PHILLIP REESE

I am the luckiest person in the world. I ran away from home when I was 5 years old, then again at 7 years old, then I went to military boarding school, I had foster parents, then I went to live in Africa, again with my parents. I felt free there, those big spaces, no private proprieties, streams. The little town where we settled down was one mile high, we did not have poison scorpions or snakes and there were no predators but thousands of crows in a long queue crossing the skies everyday coming behind beautiful mountains (scarps). I didn't want to go back to Europe, but I was forced to.

Put in a boarding school, rejected, kept alone there at Christmas, I rebelled the only way I knew, not studying. At the age of 15, the impossible idealistic child was sent back to Africa to live with his father, then already separated from mother. My father was a workaholic and he was always travelling either in the savannahs or to foreign countries leaving me alone behind. Later, I left my father and I lived on the streets.

I was the luckiest boy in the world, a friend saw me and helped me. I got a job, transferred to a far away place not far from the Okavango river, and I caught an endemic disease. I was hospitalised during 45 days, but with the pressure to join the army, I ran away from the hospital to not lose the first day of the military training school.

During my military service time, I got in trouble with the military hierarchy. One year later, this girl got me, and problems did not end there.

The last phrases are the context for the book BEFORE I LOST MY COUNTRY.