growing up (1/3)

As a child I was shielded to the horrors of the real world. I was oblivious. I was ignorant. My family, my parents, and adults all around me abhorred the military regime and I didn’t get why. I was lucky enough to be born into a family that could always provide a roof over my head and food on the plate, so I never realized how bad things used to be and how bad they still were. All a kid wanted to do was play and play I did.

We didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t have the internet and we barely had electricity. I remember when I was younger, we only had electricity 12 hours a day. 6 on, 6 off, 6 on and 6 off. At least that was the usual pattern. Sometimes blackouts were longer. I hated the days that it came on from midnight to 6 in the morning and then blacked out until noon. I would curse those days when I was asleep to enjoy light and awake to enjoy anything but electricity. Even then I didn’t know about the underdeveloped problems our country faced. At first I played as kids do, ran outside, ran around the house, played with shadows at night. Then I became spoiled and in a way privileged, all I wanted was to play on the PlayStation 2 and sleep in an airconditioned room at night.

Trivial as it was, this was when I learned that life could be unfair and sometimes there was nothing you could do about it. I would hear that government officials and high ranking military authorities never had their electricity lines cutoff. To me, as a kid, that was unjust and biased. With my unopened and narrow little mind I thought, "That’s not fair! Shouldn’t we all have electricity together?!”. All because I couldn’t play this new game I bought on a certain day.

(I’m writing this in 3 parts, so please read onto the next ones!)