Three women in three war zones

Guess where. This is not a test; it is a reality. The links will show you where.

I wouldn’t say my life is ”ordinary” by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think it's quite outside the entire realm of the ordinary.

Just ask my [2 year old].. He often mistakes ... helicopter gunships for birds, dances to the revolutionary songs blasted during political rallies marching by our house, and has learned to distinguish between ... tank shell fire and machine-gun banter.

***

Most commonly, they ingest a whole bottle of quinine pills, with castor oil…we try to get them to the ER before their cardiac rhythm is interrupted…Sometimes they douche with very caustic products like bleach. We had a patient, a teen, who burned herself so badly with bleach that we couldn't even examine her, her vaginal tissue was so painful….

***

I’m reading, and hearing, about the possibility of ... war. The possibility. Yet I’m sitting here wondering if this is actually what civil war is like. Has it become a reality? Will we look back at this in one year, two years… ten… and say, “It began in February 2006…”? It is like a nightmare in that you don’t realise it’s a nightmare while having it- only later, after waking up with your heart throbbing, and your eyes searching the dark for a pinpoint of light, do you realise it was a nightmare…

Perhaps we are all just watching and waiting.