Aid dries up for Landmine Clearance in Angola

Economic hard-times have had a knock on effect for the people trying to make a life in rural Angola. Landmines make farming a hazardous occupation and animals are often driven into fields where farmers aren't sure.  As aid has reduced, so landmine deaths have increased.  Follow the link to read more about the problemhttp://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jU1TqAp918BZvW1Yz60VJkMdA45g?docId=CNG.b7e76dffd5a2aae26c1d92c52b07f817.361:

Meanwhile, the training continues...

The Painful Present

I promised in one of my earlier posts that this blog would be about the present, rather than a history lesson about the Bush War.  But for many of us, the war is not a distant memory, it lives with us daily, intruding on our lives and affecting how we are today. 

This week I met an ex-concript who was a doctor on the Border.  He flew into Angola regularly to pick up the pieces during and after battles.  He did his best to save the lives of young soldiers with horrific injuries.  He witnessed combat first hand.

My meeting with him brought back memories of my own.  To help me sleep that night, I dumped some of my impressions onto the pages of my notebook.  Afterwards, I slept fitfully, a sign of how far I have come on my own healing journey.  Here is the result:

I hear your painful story

Of broken bodies beyond your power to mend.

Of horror and inhumanity and torture

And death after death after death.

The deadening of the soul a way of surviving.

A suppression of the madness that starts to engulf you and the

Meaninglessness threatens so much that a leap into the abyss, to your death,

Would seem a bearable ending.

I hold it now, only a tiny part, I know,

A sadness, heavy on my soul.

A darkening of my spirit at the hearing of it all:

The stuff I dished out,

The death and maiming and terror I inflicted from afar is the horror you saw and the broken bodies you tried to heal.

A different time yet part of the same sweating hell.

I feel it now, hard and heavy and cold in my gut:  a frozen ball of tears.