A day filled with so much emotions

This morning, I had a long cry over the sad news of Joash. It is pronounce Joe-ash. We spent a week together in our advanced CJ training. Then, the last time we met was at the CJ conference. The tragedy is just too shocking to take. He died in an accident with his two sisters, father and his maternal grandma. Right now, his younger brother is still in critical condition. His other sister and mother too are injured.

It is something none of us can comprehend or will ever understand. I can only pray. Keep his family in your prayers because his younger brother who is 13 years old is said to be still in critical condition. Ask for the divine help for the mom and two other sisters to give them strength to face their losses. From Joash’s Facebook page, you can see how many lives he had touched.

Then, with the tears and all, I noticed a new Tweet from ICFJ and checked out the video below:

Initially, I thought ‘hey, who played around with my videos!’. Then, I realised it is from ICFJ which is the US partnership with Malaysiakini who funded the citizen journalism training. It is the greatest honour and I feel sort of happy. And then, I saw Joash was in the video too. So, it sort of tied in. And that made me cried even more.

Joash was the chap who went to cover Rais Yatim. And I recalled how amused he was when he did research. Before he left for that video assignment, he Googled for Rais Yatim. He was sitting behind me during our course and he discovered that I am THAT blogger who called Rais names. I guess he probably felt a lot less nervous meeting Rais after he knew what sort of things I said about Rais. So, that made it even worse because I remembered the laughs we had when he returned to our class. He said he had to do many takes of ‘stand-upper’ before getting one he is satisfied with.

The only comfort I can find is he is with the Lord. He has return home to be with God. But the most heart-wrenching thing is how is his mother going to cope with the losses of her mother, husband, son and two daughters? Only God knows.

Rest in peace, Joe-ash.