Drool

I love books. Love love love. And I have since...what age mom? Like 4? Who knows...For awhile I had aspects of my personality and behavior that I hid away out of embarrassment, thinking that people would think I was a nerd, dork, freak, loser, etc. Now, however, I do not care (for the most part) and I would be flattered if anyone called me those words (well...besides loser...).

To give you all an example of my dorkiness and absolute adoration of books, I have kept a journal of all the books I have read since fourth grade. I think I have lost portions of it - I kept it on my computer for awhile and then lost some files. But now, I keep a hard copy with title, author, page numbers, and dates I started and finished. I also write down any quotes that strike my fancy. I started doing this when I first moved to Walpole because I was determined to read every book in the Walpole Public Library's young adult section. That didn't last long. I went about it systematically and the first couple A-authored books sucked and I got discouraged. It's amazing - even today, I attack projects in a similar fashion and get peeved and ditch them. But anyway, books...

Last week my roommate took me to the Peace Corps office in Santo Domingo where they have a wall of discarded books from previous volunteers. Man oh man...I could have kissed him. It was like paradise! I had to physically restrain myself from taking too many and only brought three home - Jodi Picoult's Picture Perfect, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (per Naureen's recommendation - can't wait!), and something about a goat that is a novel about the Trujillo regime. Very exciting.

But today...oh today I am drooling over a different kind of literature. My boss was at a conference in Chile last week and came back with the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces' Women in an Insecure World: Violence against Women, Facts, Figures and Analysis. While it's a bit dated (2005), it is simply a beautiful publication - not the subject matter, clearly, but the actual book. The weight of it, the feel of the pages, the pictures. Wow. The smell leaves something to be desired, but we will leave that aside. It's one of those publications that you don't want to open all the way for fear of bending the cover. I want to make one.

Despite reneging on my commitment to widows for my thesis, I, of course, had to look at the "Women in Mourning" section. And it's these statistics that make me want to reconsider my decision to change topics: in Bosnia-Herzegovina 92% of persons missing in relation to the armed conflict are men; in relation to the armed conflict in Kosovo this figure it 90%. The majority of these missing men were not members of the armed forces or armed groups, but civilians. Imagine losing all the male members of your family between the ages of 15 and 65 years and having no idea what happened to them...

I fill my head with information like this all the time, but the reality is that I have no idea what it would be like to experience any of the things I read about. I can't imagine losing someone close to me at all, let alone in a situation in conflict. Hell, I can't imagine living in conflict situation. But then to lose someone, to not know what happened to them, to be alone, to be displaced, to be threatened by violence...It's unimaginable I suppose.

And sometimes I worry that my own lackof experience of these things, particularly just the experience of being in a conflict situation, hinders my ability to truly understand. I can read and read and read, but I really don't have any clue what it would mean to go through a trauma and then try to "reconcile" with whoever has killed or disappeared or raped or...any number of things...me, my family, my friends, my community, my country. I know I am very very very lucky in so many ways. And I certainly do not wish to experience conflict (well maybe a little...) or trauma, but I do wonder about my place as an "outsider" trying to understand and "help". I don't have any answers and I know that these are questions that many academics and practitioners grapple with on a daily basis.

Ok that's it for the rambling. Back to my secondhand information gathering and reading this beautiful publication...ahhhhhh....