I’m sitting comfortably in my easy chair, wearing my pajama’s with the little booty slippers and covered in my handmade quilt. I’ve got a laptop with wireless, high-speed Internet access and a TV remote in my hand. My belly is full of Chinese take-out (sesame chicken!) and I’ve got a bottle of water nearby, along with my smart phone.
Life is pretty good for me. And, for this I am grateful. When it’s cold or wet outside, I have a warm safe place to sleep. I also have decent employment, friends, and a great family. Though I am not where I thought I would be, at this age – life has treated me pretty fair so far.
But, there is still something fundamentally wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, directly. It’s like one of the old blind men that tried to describe an elephant. One felt the leg and declared “elephants are like trees!” and one felt the trunk and declared “elephants are like snakes!” and the third felt the flank and declared “no, elephants are a like a stone wall.” It’s not just that their limited viewpoints gave them pieces of the truth. It’s that even taken together, those pieces do NOT represent what an elephant is “like.”
I have a friend who spent six years in the US Army. He reports that the same term is used for those soldiers who experience actual combat. It’s called “seeing the elephant.” Because, only those that have actually experienced it can know what it means to experience it. Everyone else is just blindly feeling along the smallest portion of what that experience means.
Therefore, that thing which is wrong is vaster then my ability to perceive. I am blind and feeling along the edge. I know “it” in stories that reflect portions of “it” but I have no ability – at least so far – to stand back, open my eyes and see “it” in all it’s horror. Furthermore, I have no faith that even if I could … I’d ever be able to communicate that to you. Maybe you’d have to see the elephant for yourself.
So, here’s a story that shows the shadow of “it.”
When acid is thrown on a person, the results can be horrifying. Nitric, hydrochloric, or sulfuric acids all have a catastrophic effect on human flesh. It causes the skin tissue to melt, often exposing the bones below the flesh, sometimes even dissolving the bone. When acid attacks the eyes, it damages these vital organs permanently. Many acid attack survivors have lost the use of one or both eyes. The victim is traumatized physically, psychologically and socially.
An acid attack on your body would dramatically change your life. Most survivors of an acid attack are forced to give up their education, their occupation and other important activities in their lives. This is because recovering from the trauma takes up most of their time and because the disfigurement they have to bear debilitates and handicaps them in every conceivable way.
The scars left by acid are not just skin deep, victims are most often faced with social isolation and ostracisation that further damages their self esteem, self-confidence and seriously undermines their professional and personal future. Women who have survived acid attacks have great difficulty in finding work and if unmarried, as many victims tend to be, they have very little chance of ever getting married, which in a country like Bangladesh is socially isolating.
http://corrosion-doctors.org/Acids/acid-attack-1.htm
Acid attacks are a big problem in Bangladesh. The statistics say there are more attacks here than anywhere else in the world, but that may only be because Bangladesh documents its cases more thoroughly than other countries. The Acid Survivors Foundation meticulously documents every case it finds. In 2005, the organization claims there were 211 recorded incidents involving 267 victims. That is significantly less than the 487 people hurt in 2002, the worst year on record, but that is cold comfort.
Last year 178 women and 89 men were attacked with acid. Fifty-three children under the age of 18 were among the injured, many because they were sleeping next to the intended victim. The most frequent motive for the attack was a dispute about land, property, or money (46 percent), followed by crimes related to rejection or refusal of love, sex or marriage (15 percent), marital disputes (12 percent), disputes within the family (10 percent), and dowry disputes (5 percent).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,406485,00.html
Acid violence is a particularly vicious and damaging form of violence in Bangladesh where acid is thrown in people’s faces. The overwhelming majority of the victims are women, and many of them are below 18 years of age. The victims are attacked for many reasons. In some cases it is because a young girl or women has spurned the sexual advances of a male or either she or her parents have rejected a proposal of marriage. Recently, however, there have been acid attacks on children, older women and also men. These attacks are often the result of family and land dispute, dowry demands or a desire for revenge.
http://www.acidsurvivors.org/
I had heard about acid attacks for some time now, but I didn’t fully understand what they meant. I needed to “see” for myself. So, I used the Internet and did a little research, complete with photo’s of survivors. This is NOT something you want to do if you have a delicate constitution or cannot live with seeing how much damage throwing acid in someones face can do to them. Having seen the photo’s and read some of the articles I still cannot claim to “know” about this issue. It is unlikely that I will ever work along side someone who’s been the survivor of such an attack or ever have someone in my family face such a horror. But, I can empathize with what I see and what I know, as limited as that is.
Part of the revulsion is not the way the survivors look; no, not that at all. It’s in the horrible knowledge that humans are capable of this and more then capable, willing and able and guilty. It’s the level of absolute injustice that perpetrators are rarely caught or sentenced. It’s the grief that the survivors live with physical and psychological scars for the remainder of their lives. It’s the terrible truth that within every human heart is some dark place, in which we are similar to both the survivors and the perpetrators. Though we’d like to call them monsters, and their deeds are truly monstrous, they are humans like us. They are motivated by greed, jealousy, resentment, lust, rage, and the desire for revenge – like us. If they are capable of this, then so are we. Maybe our culture or religion or law or history restrains us, for the most part. But even then, not entirely.
Even we lucky few, in the land of law and plenty, have our share of mothers murdering their children and husbands murdering their wives and every sort of deceit, infidelity, and human predation imaginable. We may not have 200+ acid attacks each year, but not because we’re above them or incapable of such cruelty.
We live in a world in which humans – creatures of rationality and morality, can do these terrible things and allow others around them to do these things. And, things worse then these. There is something very wrong, here.
But, if there is darkness in the human heart, there is also light. If there is horror in the human condition, there is also grace. If there are hero’s in this world, it’s those that recognize the terror and instead of succumbing to it or hiding away from it or deluding themselves that they live in a world of rainbow’s and puppy dogs … they roll up their sleeves and help to correct that injustice, horror, and grief around them. To the best of their ability, at least.
For the better part of a decade, Monira Rahman has fought to provide treatment, counseling and rehabilitation to the victims of brutal acid attacks in Bangladesh. This weekend, Amnesty International Germany will honor Rahman with its annual human rights prize.
Many Bangladeshis also know that there is a hospital in Dhaka, the capital city, where acid survivors can receive free medical treatment and legal assistance and that a telephone hotline is available to connect them with these services. They know that there are new tougher laws against acid crimes. It’s a public awareness that has been created through countless posters, brochures, radio announcements, TV spots, newspaper articles, theater performances, and public rallies — all the work of the seven-year-old Acid Survivors Foundation and its tireless executive director, 41-year-old Monira Rahman.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,406485,00.html