Westgate survivor feels no hate for attackers, calls for love
A survivor of the Westgate terror attack has for the first time unburdened herself with a confession of not hating the Al-Shabaab militants who killed 167 people two years ago.
Margie Brand, an American who was pictured clutching her young child during the attack, has called for a message of love
She posted her feelings on Facebook on Wednesday, describing how she played dead for five hours together with her face to face encounter with one of the militants during the attack
“Two years ago, armed men walked into a shopping mall on a crowded Saturday morning wielding automatic rifles and killing everyone in sight. I held onto my eight month old baby, running, slipping, my heart jumping out of my chest,” she states on her post.
HID AMONG THE DEAD
“I hid among the dead for 5 hours. It felt like a lifetime. Experiencing sounds and images I wish I did not. They walked calmly, up and down, among the aisles. Killing everyone they found. Again and again they walked past us. Not seeing me lying, curled up a ball, among the dying. My baby remained silent. We’ll never know how. Logic told me it was the time of final breaths. I was ready. No hate. Yes, incredible palatable fear, but not hate. Fear that moved past fear. Becoming strangely, peacefully accepting. Curled up on the hard, cold floor. I listened to the sounds of death interwoven with the feeling of silence.”
“There he was. Looking down his barrel, straight at me. Towering. Eyes full of disdain. No one knows why that day of all days, after killing children, pregnant women, and anyone they could find, they told me to stand up. I knew that it would now be my end. They killed the woman lying next to me. They told me to walk. I walked over the dead. I walked out holding my baby. In another part of the mall my friend lay dead. He and sixty seven others never got to leave – many hundreds more still hold the scars from their wounds.”
In her post, she says that she still lives in fear.
TAKE ME BACK
“I still jump at the sound of a loud noise. I get up from a table and walk straight out of a restaurant if the lights flicker as they did just before the attack that day. Sights, sounds, smells – anything can unexpectedly take me back there. Take me back where I no longer want to go.”
“Instead of fear and hate, I invite you to join me. Join me in turning off the news. In most cases we already know what happened. We’ve heard and seen more than we ever need to know. I invite you to close your eyes, to imagine any image that gives you the feeling of love. Your newborn baby, children laughing, someone or something that you love. I invite you to take that feeling of love and imagine slowly breathing it out across the world. Wrapping our planet in it. Connecting with others who are emanating the same love. Breathing that feeling of love in and out.”
LOVE NETWORK
She concludes her post by saying; “As many times a day as you remember to, as many days as you can. Like a network of bright light connecting around the globe. I believe that together we can change the frequency of people’s thoughts and hearts. If we emanate fear and hatred, we connect with others who do the same, and we bring more and more into that field. If we emanate love, we grow our love network, and it envelops all others.”