We Deserve to See the Sun

Yes, we are angry and we are right to be. We are angry because we carry a burden we don’t want and we don’t accept to carry anymore. We are tired of situations that darkened our grandparents twilights and our lives’ dawns. We are angry because we deserve to see the sun.

Thus we stand up and light our own fires. Not by fanning the embers: that is what despair people do. But we are not desperate. We struggle a lot to not let our anger turn into anything else than an inexhaustible determination to change our existence. So we light fires of hope and blow on them so that they may spread quickly all over the region. And actually they do, Mr President!  You’d be surprised to see how much we, the Middle East youth, is currently blowing and blowing on those fires! Because we want one very simple little thing: to live. But to live for real, which means not only having dreams and goals, but having opportunities to achieve them. And this is possible only through…peace, this tiny tiny window that has to be opened to let us run outside the room and embrace true life. Because from the room we can, not only imagine, but actually see what true life looks like. And we love it! And we are excited about it! And we cannot wait anymore for it!

Let’s be clear, Mr President: we don’t ask you to open the window for us: it is our responsibility to open it. But we need you to open it with us. How? By really hearing us, not only just listening to us. By strongly supporting us, not only by sincerely encouraging us. And by putting aside, just for a while, diplomatic considerations to focus on human ones. You know already the political sad face of the Middle East: take time to have a look on its human hopeful face.

We know it takes you a lot of courage, Mr President, to stand up and speak. And for sure we know that it takes even more courage to make a break and listen. But you are the one capable to do so. You have to. Because the window will end opened, and not broken, one day. The only question is: do you want to be part of it, Mr President, and would you push, again not for us but definitely with us, this window?

Hanane Harrath

YaLa Young Leaders