Grade 8, Rena Le Lona
Committing suicide at a young age or even when you are older is totally wrong, because at the time you take your life, God decides to increase your living or eternal life, but you just choose to take your life so easily. And even your soul won’t rest in peace, because it wasn’t your time to leave the world, but you actually decided to. Killing yourself is not a solution to solving your problems that you are facing, but it is an evil spirit that makes you to do so. Even me, I’m facing so many problems while I’m still young, and I’m thinking of doing this because there’s nothing I’m living for in this world, but at the same time, there is something that is telling me not to do so, and many people are advising me about how it is dangerous, and they also told me to not do so because they still need me in life. But all I can say is that life is too short and it is not easy.
Once upon a time, there was a young beautiful lady at the age of fifteen years, named Owami. This young lady and beautiful child was staying with her grandmother in Gauteng after her parents both died in an accident on the way to visit in KwaZulu Natal. Her mother was named Zamokuhle Ndlovu and her father was named Lindelani Mpiyakhe Khanyile. She was living with her grandmother in Pretoria in a RDP house while they were waiting for this house for seven years. Owami was a beautiful girl, quiet, sweet, kind, and respecting adults because she was taught to respect from her home. They were living a hard life because they were very poor in the community. Owami was a grade 10 learner at Mfundisweni High School, and part time on weekends she would go and look for a job in the supermarket for working only two days.
Even her grandmother was not working because she was disabled and in a wheelchair. The worst part is that at Home Affairs they said that the computer was saying that she was dead for a long time, while she was still alive, so that was why she was not even getting grant money for being disabled and old. That is the only part which was so painful; when Owami thought about it, she just started crying, and remembered her mother’s last words when she said, “Don’t cry my child, be strong, everything will be okay when time goes.”
When Owami went to school, she must start the day by choosing food that is being brought by social workers and feed her grandmother. Sometimes she would leave home without eating anything, and go to school without anything to eat. That made her feel very ashamed of herself, and that she was nothing in life, which was very wrong. When she was in the classroom, she thought wrong things, of killing herself, and who she would leave her grandmother with, because she loved her grandmother but she didn’t listen to her thinking.
After two years, when she was doing her matric, things started to get harder and harder. She decided to listen to herself, and decided to take her own life a week after she finished matric to make her grandmother happy, when the year had ended and results were going to be out. On the 31th December 2002 on the date which her mother died, in the morning when she must go and get her results, she decided she must hang herself with a rope on the tree at the back of her house where they stay. When her grandmother went to the bathroom, so she didn’t mind it. After a few hours, the grandmother suspected something had happened to Owami, and when she was walking she just saw a dead body hanging on the tree. She didn’t cry, but she fainted. When neighbours saw what happened they just called the ambulance to take them. When they arrived at the hospital, the doctors said Owami was already dead, and her grandmother’s heart was not beating anymore, which meant she was also dead because of the trauma. When days had gone, they buried them both, which was so painful.
What I will advise everyone, is that even when things are not good at home or you have many problems in life, killing yourself and taking your life is not a solution to problems