As I left home a year ago, I have always wondered what it looks like from a distance. Libya has been in a critical situation. As I lived there my entire life, and maybe at some point, I will go back; I see the big picture now. I am a citizen watching that immense and rich region burn and suffer every day as the entire world is watching with me. It is as if you are watching a thriller movie, but the end is unpredictable because the director is gone missing, and the cast is going wild.
Maybe now I understand how others see my country, Libya; it is a case study, a hot topic for open discussions, an exciting thesis question with international relations theories to back it up and eventually add it as a reference for other scholars to learn from your discoveries while the country is drowning in its mess. The usual way of living is abnormal there, and I am adjusting here as life is straightforward and ”normal”. Life there is no longer a life!
It is dead with alive people, but their souls are dead from within. Maybe life is uneventful too. Death ghosts are haunting cities. I sleep and wake up to terrible news; for example, people sleep and wake up to dead bodies thrown in dumpsters and sidewalks. I see pictures of destroyed areas back home, and the war would expand the image of horror even wider.
Cities suffer from long hours of power cuts, water shortage, and lack of fuel which has been happening for so many years now. For a change, one would want to wake up to the sound of birds chirping and the smell of coffee coming out of coffee shops, and people rushing to bakeries to get bread, but that is not the case anymore.
Some are still trying to keep this image going on, at least. A civil war is occurring there as I am writing this piece from a corner in a Parisian coffee shop, and I am still wondering how life can be this unfair.
It is more of people who are pushing through life and still trying but sometimes the question to ask here is how long will you be able to put up with this situation? It is not a mechanism of coping and adjusting because, simply, no one deserves to live like this.
Photo Credit: SirajuddinSArab