An Idiot’s Guide to Sawa 2012…

…if I had any guts this piece would really be called ‘what your PFDJite parents were too stupid to tell you!’… but it has been one long emotionally draining week and I have no strength left in me to out scream YPFDJ and then put up with my sensible friends misplaced sense of right and wrong… so for one week only I am going to reach for any residual sensibility  and adopt a milder undertone!

…so you think you are heading to Sawa? The way I look at it you have two problems: deciding if you want to do it the Eritrean way or the diaspora way. If you decide to do it the diaspora way you have no problems all you have to do is pack your day wear, evening wear, as many PFDJ tshirts as you can squeeze and as much suntan lotion and anti malaria pills as your chemist (I don’t know what chemists are called in the USA!) allows and off you go swapping your winter dance floor at PFDJ mekete meetings for your summer dance floor at Ground Sawa… I hope you will pardon me for thinking you an idiot and your parents stupid though!!

… if you decide to do it the Eritrean way then you have a further two problems: whether you will do it the PFDJ way of the Warsay way… If you do it the PFDJ way you have many problems but not a major dilemma… all you have to do is make sure you haven’t booked any major life events for the next 10-20 years… make sure you have no ambitions to go to university, get married, have children or even have plans to visit your family from time to time. And warn your parents not to get ill or, God forbid, die while you are out there at Sawa… more importantly make sure you leave your personal opinion, personal faith or conviction and any thoughts about expressing them long before you decide to go Sawa PFDJ style (personal liberty is a nasty habit that takes a while to kill off)…if you want subscriptions to news papers you can choose from Hadas Eritrea, Hadas Eritrea in Arabic, Hadas Eritrea in English or Hadas Eritrea Tigre (check locally they might come under different names)…sensible people your age often have ideas for a career… make sure yours are relevant to your circumstances… in other words… don’t bother for your new masters will decide what you will do and how long you will do that for… no terms or conditions will be discussed with you… if you are thinking that, that would make you effectively a slave… you would be dead right maybe you should consider doing Sawa the … idiot (pardon me) I mean the… diaspora way after all?

While you are at it, you can discharge your lawyer (save on retention fees) you won’t need one, if you are arrested for something whilst doing Sawa the PFDJ way… what you will need the most is a funeral director rather than a lawyer… for unless you decide to leg it out of Sawa at that point there is a very significant risk of you dying in the hands of a torturer… if you decide to leg it you will actually end up doing Sawa the Warsay way…

When you do Sawa the warsay way you will have many problems… but the main ones will be whether you will dye trying to get somewhere safe and prosperous or whether you will simply die of hopelessness! If you decide to simply die of hopelessness go to one of many refugee camps in Sudan or Ethiopia… and depending on how resigned you are to dying of hopelessness you can experience a prolonged or accelerated dying, from the inside out… chances are you will choose to die trying to reach safety and prosperity, in this case you have various options: to die in the hands of traffickers who will fleece you, your family, your extended family, your friends and neighbours and their family, extended family and friends and neighbours too… alternatively you could choose to die in the Mediterranean where you could die off the costs of Libya, Italy or Malta either way you will die… you might at this point consider you are better off dying of hopelessness instead… but given that dying is dying it might be better to die in the hands of PFDJ torturers… unless ofcourse you choose to do Sawa the diaspora version in which case you will have to pardon me for calling you  a SELFISH IMPOSTER!