I wanna hold his hand

Thursday, 4 November 2010

Today was the first of two “journees pedagogiques,” which resemble teacher in-service days in the US. My friend and fellow PCV from the next town over came to my ’ville for the seminars. Since a lot of presentations like this are, in large part, pomp, I spent most of the opening ceremony reading articles I had torn out of sundry issues of The Christian Science Monitor newspaper and brought with me to Cameroon.

My friend’s “prison bus” didn’t arrive until mid-morning, so she showed up late to the gathering at school. I had spent the half hour before she came trying to get through an article that wasn’t more than 800 or 900 words. I couldn’t finish. I had made it about one-quarter the way through, but each time I tried to read on, I started crying.

In each of its print issues, the Monitor includes a spot on “People making a difference.” That edition’s “PMAD” story was about a woman, Sara Terry, who had created The Aftermath Project, a nonprofit that funds the work of photographers who wish to document how life goes on after war and conflict have ended. The project was born out of Ms. Terry’s experience as a photojournalist after the mass graves at Srebrenica were uncovered following the spate of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Although she didn’t want to, Terry eventually captured up-close shots of the grave where lay the bodies of Muslims killed in the massacre.

When I came to this line, my vision blurred: “Then [Terry] turned her camera on the anthropologist as she gently cradled a teenage boy’s partially preserved hand in the muck.”

I was in middle school as this latest tragedy in the Balkans exploded on the global scene. By this time, my family had moved away from my hometown, but I still kept in touch with my best friend from childhood there. In high school, she had two close friends whom, she said, were Bosnian. I’d heard many good things about them, but as the years wore on, those stories slipped from memory.

Then, seven months into my teaching job at the refugee center, I met a young man, also a teacher there, who’d come looking for my colleague to collect some English workbooks from her. He and I exchanged a few pleasantries, including clearing up that I was not, in fact, 14 or the daughter of my co-worker. My co-worker was driving me the few blocks home that afternoon, and as we pulled away from the curb, she mentioned that the man I’d just met was Bosnian. Instantly, those forgotten tidbits about my friend’s high school classmates flooded my mind. Although my hometown has a sizable Bosnian population, I just knew this man had been the boy I’d heard so much about all those years ago.

At the corner, my colleague stopped at a red light, and I seized that opportunity to roll down the window and holler across the street, “How long have you been in the US?”
“Since ’95,” came the response.
“Did you go to [my friend’s high school]?”
“Yes!”
“Do you know [my friend]?”

Let me interject that my new acquaintance had been with someone else when he came looking for my co-worker. I didn’t know who his companion was but thought maybe he was my friend’s other Bosnian classmate. When I asked whether Bosnian No. 1 knew my friend, both boys’ eyes lit up, and they smiled as they exchanged looks of surprise and shouted, “Yes!” By then, the light was green, so off we drove.

As soon as I’d eaten lunch, I facebooked my friend to say I thought I’d just met her Bosnian BFFs and was very excited. She confirmed the identity of Bosnian No. 1 but said his friend couldn’t have been Bosnian No. 2 because he now lived in another state and was currently doing doctoral research in Bosnia. Not so, I learned a few days later. Bosnian No. 2 had just returned to the States and was visiting his best friend in my hometown. The night before Thanksgiving, No. 1 invited me out with No. 2 and another friend of my childhood friend. After just a couple of hours, it was as if the three of us had been pals for years. I loved these boys and my friend’s best girlfriend.

Over many cups of coffee and tea, from biting winter evenings to balmy spring afternoons, Bosnian No. 1 allowed me to plumb his memories of his Balkan childhood. He let me see inside some of his heart.

His family had been refugees from the genocide. He and his brother were “mixed marriage” children, the sons of a Muslim father and Catholic mother. In their small town, Muslims and Christians had coexisted peacefully. But, as I understand it, when Serbs started killing Muslim Bosniaks, and, eventually, Christian Croats turned on the same group, there was no safe place for families of mixed cultural backgrounds like my friend’s. It didn’t matter that they were not themselves practitioners of either faith.

My friend’s town was not at the epicenter of the carnage. As the battles edged ever nearer, however, mother and father sent away their 12-year-old son to live with his grandparents in their summer home on the fabled Adriatic coast in Croatia. Parents and big brother stayed behind, hoping to wait out the conflict. When the war didn’t abate, they got out, got refugee status, and were resettled in the US.

By then, my new friend was 15. He didn’t have to witness the bloodshed his people suffered. But he was a boy, knowing that his people knew brutality. He was a half-Muslim boy who had been about the same age as the Muslim boy to whom that partially preserved hand belonged.

When I read about this young Bosnian boy whose life had not been spared, I wanted so much to hold my friend’s hand – not that man’s hand of his, but that child-hand he used to have. I wanted to kiss its palm and breathe thanks for its escape from evil. I wanted to whisper how grateful I am that it survived to touch my life and heart.

Eventually, I made it through the rest of the article. But the way the writer (and, I’m sure, Ms. Terry) drew such a gentle image from a scene of such horror still makes me misty-eyed. And the thought of my friend’s slender, now grown-up hands reaching out and up from a nation’s tragedy makes me smile through the tears.