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Oscar Bamwebaze Bamuhigire
E mail: obamuhigire@
Mobile number: +256772927955
There Is No Happiness Without Compassion
Therefore, to love my neighbor is to love myself, and to love myself is to love my neighbor. By this definition, my neighbor is every living and non living thing in this life. What I do to others is what they will do to me, and what I do to myself is what I will do to others. I get from life what I put into it.
The Healing Power Of Self love (P. 176)
It was close to midnight and all I wanted to do was get to bed and rest. I had had a very long and tiring day. But shortly before I could switch off my lights, I was rattled by the thumping sounds of a barrage of kicks, slaps, and punches, which emanated from outside our walled up enclosure. My heart rammed heavily against my rib cage, because I knew at once that someone was being beaten. It eventually became clear to me that an angry husband was battering his feeble bodied wife.
I peeped through my window and could se the angry husband reap off a branch from an Avocado tree in a nearby banana plantation. He then thrashed and flogged his helpless wife until she screamed out for help at the top of her muffled voice. This woman was right in the middle of a densely populated residential area, but everyone who heard her chilly cries just closed their doors and drew their curtains!
I stepped out of my room to intervene in the situation, and that is when I spotted the nearly lifeless body of the battered wife crawling desperately into our compound. “Help me!” she cried out, “my husband is killing me!” I could see her husband closing in one her. He was as huge as a buffalo, and because of his massive size, I froze still in fear.
My other neighbors came out of their tiny rooms to witness what was happening, and quickly withdrew into the safety of their rooms, shutting their doors behind them. The terrified woman gathered enough energy to dash off into a bachelor’s room. He was seated inside watching a football match on his TV. “Help me sir!”, she cried out, her body smeared in blood stains. The bachelor got up casually from his seat, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw her out of his room and back into the courtyard where her angry husband was waiting to finish her off.
I warned her husband not to beat her, and I threatened him that I would call the police. But he took one look at me and figured out that I was no threat to him. He grabbed his almost lifeless wife and began to kick, flog and slap her. She managed to wriggle herself free from his grip and tried to dash into my room for safety. Barely had she made it passed the threshold of my door when he caught up with her and began to beat her again.
I now became determined to stop this man and I sought the assistance of my neighbor. He took one look at the dying woman and replied nonchalantly, “Ah! Those two are just in love.” But after I insisted that we had to restrain the man from killing his wife, he agreed to intervene. The angry man stopped beating his wife when he was confronted by the two of us. We calmed him down, and advised his wife to flee to the nearest police station. I also advised her to divorce her abusive husband.
We walked with the angry man right up to his room, as a way of ensuring that he didn’t beat up his wife again. But a few minutes later, his battered wife popped up from a nearby banana plantation and stood right next to him, in a seemingly romantic manner!
“I told you guys,” bellowed out the angry man “that this woman can never leave me alone however much I beat her up or chase her away.”
“That’s not our problem,” I replied the angry man, “As far as we are concerned, you will be arrested the next time you beat up your wife.” Fortunately, we were able to force the woman to pack up her bags and get lost, because we didn’t want her to die.
The very next day, on my way home from work, I met an eight year old child dragging a five year old child on the highway, amidst blows, kicks, slaps and verbal abuses. This young boy was doing to his brother exactly what the angry man had done to his wife the previous day. There was a group of men and women standing across the highway, but they did nothing to intervene. The five year old boy had been crying for several minutes before I was able to reach him and rescue him from his abusive brother.
These two incidents have baffled me because I can not understand why normal human beings would refuse to come to the rescue of a dying person. Psychologists call such inhumane behavior ‘learned helplessness’
What these people do not realize is that we are all interconnected by some invisible thread, and the injuries inflicted upon other people, are in reality inflicted upon us. When we choose not to come to the rescue of those who are suffering, we suffer too. We are suffering today because we either abused someone yesterday, refused to prevent someone from being abused, or because we were abused and no one did anything to help us.
All the people in my neighborhood, who chose not to help the dying woman and the crying child, are all poor and unhappy. I guess God has no reason to take them out of their misery. ....
These are just a few of the cases that I have known. Whether we like it or not, much of our pain and suffering has a lot to do with how we treat other people. There can be no happiness without compassion. Each time we abuse someone, we abuse ourselves; each time we refuse to help someone who is suffering, we too suffer; and each time we become obsessed with our own needs at the expense of others, we become miserable. We are all one and the same person.
OSCAR BAMUHIGIRE has more than twelve years of experience as an alcohol and drug addiction counselor. He has a degree in Psychology from Makerere University, and training in the Therapeutic Community model from DAYTOP International, New York, U.S.A (America’s oldest and largest drug treatment program). In 2003, he represented Africa at an international symposium on alcohol and drug addiction held in Rome, the Vatican, organized by the Vatican and the Italian Federation of Therapeutic Communities. During his stay in the Vatican, he personally met Pope John Paul II. He is one of the founders of Serenity Centre, which is Uganda’s only residential treatment center for addicts. He has also worked as an addiction counselor in other countries like Bangladesh and Kenya, authored more than one hundred newspaper articles on addiction treatment, and featured several times on Ugandan Television and radio talk shows. Early in his career, he received a vocational Award from the Rotary Club of Kampala South in recognition of his work with addicts. Oscar Bamuhigire suffered from alcoholism for ten years, but recovered in 1995 after he joined a 12 step group. He currently lives in Uganda, where he works as an addiction counselor in private practice. He has a website at: http://www.writersownwords.com/
ISBN: 9781440101373
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