knitting a world

Numbers do not tell stories. Millions displaced, the UN says. Thouands of human rights abuses a year, the international aid organizations decry. Grow the economy with "free" trade, our government disseminates. But today I heard the voice of human misery behind the stock figures, the catchphrases glibly tossed and dire warnings unheeded. I won't tell their stories here; they are not mine to tell. And I missed some things I should have picked up on as important. We were talking about grants, and one woman asked, "but they won't want to hear about our histories?" I realized later what she was really saying was -- does what happened to me matter?

I was meeting with ASMULIDER, an incredible group of women knitting their lives back together again, literally. They do have an awful name, though. It's supposed to be evocative of leadership (the "lider" part), but I'm pretty sure it falls well short of that, but then again, few words could describe their collective experiences, or who they really are. They are 25 or so women who have been displaced by the conflict. Displaced really doesn't come close to describing the horrors people who make the decision to pick up everything overnight and leave their homes have had to face. It sounds so clinical, one object moving into the space of another; ice cubes in a glass of water. This is anything but that. It's messy, humiliating, and degenerating.

The process of claiming status in the government's eyes as a displaced person involves bringing photos of your loved one's corpse, in triplicate. I cannot imagine anything worse, after the loss itself. So today the gruesome images made their teary way around the circle. It's hard for me to understand how people find the strength to go on, but somehow they do, at least that's what it looks like from the outside. As Gracie is fond of saying, the fight continues because we keep fighting.