Losing your legs to a landmine would be bad. Or even worse, losing your two kids to landmine, RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, and then having to lose yourself. Not with a landmine, but with a noose; because you can’t live with the pictures in your mind. The pictures that came at the cost of your two kids. The pictures you didn’t even want, ever. The pictures you now have, always. Or watching your wife being raped, over and over, and then beaten and then raped again, as a war crime, and then being shot. And then you get shot. Just because there is a war. That’s no way to die, and it’s no way to live. Taking a tumble out of a fancy hotel in Paris and dying before you even know that you fell. That’s not a bad way to die. It’s definitely a stupid way to die. But it’s not the worst way to die. There is always, without a doubt, no matter how bad you think it is, someone who has got it worse, waaay worse than you. And I was alive! For a second time, or maybe it was the first time. I was actually alive. Me and my wheelchair problems were not even a worry. And so I made all the times into the best of times, and before I knew it they turned into the “even better than the best of times”. And today, was, again, the best of the best of the best of times because I made them so. I am hidden somewhere on the vast continent of Africa, only because it feels right, because I want to be here. Nobody told me to be here. I work for the mentoring organisation, AIME, only because I want to, because working with kids, using my imagination and trying to create a fairer world feels right. Nobody told me I have to. I am writing a book, because there are a lot a lot of stories from the old life and I thought they might inspire something. Only because I want to. It feels right. Not for a publisher or for the $$$. I don’t even have one. Today, on my third birthday, as I am kissed by this beautiful Giraffe. I just wanna say THANK YOU. We don’t always know everything. The more I live the less I realise that I know. But the few pieces that I do kno