Counselling Intervention for Budo Community
Counselling Intervention for Budo Community
COUNSELLING INTERVENTION FOR BUDO COMMUNITY
The gruesome massacre by arson of 20 children with the modal age of 10years in this century at Budo Junior School in Uganda on the 14th April 2008 is unbelievable. Everybody should condemn this brutality and be in solidarity with the most affected kin of the deceased. It is only these young angels who will enlighten our mind to accept what they went through. My prayer is that they bring quick and soothing intervention to the relations they separated from.
Recently one high ranking personality in government said over one FM radio that he did not want to talk about the Budo massacre for fear of refreshing wounds, agony of all those who are mourning the beloved children.
There could be countless others who might feel tempted to keep mum for the same reason. I should tell you that whether we keep silent or continue to talk about the Budo massacre it is not yet over. We should only brace ourselves to tackle what is yet to come. This brief reflection is an attempt to graciously buttress for the eventuality in connection with the Budo incident.
The demise of these young angels made me contemplate on two things that quite often are not given their preeminence at a moment of loss. The Budo massacre denotes these two issues: the loss of life and loss of persons/affinity. The majority of us are mourning these two aspects.
Significantly it is the children who suffered both aspects, namely, the loss of life and the separation from their beloved ones. The rest of us suffered severed affinity.
The loss of life came once and for all. It is only the perished young children who knew and who experienced what it means to lose life. However death will never persist on them any more. Death has seen its end with the demise of these children.
In ending someone’s life like it happened at Budo, there must be an exchange of some sort. The children lost their life to the murderers and unconsciously in exchange the children were handed a banner written on “NATURAL JUSTICE.” It is this banner that they are now flying in their new abode which is timeless and without space. It is this banner that must take its due course. They are not going to avenge their death because this is characteristic of human endeavour. But their new acquired responsibility is to enable those who massacred them to have the courage to meet the promptings of natural justice.
If loss of life and affinities is sweet or bitter the murderers must embrace themselves to taste this recipe. Since in the children’s new abode, time and space is immaterial, natural justice visiting those who organized, participated and carried out the massacre will strike at its own convenience. It can either take place within our time or outside it meaning that the murderers or their dear ones at any moment of human existence will not escape the full weight with interest. This is the most absurd and incomprehensible full weight of natural justice.
Those of us who would feel the temptation to avenge the lives of the dear children cannot do it to the satisfaction of those who are now open to all reality, time and space. The children are now exposed to the full reality of the origin, planning, execution and the aftermath of that sinister massacre for which we mortals it is just a matter of speculation. So at the appropriate time natural justice will definitely catch up. The only favour the children could do for us is to witness in our lifetime the execution of natural justice. May be we may ask this from them.
The second reality of the massacre is that parents, relatives, and significant others lost persons or affinities that existed with the children. We never lost life as the children did. We are still alive. We looked at loss of life from an angle and from a distance because we never experienced it ourselves. The pain and bitterness of losing one’s life we cannot describe it because we have not gone through it. Death is still with us and it is tormenting us every moment of life, unlike the perished children who can no longer be tormented by death.
Because we are still alive and at the same time we lost our affinities that is where the agony lies. We lost our children, sisters, relatives, friends, schoolmates, classmates etc. This is a situation we are to live with which by all means has compromised our mental health with consequences of trauma, depression, separation anxiety disorder, attention deficit, panic, obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias and posttraumatic stress.
It is also very likely for the pupil community and especially for the survivors to experience reactive behaviour to the trauma reminders that can result
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