Faces You Can Never Forget
Everyone watching the news, watching documentaries and learning encounters moments of great sadness at the state of the world that has become in which we live.
When you turn on the news, you watch faces of people. Some of the faces people encounter are people aiming for grandeur, or people in great grief. These are the face that you remember for life.
I got to watch Robert Fisk’s documentary (Ends of the Earth) Beirut to Bosnia.
One of these faces which captured my attention was of an old lady who was a victim of the Bosnian war.
She was uprooted from her home because of the war, and managed to escape the direct effects of the war. When asked about what her plans are, she kept a strong face, and that maybe the international community will take care of them.
She radiates a sense of confidence which people around her do not have. This may be because she has a child-relative she is hugging.
Robert Fisk continued on asking questions to people with many moments of silence of people wondering even if they should have been alive.
In a few minutes, Robert interviews the woman again, but this time with a photo of her enjoying a picnic with her relatives. He asks her which ones are dead. Most of them were, including her mother and husband.
Then Robert asks, “What do you think when you look back at these days now?”
It was a rather blunt and direct question.
She get caught off guard and says,
“What?”
“Why ask when you know everything? Please don’t ask me.”
She raises her hand and gets up, with a shakey voice.
She continues, “I’m sorry. I don’t have any strength anymore.”
The fascade she was trying to put up that everything is all right had been broken down. She walks away crying, trying to wipe the tears. She is going to be a refugee and then scattered somewhere in Europe.
I realise that she is more of a victim and her dead relatives as she has to live with great grief throughout her life.
Another face that I can’t forget was aired recently in “Unreported World - Kosovo , State of Denial”
Sam Kiley reports about Susan, who is a Serbian mother of three living in Kosovo. Her children, and the Albanian husband died in recent raid by “security forces”, during which she was raped. Now she is the only Serbian in the town.
Being a Serb, she is unable to find employment in Kosovo. She now feeds what is left of her family from the city dump (see bottom right of the photo). This includes the cloths that she is wearing. I saw the same attempt in her face to be willingly presenting a mask of strength for the camera, as the Bosnian woman had.
In the deep recesses of the night, you think about what the world has turned into, this is symbolised by the faces of extreme grief that you can’t ever forget.
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