The kids watch TV indiscriminately. Besides the usual cartoons, which I monitor from feminist and anti-racist perspectives, they watch the news, documentaries, whatever everyone else is watching.

I had left BBC on this morning and exited the room for a short while just before BBC began a feature on Africa. When I returned the two of them were staring at the TV with wide-eyed horror.
The feature was on child soldiers, I don’t know where specifically. Abdullah said, with his mouth slack, something about one of the the boys now on the screen having had to take another child’s brain out, something about blood. The presenter is talking about “unspeakable horrors,” explaining that these children must either commit these atrocities or have suffer these deaths themselves.
As he speaks, the camera scans the faces of the children. They are all boys, and all but one stare back at the screen blankly. One seems to smile; he’s handsome.
The camera returns to the presenter, who informs us he is about tell us the story of another child, a girl. He warns us that the story is disturbing, that if there are children in the room, it would be advisable to ask them to leave.

I change the channel. We are now staring at the complacent face of a Conservative MP talk about same-sex marriage in the House of Commons.

Aishah appears close to tears. Abdullah is draped over a chair on the other side of the room, seems to be holding himself away from the TV.
For the rest of the day the three of us are irritable. I keep trying to decide what my stance on childhood innocence is, whether or not there is such a thing, whether or not I do the right thing when I let the kids watch things about the real world that reveal more evil than any of us are capable of comprehending.

I remember waking up one night when everyone else was asleep and switching on the TV. This too was Africa, still unnamed. A group of soldiers surrounded a young boy, were kicking him as he lay on the ground, screaming. The TV was on mute, but in my memories, it’s as though I can hear him. They stripped him of his clothes, tied his arms, his legs. They kept beating him. I see him now, curled on the ground like a feotus, and the soldiers arranged around him in a circle; they are laughing.

I was shaking, crying, sitting there on the floor in the flickering light of the TV.
This was the during the first month we spent in Canada, before I enrolled in grade nine.
The image of that crying boy has blurred over time.

I do not cry now, when I watch the news. Still the sickening lurch of the stomach is there. Still the unfocused anger and guilt. Still the question – why does God allow this?
The answers are always too glib for me to connect to the reality of the atrocities that we continue to allow.

And yet, concretely, what can I do? I stump myself with this question, effectively silence my conscience.

My father often speaks of having to own up to one’s sins on the Day of Judgement. He often speaks of caring for the poor, for family. And yet, it seems to me, if God is Omnipotent, and if we are God’s vicegerents, then our responsibility extends worldwide. We will be held accountable for the fates of people we never met. I truly believe that, but when has belief ever amounted to anything. I don’t know what to do, how to help. How to save the world.