Darfur

/ 30 May 2009

I think I know something of what Bob Herbert means when he says that “The tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is understandable.” He goes on:

But it’s a tendency, as Elie Wiesel has cautioned, that must be fought.

We have an obligation to listen, for example, when a woman from a culture foreign to our own recalls the moment when time stopped for her, when she was among a group of women attacked by soldiers:

“They said to us: ‘If you have a baby on your back, let us see it.’ The soldiers looked at the babies and if it was a boy, they killed it on the spot [by shooting him]. If it was a girl, they dropped or threw it on the ground. If the girl died, she died. If she didn’t die, the mothers were allowed to pick it up and keep it.”

The woman recalled that in that moment, the kind of throbbing moment when time is not just stopped but lost, when it ceases to have any meaning, her grandmother had a boy on her back. The grandmother refused to show the child to the soldiers, so both she and the boy were shot.</blockquote>

My tears are flowing freely. My prayers, too. But what else can we do? Learn more. Support organizations like Physicians for Human Rights, Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief.

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