Moses Mensieur Mukarage, Susan Knapp

Why I Couldn't Smile (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Why I couldn't smile is a story between two friends, living on different sides of the world and grappling with age old questions of Why am I here? What is my purpose? And Why Me?

Written as letters the book was originally communicated between the two friends in the form of WhatsApp messages. Some by text and others by voice notes. Mensiye from his home on the rural outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda and Susan who at the time was in Australia.

Mensiye writes of the upheaval of his life, family and the world as he knew it, when at the age of six genocide broke out in his homeland killing millions. After living through unimaginable brutality Mensiye is then 'discovered' and offered a place in the African Children's Choir where at the age of seven he travels to America to perform in concerts around the country.

Susan who met Mensiye as an adult when she was working in Rwanda, them both sharing a passion for education and empowerment, grapples in responding to many of her friends' letters from her comfortable life in Australia.

Through their tears in writing Why I Couldn't Smile, both Mensiye and Susan came to an understanding of the collective need across the world for healing.

This story is not one where you will find any victims...quite the opposite. Through this story you will find that faith, forgiveness and a knowingness of us all sharing one story we can unite for a more peaceful humanity where all can survive, thrive and prosper.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Moses Mensieur Mukarage
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798232569389
• Artikelnr.: 75725160

Autorenporträt

A little bit of background from Susan

Mensiye and I met when I lived in Rwanda in 2015. I was working there and at one point I shared a house with his infant son, my daughter, and the mother of his child.

It was on my third visit back where I suggested to Mensiye that the world needed his story. I also believed that it would be his story that could potentially generate an income for him and his family to live beyond a subsistent model.

On this visit I had come from Australia, where I had been exposed to things, I had never experienced in my 25 years working as a teacher in Africa, Asia and The Middle East. Things such as suicide being the highest form of death in Australia for people under the age of forty. Things like loneliness being the second highest killer of people and homelessness reaching epidemic proportions. Things like children refusing to go to school, self-harming, drug testing stations out the front of primary schools testing mothers for narcotics as they kissed and dropped their children at the gate...I just couldn't get my head around this.

Having decided to put the story down on paper, I was now back in Australia and Mensiye in Rwanda where he lived without a laptop. Determined to get this down, Mensiye relived the pain and torture of his life in the form of whatsapp messages he would type on his phone and send me.

Reading these messages was devastating and at some point, led me into a literal writing paralysis. Unlike me, Mensiye speaks many languages and English is not the first (you will learn this story inside the pages of the book). So, in addition to editing and sequencing his story, I had to process hearing the life of my friend as he navigated stories and situations my life and background could simply not comprehend. That coupled with the world I was now living inside Australia was such a challenge to reconcile within myself.

It's not an easy read, because it questions many things about life, love, faith and atrocity. It has however been designed in a simple format of letter writing so the reader can read short pieces at a time or choose not to put it down and read the whole book at once.