( ).

Sometimes there are no words.

How do you force your lips and tongue to spit out the sounds that will inform an eight year old, orphaned boy that he is HIV Positive?

How do you make your fingers tap out a coherent sentence when it is the testimony of a new born baby who was held by the ankles and smashed against a brick wall, all because the woman who they assumed was his mother was not telling them what they wanted to hear?

How can you use lines and squiggles to remotely communicate the fact that a man was stabbed with red-hot machetes, tied to a tree and left with burning tyres around his neck? He was a doctor. He was walking home the wrong way.

I never want to be someone who does not grieve for other peoples’ pain.

Yet the feeling of having a knife searing open my chest and flattening my lungs, combined with leaden limbs and a liquefied brain, can be paralysing.

I try to turn towards the God, who these Africans love with everything that they are, despite their insurmountable challenges.

Yet how can I express my feelings of anguish, betrayal, horror, relief, adoration, disgust, anger, outrage, exhaustion; combined with question upon question upon question?

Sometimes there are no words.