None of it bothered me. My family believed it was important to care about the community and to do whatever we could help. Even though I was only thirteen, I could see that the biggest problems facing us were violence and the war. Peace was needed more than anything else. Of course, it is hard for a child to try to make peace, but trying is the only way anything ever happens...
So many lies have been told in my country for so many years that people do not know what or who to believe anymore. They cannot always trust the newspapers, the radio or television, the politicians, the armed group-but when they hear children talking about the violence and the war is affects us and how we want peace, somehow they know they are hearing the truth...
Some people say they are fighting for the poor, but the poor have suffered more than anyone else in the war. I think that some people are also fighting for revenge, or for power, or because they feel that they have no other choice. Some young people join the armed groups because their families are poor and they see no other way out.
John and his family were threatened in the midst of civil conflict and had to move out of town. His father went back and forth between his office and the farm in which they lived, but this relative calm could not be maintained. His active support of the processes of peace finally resulted in his being assassinated.
I thought I understood about war because I lived in the thick of the conflict. There were battles in the streets during the night. I was often woken up by gunfire. When I went to school in the morning. I saw the evidence - the blood on the sidewalks, the bullet-riddled buildings. And I had seen the victims at the morgue, not far from my fathers office.
I had talked about this with confidence, as if I knew what the war meant - but when my father was murdered, I was shattered not just by grief, but because then I understood the war. I knew what if felt like to want to fight. I realized that no matter how much you want peace, you take a stop towards violence when the war hits you personally.
This is the same trap that has caught so many people in my country....
Nothing was the same afterwards. The house felt like a dead empty shell, The streets that were so familiar all looked strange. Nothing and nowhere felt safe. I thought all my work for peace was worth nothing because it had not saved my father. The horrific violence that had engulfed our town had finally struck the heart of my family - and I had been unable to stop it. I blamed my self. I asked myself "What had i done that my father should die in such a violent way?"
The family continued to be threatened. John bought a gun in order to protect his loved one. One evening, ten days after his father was killed all members of John's family were gathered in a room on the upper floor of the house. As John came down to the kitchen he saw an intruder in the garden carrying a gun and looking at the second floor windows:
I knew that I could gun and kill this man.. It would be taking revenge for my father's death. I would be protecting my family. And almost no one in.. would be me for shooting him.. Yet while all of this was true I did nothing.. My father had wanted me to work for peace. How could I become violent now? The only way I could show respect and love for my father, the only way I could help save my family, was by trying to make peace. Killing him would bring no peace to me, or my family or my country. In fact, by killing him I would lose everything. I would be no better than he was.
John watched the intruder quietly who, after a while and for no apparent reason, turned away and left. Not long after, John got rid of his gun and decided never again to acquire one.
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