For eight straight days I have lived with the thundering sound of bullets from the nearby villages of Kake I, II and Diffa. I go to bed to the frightening sound of a thousand gunshots and wake up with the urgent blast of bullets that sound like bombs. My alarm has become useless.

I can’t tell whether I truly really sleep. I leap into the darkness of my room every time the sounds come on. And recently it has been in intervals of about 15 minutes. It always seems near. Like an approaching hurricane. I feel like the gunshots reach into my heart and create a new set of fast painful beats.

I am afraid. But fear has become normal. You see it in the faces of aged mothers running barefooted into my street at the sound of approaching gunshots. You see fear tattooed on the faces of little boys and girls hawking boiled groundnuts, as they eye the approaching fleet of masked military men wielding massive guns, seated behind trucks, staring with crimson eyes as children flee, dropping their trays, falling on sharp stones but refusing to feel pain until they reach something that resembles a safe place.

I am afraid but fear is now normal, because in the intervals of fifteen minutes, when the sound of gunshots halt, you hold your chest and feel your heartbeat, and thank God you are still alive. You are not one of those ferried speedily behind blood-drenched cars to beg for space in a mortuary overflowing with corpses full of bullet holes.

You hold your chest and thank God your corpse is not in a ravine, decaying because the military has allowed only an interval of fifteen minutes for those who are alive to feel their own heartbeat before being burnt or gunned or chased into bushes. Bushes now crowded with heavily pregnant women hoping that god performs some miracle at delivery, just so that she does not die, even if the baby does.

I am afraid, but you see, I know that my government is one that wants me to feel that living in fear is normal. I pick up my pen, feel my rushing heartbeat and write what I feel. So that one day, when fear becomes normal for me, I would know that it was not always that way. It was my government that made it so.

K.B.E