Walking

Mud clinging to feet and bodies.  Crowds, pain, sickness, death.  Miles and miles of trodden paths where the homeless trudge along.   Knapsacks, packed full of the only things left, resting upon heads.   Families lying on the sides and sometimes in the way. Mother’s lost, children forgotten, and bodies thrown to the side. 

 Photo by Sebastiao Salgado

Prayers of hope moving tirelessly through minds, trying to ease the broken dreams of one day being free.  New camps, old camps, where is home? Dreams of home just bring less hope and bloody slaughters.  Death—a commonplace to them.  Old masters killed, new ones march us on.

Fights and more fights—food and less food.   It seems the only way to get food is to kill brothers for it.  Strange white people bring food sometimes only and is savaged by the most hungry and violent. Some will die for it, some already have, some just fall asleep on the road with bones visible (NY Times). 

Why are we always walking?

“If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time” (Hoban).

Many people remember that not so long ago a genocide took place in Rwanda, Africa.  This photograph is part of that genocide and how they survived such a devastating tragedy of slaughter. Read this inspiring book about these people and how they got to this point: Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.

Works Cited

Hoban, Russell. The lion of Boaz-Jachin and of Jachin-Boaz. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. Print.

Salgado, Sebastiao. Photograph. Migrations: Humanity in Transition. Aperture. New York, 2000. 218 (bottom). Print.

“Zaire Refugees’ Lack of Food Grows Acute.” World. New York Times, 10 Nov. 1996. Web. 4 Feb. 2010.