Healing the Soul: A Spoonful of Silence

✍️ A story of memory, responsibility, and the humanity we must bring back.

The Witness

December 1990, Maputo, Mozambique.
This is my last domestic flight, I am exhausted and ready to go home. The cholera epidemic, the night offensive from the rebels, getting kidney stones due to heat and dehydration, the evacuation to Zimbabwe, driving over a land mine, it has been a very intense month. I have been living in Africa for over 4 years by then, I am used to this, but I am ready to go home.

The plane is full except for the seat beside me. Delays are normal for LAM (Linhas Aereas de Mocambique), but we are waiting for a last passenger. It is hot, humid and stuffy, we all are sitting and sweating patiently. The less I move, the more acceptable it is.

Two large United Nation officers in blue uniform enter the plane in company of a tiny old man. Abducted by the rebels and later released, he was now being sent back to his village. He was my seatmate for this flight.

Take a breath here, really.
Let the following words in.
Not just into your mind, but into your heart, your body, your soul.

What’s coming is intense. Visual. Almost intolerable.
Even decades later, I tremble as I try to write it.

The rebels punished him for trying to escape.

They cut off his eyelids.
They cut off his ears.
They cut off his nose.
They cut off his lips.
Everything that makes a human face.

He was a testament to human cruelty, clenched in a permanent grimace of infection.

He couldn’t blink. His eyes bulged, raw and wet, always crying.
His mouth never closed, like an unhealed wound, saliva pooling and dripping.
His gums had peeled back leaving his teeth exposed and decayed.
His nose once was a gapping dark void, a tunnel to the center of his skull.
The smell was of decay, something I learned to recognize and never got used to.

It was nearly impossible to witness.
But looking away felt like betrayal.
And I couldn’t be another one of those.

So I did what I could. I spoke, my voice thinned from the knot in my throat, cracked, stitched together from broken Portuguese and unbearable grief.
Words didn't matter. The moment did. The witnessing.

And there it was.
This man, who had been stripped of every facial softness, met my gaze.
No lids. Just eyes. Just pain.

I’ve seen war, torture, rape, parents carrying the dead bodies of their children turned to flesh by bombs. But that moment, that seat, that silence between us, that humid plane cabin saturated with the stench of suffering and injustice, that was the heaviest weight I was ever given to carry.

The food was served and I looked forward to it for relief, not sustenance. Something else I could focus upon to digest my emotions. It came in the cheapest plastic tray imaginable, thin, flimsy, barely holding. No one expected great service here. We were more cargo than passengers. I was not hungry, I ate what I was given.

I could hear my neighbor struggling to eat. His lips couldn’t close around the fork. His gums, exposed and bleeding, he fought to keep every bite in… with his hands. He moved through the meal like someone assembling fragments of himself, trembling, piece by piece.

And then, when I thought the moment was over, this happened.

I watched him clean his tray. Reverently.

He wiped the plastic spoon, the fork, and the tray itself with deliberate care. He even folded the limp paper napkin as one would fold fine silk. Each movement, slow, precise, sacred.

Then he tucked the bundle into a small cloth bag at his side. As if he had just been handed a gift beyond measure. As if the plastic spoon itself was a treasure, an object not to use, but an object of relief, the symbol of an even worse nightmare just finished.

At that moment, I could not hold it anymore, I broke into tears.

I had seen the most excruciating and soul wrenching moments, but nothing tore me open like the way that man handled a disposable spoon.

Even with experience, the knots in my throat were so tight I barely could breathe. I mimicked his movements, wiping my own tray, my own spoon. And then I turned to him and offered them.

Instead of reaching for the utensils, he reached for my hands.

I felt the callous skin of his palms, the bony fingers with barely any flesh left. His touch seeped through my skin, reaching deep into my soul. Skin to skin, I felt something move, a current, a silent transmission. It was a download of lived pain, of deceived hope, a primal scream echoing from the depth of the human soul, carried across time.

A touch I can never forget.

Then he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to my hands.
“Obrigado, obrigado,” he whispered, again and again,
as if I had given him gold,
as if I had handed him back his humanity.

This was not gratitude. It was grace.

More than thirty years later, I still cannot recount this without crying.
To this day, I cannot pass a trash bin filled with discarded plastic cutlery, without thinking of him. Every time.

And I wonder:

What kind of world are we living in, where a plastic spoon is a sacred object to one man, and landfill to another?

That spoon... it was not plastic. Not a spoon.
It was a mirror.
A mirror that was handed to me, so I could hand it to you, one day.
And in it, you’ll see truth.
You’ll see the world as it is.
The world as we accept it, make it.
It reflects what we choose to see, and what we dare not turn away from.

---

The Burden of Memory

This moment was not just something I witnessed.
It was something entrusted to me.

This man, whose name I never learned, offered me more than his story.
He handed me a memory he could no longer carry alone.

In the hollow of that spoon, in the softness of that folded napkin, he placed his suffering, his resilience, and his dignity, and without knowing it, asked me to become its keeper.

I was not meant to forget (how could I?).
I was meant to remember.
To hold it.
To give it voice.
To offer it, one day, to someone like you.

Because some stories are not for history books.
They are for the soul.
And they are given to messengers who will not turn away.

I carried this story unsure what to do with it.
It nested inside me, breeding a sorrow so dense it hardened into silence.
Every time I approached it, it burned. I screamed. I wept.
And when I tried to share, most people turned away.
I learned that pain without shape cannot be received.
So I waited. Until now.

Today, I know what to do with it.

I owe it to this man to share his story.
Not to prove anything. Not to demand. Not to explain.
Just to pass it on, from one human to another.

I am the voice of this man and all those I have seen suffer.
Those tortured, raped, jailed, banished to refugee camps, killed.
Children who never saw a school, a pair of shoes, or a glass of clean water.
Parents who held lifeless children, lost to famine, to landmines, but mostly to human greed and stupidity.

It is pouring out of me now like a thick, dark tar I can no longer contain.
This is the anger. This is the sadness. This is what people have long seen in my eyes.

It is the voice of the unheard.
The ignored.
The discarded.

This was my vow all along.

When I was six years old, while being abused, I made an oath:
I will be the voice of those who don’t have one.

It is a vow I have kept across lifetimes, across lifelines, across frontlines.
And now, I am doing what I came here to do.

Because these humans gave me the only thing they had left.
Not their names.
Not their bodies.
Not even their lives.
But their memory.

They made me a witness, not just to their pain, but to the proof of their existence.

So their lives, their pain, their presence in this world however short, would not be in vain, would not be erased, would not be ignored without someone noticing, witnessing, remembering.

Forgetting was never an option.

---

The Voice that was Forged

My voice was not forged in the comfort of a western refuge.
It was not shaped by privilege, nor inspired by a social media meme we share to feel good while keeping everything the same.

My voice is a testimonial.
Of sweat. Of tears. Of blood.
It carries the message entrusted to me by those I have seen suffer.
Those tortured, oppressed, and killed.
Those I carried into the hospital tent.
And those I carried out, to be buried.

For three decades, I have walked into the fire of human suffering.
I have worked to alleviate the burden of civilians in distress, across countless countries, on every continent.
Much of that work was done in war zones.

I have lived overseas my entire adult life, immersed in the raw pulse of diverse cultures and religions. I speak three languages fluently. A few more, I can get by.
I learned. Not from textbooks. From people. From survival. From listening.

I’ve put my life on the line more times than I can count.
Shot at. Sentenced. Deserted. Arrested. Interrogated. Intimidated.
I crossed borders illegally into war zones.
I walked through minefields.
I stood on frontlines.
Not to fight, but to witness, to serve, to stand where most don’t.

But I never carried a gun.
And I never will.

I studied hard sciences, political science, and psychology.
I have walked many paths, from guiding individuals through personal transformation, to shaping global initiatives that have impacted billions (yes, with a b).
I dove into spirituality, not to learn it, but to become it, through death, through grief, through breath, through fasting, through silence.

You don’t have to agree with everything I say.
You don’t have to see the world as I do.

But I invite you to listen.
Because I didn’t come here to please.
To pretend.
To entertain.
To hide.

I came here to remember.
To speak.
To stand.

And to remind you,
whoever you are, wherever you are,
that your voice still matters too.

---

The Mirror is Now Yours

And now I give the message,
the memory,
to you.

Because this voice is not for me.
I already know.
It is for you.

For you to wake up from the nightmare we are creating.
For you to stand in your own genius,
your own perfection,
your own divinity,
and to move in the world from that knowing.

It is possible.

No one is too small.
No one is powerless.
Everything is an expression of consciousness.
As powerful as God itself.

You have the power of consciousness.
You have the power of Love.
And that is all you need.

That tiny old man, disfigured, discarded, voiceless, found a way.
A way to speak.
With silence.
With suffering.
With a touch.

His transmission was profound.
And it is now reaching you.

So now, it is not only my voice you are hearing.
It is his.
Still reaching.
Still thankful.
Still powerful.

And now—it’s yours too.

Post Scriptum

At the time of this story, elected President Joaquim Chissano was slowly guiding Mozambique out of the ashes of civil war, attempting to build a credible republic from devastation. Yet, due to his reformist approach, his government was flagged as Marxist, placing it in the crosshairs of Cold War logic.

The major rebel group, RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), was known for its brutality. Covertly funded by Western interests under the pretext of ideological balance, RENAMO abducted entire villages. Men were forced into agricultural servitude to feed the rebel army. Women were used as sexual slaves.

Punishment for attempted escape was unspeakable. Torture was not just a means of control, it was a message. A warning. A public ritual of fear and cruelty designed to keep others in line.

Coming from the so-called 'West,' I still freeze at the thought that even a fraction of the taxes I paid may have helped fund this barbarity, elevating me, unknowingly, to the rank of accomplice. In the face of my potential karma for any unwilling contribution, I cannot say “I did not know”.

And I wonder, what about today’s taxes? What barbarity do they serve? (April 15 the the tax due day in the US).

---

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.