The Turtledove

A baby turtledove broke one of its wings. I saw it walking around in the backyard two days ago, and was surprised to find it wasn’t flying away when approaching it. 

Its parents stopped taking care of it, so we had to leave some water and fat balls by its side. The bird is still moving around or chilling under the shadows of a bush, like a caterpillar waiting to take flight. 

Just like a dove, a turtledove is an omen of peace, prosperity, balance, and happiness to whoever it encounters. 

Today though, the turtledove became a harbinger of death: my cousin Léo was murdered by armed Islamists in Niger, in the region of Kouré, while serving as a humanitarian aid worker. He was my age.

I’m speechless, so I’ll try to write down my feelings in a few words.

I feel pissed. I feel sad. We didn’t talk since we were 12 or 13, so we weren’t close and my grief isn’t as strong as I feel it should be, but he died a martyr, a hero: I have no doubt he is in a better place and has no reason to envy us. I feel more sorry for his mother, who raised him by herself through thick and thin. Our mothers grew up together, so it deeply affected my mother as well. It could have been me instead of him, but fate decided otherwise.

What’s the point of doing humanitarian work if it’s only to end up full of bullets? It feels meaningless. You go to a country to help, and you get yourself killed for it. Maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved. There will always be bad people ready to destroy everything you’re trying to build. Maybe it ain’t worth it. Or maybe it means we need to stop staying so idle and double our efforts to make the world a better place.

Léo, just like the turtledove, came to bring peace. But who brings peace to the peace bringer? It takes a long time for a wing to heal itself, but we can’t bring back the dead. There is nothing much we can do, except dedicating our lives to honor their memories.