On Being

This morning when I turned on the radio, a bit late (7:25 am) you were talking with Mercedes Doretti. I couldn't believe my ears! Having missed the earlier part of the program, I don't know if Mercedes spoke of all of her work in El Salvador: the El Mozote exhumations and those of the La Quesera Massacre. I met her at the latter project.

I'm a mental health therapist and worked between 2001 and mid-2007 with the survivor group that sought (through Tutela Legal of El Salvador) the aide of the Argentinean Forensic Anthropologist team. The beauty of Mercedes and the other team members, their sensitivity to the survivors during the exhumation process, was beyond description. Yes, the work she and the team do does provide healing. Yes, it restores dignity to those who who died so inhumanly. Being involved with this experience with the survivors of the La Quesera massacre was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I am so grateful to Mercedes her team! And so glad to hear about her 3-year-old daughter!

I wrote this poem about the Mothers at the Plaza de Mayo in 1990 when I visited Argentina on a Fulbright grant. It was published in my recent collection of poems, Saunas (Mayapple Press, 2008).

EVERYWHERE THE VOICES OF THE MOTHERS
Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires

The mothers, fathers, daughters,
sons all have explanations.

"My skin got goosebumps 
when I heard the names."

"The subversivos called my grandfather 
the same day they bombed his best friend."

"He left the country 
because they threatened
to kidnap his children."

"He said, 'Come and get me,' defiant, 
and they did, they put a bomb in his car."

"We sent our children away
to a relative in Italy. 
They were in a high school drama club.
They never had an armband in their hands."

Everywhere a story.

"The subversivos, those communists
started it right here in Córdoba.
Go to the corner and see where
they massacred the people."

"Intellectual college professors,
can you imagine? like the Shining Path
in Peru. Leftism gone too far."

"I'm glad the military took over
but they went too far.

"I saw priests 
mowed down in my church."

"The Mothers are all communists."

"All the disappeared showed up 
in Sweden and the United States.
I used to play soccer with them."

"They took my daughter-in-law
and my son in the middle of the night 
and stole their furniture too." 

"My daughter went crazy in jail."

Every Thursday at four, mothers
the conscience of the world 
the Mothers of the disappeared
no matter who they were or why 
march at the Plaza de Mayo.
Argentina says the women will die soon.
"They are getting old."

All the people say 
Nunca Más —Nevermore—
and Presidente Menem
pardons the colonels.

I really enjoy listening to your program. I'm not a "religious" person but like many Americans and others around the world, I consider myself a "spiritual" person.

The program about those who have "disappeared" in Argentina, Chile and all too many countries around the world at different times in history, was of personal interest. My grandfather was killed, somewhere in the Soviet gulag, in the late 1930's. He was among the tens of thousands of Americans, Finns, and others from many countries who went to find work and a "classless" society in the Soviet Union, during the Depression.

We think that he was taken to a prison camp outside of Moscow. A former guard in this camp, interviewed in the Moscow newspaper in the late 80's or so, spoke of taking prisoners, one at time, shooting them and tossing them in a truck during the night, to be disposed off in a mass grave in the forest before daybreak … some 250 or so per night, every night, for the three years or so that he was there. Chilling.

We had an AP writer, who was doing work on a story about Americans stranded in the Soviet Union, who wrote me that he had seen files of Americans in the archives. We then tried to get permission for him to look at and copy information on our family members. Soon after, he wrote that he was headed to NY, that the archivist whom he was working with had been shot in the head outside of the city and that he thought we'd never see the files.

Fortunately, I got my aunt out of the Soviet Union during the Gorbechev era. She was American born and a teenager when her parents went over. She married my mom's youngest brother. She was able to rejoin her son, who at 1 year old, was spirited away to the US embassy, where he spent 4-5 years. Eventually he was allowed to come to come to the US. 47 years later the boy and his mom were finally reunited.

On a separate note, I was in Chile some time ago. It was sad to read an interview with a Chilean actress, working in the US, where she was asked how she felt about her father having been "disappeared" during the Pinochet era and dumped from a plane into the ocean. These stories need to be told — deserve to be told.

Thank you for this and all your other thoughtful, sensitive and insightful programs that don't force feed everyone religion and faith but do reference it and respect all the variations of it in our lives.

It is subjects like these that bring me to the borderland between faith and despair. Having spent most of my life recovering from a dysfunctional home life and two tours in Vietnam I find programs like these particularly disturbing. Sometimes I admire those people who have the courage and ability to deal with realities that I have difficulty facing. Although I have fallen into cynicism personally, this subject of man's cruelty to man is probably is probably the most difficult for me to deal with because I can't really blame God for it. Although some blame God for allowing it, the horror of what Man himself chooses to do outweighs that question for me.

I would like to hear more programs like this. This subject is where the tire of faith meets the road of reality.