Child mortality to child soldiering

I hope it's not a problem that I decided to write a poem as my blog entry... I'm a better poet than an analytical writer, so while researching child mortality I found an article talking about child soldiers in Uganda and the type of lives they lead. It also described that the few that survive and are released from this enslavement and poverty are later unable to live like normal children or adults do to PTSD.

Hands Holding A Gun

By: Adriana Camino

How do you live after your hands

Have taken a life?

After your own bullet

Shot straight through a person’s heart.

How do you live after being told solutions come with guns?

After you’ve seen necks being hung

And girls being sold for the pleasure of a drunken soul.

How do you live after a person told you you'd never amount to nothing,

But that here...

Here you are a god.

You can lead the world.

Who’s to stop you?

Who’s to stop you with the Ak47

You carry round your chest

And with the pupils the size of dimes,

Result of the fairy dust

Which takes us on a trip far away from this place.

A trip, which allows us to forget,

Forget that we're just stolen hearts

Who we'll never amount to nothing

We're just hands,

Hands holding a gun.

How different would my life have been?

If someone had told me.

If someone had explained that solutions can be compromised instead of forced.

If someone had told me that I could amount to something without this gun.

If they'd told me education leads to success,

But that dynamite…

that only leads to conquest.

I wish someone had told me that love comes from a mom,

Not from a mob.

That religion is a faith decision,

Not a way to kill individuals.

I wish someone had told me I could be better

That someone had told me that I DON’T amount to nothing

And that I, I am a child

And I’m not just hands holding a gun,

I'm a kid.

A kid with stolen hopes,

A kid with stolen dreams.

Now I’m home.

They tell me I can accomplish those dreams.

But after you’ve seen necks being hung,

And have blood filled with fairy dust,

Those dreams turn into nightmares,

And regret puts an anchor.

You forget how life was without the gun in your chest

And stress fills our heads.

We want to kill without harm

And live without contains

But most of all we want people to know,

That not so far away

There is Sierra Leon, Burundi, Uganda,

And a continent filled with the shame

Of having children caught in the maze

That is Child Soldiering today.