Eritrea’s youth have also been victimized by human traffickers, smugglers and worse of all, by political agendas that seek to undermine the young nation’s development. Today, regretting their youthful decisions, many have returned to the safety and security of their own country, but there are many more languishing in UNHCR camps in neighboring Ethiopia, in detention centers in the West. Those who make it to the Italian shores,  are today found on the streets and parks of Italian cities living on handouts. The crimes committed against these youth is deliberate-and those who participated in facilitating youth flight from Eritrea are as guilty as the criminal traffickers and smugglers.

The shores of Lampedusa bear the footprints of those who survive the perilous journeys and its waters bear in each rolling wave, the memories of the many lives lost there. Allow me to share this piece, “Lampedusa- If I were you laying on the sand, looking up into the skies”,  written by Simone Mariotti, and ask all to reflect on life… and the choices we make.

Clear road, beautiful sky, birds chirping and flying, green trees swaying from side to side in the gracious wind, softly whispering through the leaves. People walking with thoughts of happiness, eagerness, anger and desperation, and we call this: Life.

Life that turns into memories in a split second. Memories, they just are. Memories can sometimes be the cure or, the disease. Some are good, and some bad. The bad memories, however choke the good-out of the pleasant ones… leaving us feeling empty.

Today, I sniffed on the deadliest poison called memories from the past, and it is lingering in the soul of my mind,  causing the slow death of the inside.

This intricate beauty and voices from afar have told me that, I died today, yet I am alive on the outside.

My best friend, the intangible, and in-explainable-feeling, called Hope, has left my side. Today, Hope has abandoned  me, leaving me to partake at my enemy’s table-that I love the most, called Time.

Time is wonderful to those whom luck has grazed their star. Luck in its glorious virtue, however somehow have missed my star, so the dreadful scrooge-Time, is lurching and taunting me with pain of deadness inside, yet it leads me to believe that God still exists.

My contradiction, hence my intellectual appeal – how can a God that loves us, let us die alive and let us bare the agony and pain inside? Contemplating on questions that deserve answers, easy to understand on a human level, is expected from a God that is beautiful, that sees the ugliness, yet sacrifices so much to instill the beauty to those who believe. However, the suffering, agony of knowing and feeling the dead inside, yet alive and well on the outside is a punishment that Time cherishes.

God’s time has not come to the completion of His work, is that an answer? So the questions remain, why do I have to die whilst still alive? Who benefits from my pain?

Whats in it for God? Does life has to be this way: happy, sad, unfulfilled, joyful, cruel and then we die?

I am living the dead in me, but I can’t curse God because I am clothed by the cloak of free will. So I pose the question, did my inside died from my own doing? If I am dead inside, yet breathing to mock my liveliness outside, to whom do I return the free will?

I am sitting at my enemy’s table-Time, alone left behind by Hope,  mocked by the air that fills the lung, free-will that caused my dead inside… the question is Why? The answer shouldn’t be because it is Just Life. There should be more to it. Life can’t be this cruel if the God that made it is wonderful.