Black dog days: II

Ghor Mission Jan 2007 - Me with girl students 01, originally uploaded by frida world.

Firstly thanks for your kind and thoughtful (and funny, thanks Wanda) comments. Isolation is part of the problem here, so they really do help. My special thanks to Mary for your incredible emails throughout the day today, filled with poems and kindness and insight and love. You are a treasure.

I know this will pass but yesterday was the day when I realized that it wasn’t going to go away without a little bit of intention and some action on my part.

So, the intention has been formed:
1. I lit a candle (thanks Regina);
2. I made a commitment to do some healing things each day (thanks again Mary for being my witness); and
3. I set a timeframe for assessing whether things are improving (or whether I need to try recovering in a safer, warmer place closer to friends and family and further away from so much conflict, violence and injustice, thanks Maryam).

Along with the more generic steps towards healing (amongst which - I will find a way to go for walks) I also decided to do a few things that are very specific to my situation.

One of the small but significant items on that list was to teach my two human rights assistants how to properly complete a case file. This is a job that I detest at the best of times, but when I’m functioning at an even keel I can always transfer a little reserve energy over from another source and find the motivation to do it anyway. At the moment all those reserves are empty and each task that presents itself to me has to be pulled up by it’s own bootstraps. Some days the reserves dip into negative and my energy and motivation plummet. Resolve: I’m cutting down on unnecessary withdrawals.

So today I sat down for two hours with my assistants and we went through the case file template, the database of types of human rights violations and the step-by-step process for completing the form and creating the file. Then we took a couple of the cases I had pending from my last mission to Ghor and talked through them.

Yes, we had a few hiccups along the way. One of the cases I used for this exercise was about a woman who wanted a divorce from her husband because he had been beating her and because after 15 years of marriage she had not been able to have a child with him. She is complaining to us that the judge in their town will not issue the divorce because he is a friend of her husband – I would categorize this as a case about the right to due process and fair trial.

However, when my lovely (and very new) young female assistant read the case note and I asked her what follow up questions she would ask, she said she would start out with a question about the infertility (who is infertile, the man or the women?) and follow up by asking why the husband beat her: “May be she is abusing his human rights in some way and that is why he is hitting her”.

But we talked our way gently through that, and agreed that these would not be such great opening questions to a victim of domestic violence, and off they went this afternoon with their homework – to write up their case studies in the case file format and we’ll go over them at a meeting tomorrow morning.

Right now I’m going to go for a walk. It will probably have to be on the treadmill in the bunker today, but this weekend I will do my utmost to find a way to go for a walk outside. Keep your fingers crossed that the nasty blighters who keep issuing direct threats of suicide attacks against our vehicles on Thursday (thus condemning us all to lock-down over the weekend) will cut me some slack this week.