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©2009
The Duncan Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable
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Selected
Excerpts from:
ENOUGH
TO GO AROUND
Searching for Hope in Afghanistan, Pakistan & Darfur
Text
& Photos by Chip Duncan
From Chapter 1 - Abraham's
Sandwich:
Perhaps most of all, it was the
blunt, vivid depiction of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction
- the human imagination. We all had to quietly ask ourselves
whether there's really any difference between the will to
kill with a hijacked airliner versus a nuclear bomb? Is there
really any difference between lobbing compressed hydrogen
at a professed enemy versus the brutal murder of 800,000 Tutsis
using only machetes for weapons? Time, which has only a self-perceived
beginning and end in the act of mass killing, seems the only
difference. How instant, how dramatic, do we want the killing
to be? And what level of fear do we hope to unleash upon our
audience, our enemy in our quest for submission or self-proclaimed
victory?
---
Although we may keep killing
ourselves in new ways and record numbers, in conflicts most
of us can't name and for reasons most of us can't fathom,
we are, most of us, still horrified by that distinctly masculine
and desperately arrogant part of our nature. Still, for as
long as we have claimed to want peace, our friends have become
our enemies, our enemies our friends, in a cycle of violence
that creates the strangest of bedfellows. We have cheered
our warriors, warriors who are too often the victims of failed
intelligence and failed leadership in the ballet of political
dancers.
---
A society that can't provide
for its own long-term security and independence is not a solution
to anything.
From Chapter 2 - Tribes & Tribulations:
As 19th century British author
Rudyard Kipling once observed, Afghanistan can't really be
conquered. He even said that Afghanistan was where great powers
go to die. What Kipling noted, I saw with my own eyes. It
is simply too diverse, and ground travel is too difficult,
for even a national government to exercise total control,
let alone that of a colonial power or foreign military. Cultural
and ethnic autonomy often thrives within the confines of a
river valley, but rarely exports over the mountain. Although
there are widely held beliefs in Islam, the degree of devotion
from one place to another is no different than it is for Christians
in the United States or Jews in Israel. Some folks are religious,
some aren't. Many who are religious are moderate, some are
fundamentalist, and some fall into the category I would call
extremist.
---
Access to any of the resources
taken for granted in the west, including abundant food, clean
water, schools, transportation, and security, presents extraordinary
challenges to rural Afghanistan. Even the climate, which includes
blistering heat in the summer, snow and ice in winter and
flash flooding in spring, presents obstacles that have long
kept Afghans from communicating or traveling much beyond their
home turf.
---
The human scars are hard to ignore
in Afghanistan. Finding a family untouched by the loss of
a loved one to an explosion, a death or injury from battle
or wounds suffered from a landmine, is nearly impossible.
Danger is a part of everyday life.
From Chapter 3 - Sleeping with the Dead:
A few miles from Muzaffarabad,
I spent more than an hour walking and at times climbing over
the rubble of a village near the epicenter of the earthquake.
I'd been told that shortly after the quake, widowers would
spend long hours combing through the rubble, searching for
remnants of lives lost so abruptly. They would search for
hours, alone, wandering. On this day, months after the quake,
I could see two men walking alone, separated by hundreds of
yards, lost in their thoughts. What were they thinking? I
wondered. How did they cope with the sudden loss of a wife,
a child, a father, a mother? What meaning were they searching
for? What hope could they find living in a tent, their possessions
gone, livelihood lost, their family a memory? What comfort
did they find in returning, day after day, to the rubble of
their former home?
From Chapter 4 - Land of the Fur:
Six hundred people a week. That's
how many displaced people were arriving in the Zam Zam refugee
camp near Al Fashir, Sudan during my visit to North Darfur
in early 2008. And that's on top of the estimated 40,000 people
who were already there. And that's just one of many refugee
camps in Darfur and along the western border with neighboring
Chad. The numbers challenge comprehension and defy explanation.
---
Their villages burned, their
livelihoods destroyed, most of the families that arrive in
camps such as Zam Zam are no longer intact. Someone has died
along the way. Someone else has been raped. Another's been
attached by machete or has a bullet lodged somewhere inside
a limb that no longer works right. The children, even the
ones who can still smile or play, have witnessed things no
adult or child should ever see. Their nightmare is their reality
- armed men on horseback, mercenaries and soldiers sanctioned
by a government they know little about and have little contact
with who've been sent to rape, pillage, destroy, and burn
what's left. For thousands of innocent villagers, the only
offense to their attackers is their color, their tribe, their
family, their culture, their faith.
---
Darfur is not like Afghanistan
or Pakistan. It's not like anywhere else I've been to film
or document. The conflict is manmade and if it can get worse
each day, it does. There has been no getting better for years.
---
No matter who's to blame, it
is a nightmare for those whose only alliance is to their family
and a small community they'd never left before their forced
departure. Whatever resources or possessions they once had
- a one room hut, a few cows, an acre of wheat, a pet dog,
an old bicycle - those things no longer exist. The likelihood
is that they'll never return to whatever life they knew before.
And if they didn't have an enemy before they were attacked,
they do now.
---
While there were signs of hope
and empowerment in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, hope was
harder to find in Darfur. What hope I did see … was in
the faces of the children too young to comprehend the challenges
of their future. I also saw hope in the perseverance of women,
tortured by their losses, who still managed to find love and
beauty in what little they had.
From Chapter 5 - Facing Fear, Finding Hope:
Given the immediacy of the Internet
and network newscasts, it's become all too easy to view much
of the world as threatening. We're exposed to the violence
of the developing world but rarely to the simple joys that
people everywhere experience around their family, work, play
and faith. What makes "news" news, especially television
news, involves conflict. But even in a war zone, conflict
is not a constant.
When media fails to focus on people and those things that
unite us - music, art, faith, family and culture - it becomes
easy to dehumanize and group others into stereotypes. Fear
begins to feel natural. Those things that build bridges among
people take a back seat and it becomes difficult to imagine
that everyone in the world is ultimately more similar than
different. The same desire for equality, opportunity, freedom
and peace that drove America's Civil Rights Movement is no
different from the desire for equality, opportunity, freedom
and peace desired by most people in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and Darfur. No one wants to live a life defined by violence,
homelessness, disease and despair.
---
The greatest asset we all have
is the quality of our intention.
---
No one's life should be determined
by unnatural borders that looked good a century earlier to
a now forgotten British general or Belgian ambassador. No
one's life should be confined - or worse, destroyed - by a
tyrannical government, rebels, suicide bombers or terrorists
without regard for the innocent. Beyond its role in providing
temporary security, no one's life should be lived within the
confines of a refugee camp.
Reprinted by permission.
Enough To Go Around can also be purchased here
Learn more
about Relief International
For
more information on Chip Duncan, please click here
###
©
2009 The Duncan Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any unauthorized
duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
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