just died five days before. “I want cry, but sometimes I cannot find the tears,” he muttered as he recounted the new found responsibilities that came with her death. Now he was responsible for caring for not only his own two children but the six children of his sister. He looked out at the stars as he wondered how his salary as a guard would pay for food and schooling for all eight children.
He looked back at me and I could only see the brokenness that I hadn’t seen before. I just sat and listened as he spoke. He began to ramble about his past and my eyes just focused on his face.
“Bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet…” he just kept repeating the word until silence settled upon him. “I lost my parents,” he said “when I finished P3,” what we might call 4th grade. The rebel troops had come into his tribe while he was gone at school and shot all of the parents in the tribe. When he came home he said that the houses of the community had burned down with all the dead bodies within and then a group of his friends were taken from that place. “If your mouth wanted to smile, they would cut your mouth and if your ears wanted to hear they would cut your ears. They just cut, cut, cut.” He described this horror and showed me some of his scars. He didn’t tell me how he had gotten away, but he sat for a while until he began to speak again.
I wish I could say that this story is an exception to the other people I have met, but it is not. Brokenness is all around me.