I, believe in God. But my friend Nuria does not do so. However, both agree that Man created religions fanaticisms greed and wars. War is the worst form of destruction Man has created and is the most glaring example of mans inhumanity to man.
The following is the poignant and tragic story of Nuria's father, told in her own words. Though she is Spanish she has written in English which she learnt when was in her forties.
"My father was a good man who lived only for his family and for his job of a little tradesman. However, he was too very religious a man. Because of that, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, one night some out of control men came to my home, waked him up, drew him out and shot him on the road next to a plane tree. We knew the exact spot because a farmer who had hidden himself nearby saw it all and afterwards put a mark on the tree and told my mother where it was. This plane tree was afterwards a place of pilgrimage for us. My mother, a very religious person too, told us, her small five children that God had chosen father to be a saint in heaven and we believed it. I was six, loved my father tenderly and missed him desperately. So I thought-not clearly at first that God was very unkind. That he had a lot of saints in heaven and could have done without my only dad.
Many years afterwards I stopped believing in any God at all, surely because I hated wars and learned that religion has often been the cause of wars, death and great suffering. Something more about that fateful day. The next morning, the same men came again and forced my mother to give them a lot of money for having carried her husband to the graveyard and to permit her to go and see him. My mother, of course, did not think of taking her children there. But I insisted I wanted to go and, finally, she gave herself in. So, I went to the graveyard and saw my father dead with dry blood all over him. And, somehow, my first life stopped there. I mean I grew up to be a normal adult but inside me there always was a little girl of six crying for her father. And so it was."
I now invite you open the other links below to find how the little girl Nuria grew up against all odds to become the first Woman Mayor of her town La Garriga and her contributions later to her beloved town and its people..
