Abdullahi Suleiman was just recovering from losing his wife to death before he was dealt another very hard blow, Sunday.
He left home in the afternoon for Hargeisa City center to go about his daily chores. His twenty-year-old daughter was in charge.
He was looking forward to returning home and breaking fasting with the kids he was now the only parent they had when he received a call.
“Three of your children were fatally hit by a speeding car,” he was told by a neighbor who could not find any other way to break the tragic news.
“In what condition are they?” were the only words he could utter, each word running over the other in shock.
He was told to run to the Hargeisa Group Hospital to find out for himself.
The neighbor, of course, knew Abdullahi was not to reach the kids alive but there was no other way anyone could tell a parent of such a tragedy. Words to ease the pain in such a situation are yet to be invented. One trips only over meanigless platitudes that do not sink in or make sense to benumbed senses.
Abdullahi reached the hospital. He saw two bloodied bundles covered. Dead. The nurses were struggling with the third. Life left him, too, as soon as he reached by his bedside. Two turned tp three bundles. Where barely an hour ago there were three buoyant lives, now there were three broken masses of bone and flesh.
To Abdullahi, a 20-year old, a 15-year old and a 13-year old were gone forever, following their mother to the grave.
According to the traffic police, a speeding car hit all three, killing two of them on the spot.
Such very devastating road accidents are increasing by the day in Somaliland, claiming hundreds of lives per month.
People are calling for more harsh punishments for irresponsible drivers to replace existing loopholes in law and culture. No matter the enormity of the crime committed or callousness, the carelessness that caused it, drivers come out of prison soon after. Prize money changes hands and the handshakes which follow let driver-criminals out.
The law must reign supreme.
