Recognizing Women's Courage & Resilience During & After War with host, Louise Ross [Ep 24]

As I reflect on the current crisis in the Ukraine, I'm reminded of eight women I interviewed for my book, Women Who Walk because eight of those 20 women either lived through a war, ultimately fleeing their home countries as refugees, or they worked in environments in the aftermath of a recent war; or they grew up with a father who fought in the second world war, and for several of the women, it was a combination of two of the situations I've just mentioned. Eight out of 20 is almost 50%  and what I think that "almost 50%" figure indicates is that war and its tragic fallout is never too far from us historically. By way of confirming the sad reality of that statement, and by way of recognizing the women's courage and resilience in the face of often times extreme circumstances, this solo episode is me reading excerpts from six of those eight stories.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I'm Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I'll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who've made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom - reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.

[00:00:47] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 24 of Women Who Walk.

[00:00:51] Louise: Today I'm recording a solo episode in anticipation of an upcoming guest, a young Ukrainian friend who is living in Portugal. And as I reflect on the conversation I'll be having with Elizabeth, and the current crisis in the Ukraine, I'm reminded of eight women I interviewed for my book, Women Who Walk because eight of those 20 women either lived through a war, ultimately fleeing their home countries as refugees, or they worked in environments in the aftermath of a recent war; or they grew up with a father who fought in the second world war, and for several of the women, it was a combination of two of the situations I've just mentioned.

[00:01:38] Louise: Eight out of 20 is almost 50%. And so it's fair to assume that I intentionally set out to talk with women who'd had contact with war. Yet, that is not the case. In fact, I had no prior knowledge of the full extent of the women's backstories until I interviewed them. What I think that "almost 50%" figure indicates is that war and its tragic fallout is never too far from us historically. By way of confirming the reality of that statement and by way of recognizing the women's courage and resilience in the face of oftentimes extreme circumstances, I'm now going to read excerpts from six of those eight stories.

[00:02:28] Louise: The first is from Dahlia Mansour’s story. Dahlia is now in her late 40s and living in Canada.

[00:02:37] Louise: I have vivid memories from my childhood of no electrical power at home. Bombings. And with my mother rushing between bombings to get my baby brother to his pediatric appointments. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1971, just before the civil war broke out. We lived in Ras Beirut, a middle-class neighborhood of mixed religious groups, Muslim Christians, Druze, and seculars. And there was a UNESCO office, right opposite our house. I had dreams of one day working for the UN.

[00:03:16] Louise: The conflict started in Beirut in the spring of 1979. When an altercation between members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and a Lebanese militia resulted in the death of a member of the PLO. This was followed by a revenge drive-by-shooting aimed at assassinating, the leader of the Lebanese militia group. But instead four young Lebanese civilians were killed.

[00:03:43] Louise: The militia retaliated, ambushing, a bus filled with PLO and Lebanese supporters of the PLO, killing all passengers. The chaos escalated. On December 6th, the Lebanese militia set up roadblocks in certain neighborhoods and the PLO set up roadblocks in other neighborhoods with both parties, killing assumed enemies, as they tried to pass through the roadblocks. The event was known as Black Saturday. The cycle of revenge and retaliation divided, Beirut and Lebanon, creating Muslim and Christian neighborhoods, towns and regions. Our neighborhood, Ras Beirut, was neutral.

[00:04:26] Louise: During the war, Lebanon wasn't isolated from the rest of the world, nor did the fighting deter people from having a social life. There were outings, parties, graduations, and weddings. We had access to current pop culture from Europe and the US. Our lives were just very contained.

[00:04:45] Louise: Sometime in 1982, the Israeli Defense Force invaded Southern Lebanon. The PLO was operating on the border of Southern Lebanon and Israel engaging in repeated attacks and counterattacks. The IDF in attempting to push back pockets of PLO militia, invaded Lebanon and advanced on Beirut, locking down the city in a siege that lasted several weeks.

[00:05:11] Louise: During this period, we lived on tinned food and we rationed our water. The bombing was nonstop and the airstrikes were intense. It was a hard time. Not just because Beirut was being destroyed, but also, we feared we'd be killed.

[00:05:29] Louise: Eventually that chapter concluded when a deal was struck by the Powers That Be and the arrival of the US Marines to oversee the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon.

[00:05:40] Louise: In the spring of 1989, things shifted again with conflict escalating across the country. The Lebanese military, which had weakened over the years with secular divisiveness, sought sovereignty. It was my last year of high school and there was a lot of Lebanese pride and an undeniable sense of unity. We kept on with our lives.

[00:06:03] Louise: The war created pockets of interruptions where one neighborhood or region might be relatively quiet and in another street fights and tensions raged. We were one of the few families in our extended circle that had not lost a family member or close friends to the war, which really was a miracle. Over 150,000 Lebanese died between 1975 and 1990. And over a quarter of the population was displaced. So our family was extremely lucky. In fact, my father continued to work in Beirut throughout the war. He had a good job and he kept at it. But as my parents began to contemplate the kind of future that lay ahead for my brother and me, the reality was that Lebanon and the pervasive instability simply could not offer us a future.

[00:06:59] Louise: War kills your capacity to plan for the future. You cannot plan. Well, that's not entirely true. Where the planning focus goes is not to the future, but to your immediate resources. Do we have food? Water? And are we safe today?

[00:07:19] Louise: War also crushes dreams.

[00:07:23] Louise: I knew my parents had dreams. They had grown up when Beirut was the Switzerland of the Middle East. Our small country had beach clubs and restaurants all along the coast. A marina, a casino and ski resorts in the mountains. We had a unique cuisine identifiable by its Turkish and French influences and our own unique Mediterranean flavors. At that time, all this was unprecedented in the middle. This was the Lebanon my parents knew. By the time I, and then my brother were born, everything began to unravel. The war destroyed their city and their dreams.

[00:08:06] Louise: By the early 1990s, the war was coming to an end. My parents were thinking about immigrating. Initially they considered Australia. We applied, however, Australian immigration was accepting applications from people with technical skills, not banking professionals. Like my parents, Canada was offering opportunities in particular Quebec, but you needed French. My mother and brother both were fluent in French and English, but my father and I only spoke English as our second language. And then we learned that the Maritimes or Eastern provinces of Canada were open to Lebanese immigrants. We applied and Canada accepted us. In 1995 we landed in Halifax. Both my parents seemed exhausted. As though something in them had died.

[00:08:58] Louise: Very soon after we were settled, my brother and I were attending university in Ottawa. It was a new and exciting beginning for us. I had completed my first undergrad degree in biology while in Lebanon. I decided to switch gears and do an honors program in environmental science.

[00:09:18] Louise: This decision set me on a vocational path in Canada's public service. During the early years of my career, I traveled extensively within Canada, meeting with different producer groups. It was a great experience. And In 2002, I went to a United nations meeting in New York. I was a supporting officer with the Canadian delegation. It took me right back to my neighborhood in Ras Beirut, when we lived across the road from the UNESCO offices. I felt this enormous sense of pride participating in those meetings.

[00:09:54] Louise: This second excerpt is from Sandhya Acevinkumar’s story. Sandhya was also a guest on this podcast. If you listen to episode 12, you'll get a sense of just how far she's come, since the traumatic upheavals of her childhood.

[00:10:12] Louise: We lived in Mozambique, Africa in a neighborhood of Gujarati immigrants and where I grew up with other Indian children. My parents were always a bit fearful. There were tensions between the Africans and the Portuguese colonialists due to the ongoing war of independence. In 1974, when independence was declared my parents fears worsened. The workers at my father's shops were rebelling.

[00:10:41] Louise: In 1976, my father felt it was time to leave. He wanted to get out before it became too chaotic. Also, we knew of two other Indian families that had suffered fatalities when looters had tried to steal from one of their shops,

[00:10:59] Louise: Leaving Mozambique, the new independent government required us to give up our nationality. Consequently, we traveled to India on our Portuguese passports and with only small bags. My mother managed to pack some of her jewellery, but my father lost everything, his properties, his businesses, and his factory. My parents were devastated.

[00:11:27] Louise: When we reached India, I remember that my father was sad for months.

[00:11:32] Louise: In 1978, he came to Portugal to renew his passport. And once again, in search of opportunities, He stayed for three months, taking out a lease on a shop in Lisbon, before coming back to collect us.

[00:11:48] Louise: We moved to Portugal in July, 1979, but before we came, my father arranged for my 21-year-old brother's marriage. He was fearful he might not be able to find a Brahman wife for my brother in Portugal. My parents, my brother and his new wife, my grandmother and I, plus two guests of my father's, traveled to Lisbon where we all moved into a small apartment.

[00:12:16] Louise: We'd had a very comfortable life and lifestyle up until this point, living in spacious homes with home help. And now we were eight people living in a tiny apartment. We all worked in the shop. Me too, after I got home from school. I hated our new life.

[00:12:36] Louise: When winter came, we were not used to the cold and we did not have proper clothes for the climate. Our Portuguese neighbors would say, 'poor little things.' My mother and sister-in-law wore their saris and the Portuguese would laugh at them. When we went out, we went out together as a large family and the Portuguese would mock us.

[00:12:59] Louise: I started to feel ashamed of my culture, where once I felt so proud. Even the color of my skin started to bother me. And this was when I realized I was different to everyone here.

[00:13:12] Louise: My father put me in an American school, which was outside the city center of Lisbon. My mother put coconut oil in my hair and braided it. That's how we'd do a hair for school in India. She'd also dress me. At 11, we didn't choose our clothes. Our parents did. All of this was fine with me, but at the American school, I was teased terribly.

[00:13:38] Louise: When I turned 13, my menses began, but m my mother had never told me about menstruation. I was in PE class. I stained my clothes and I was mocked. I went home crying and in quite a state, as I had no idea what was happening to my body.

[00:13:57] Louise: That is when my vitiligo started and spread. Many years later, I realized it was the hormonal changes, the shock of starting my period, and the emotional trauma of my early years that contributed to the vitiligo.

[00:14:14] Louise: By grade seven, I had more white patches of depigmentation on my face and my body. And I was mocked even more. My parents were cruel too. They would tell me that it was a disease. That I must have done something bad and brought it upon myself. And as a result, no one would marry me and I'd end up alone.

[00:14:37] Louise: When I graduated secondary school, my international friends went off to university, but my Indian friends from the community in Lisbon, which had grown to about 4,000 by this time, stayed at home to help build family businesses. Even though I had become culturally mixed in my attitude, a Gujarati Indian girl, living in Portugal and going to an American school, this is what I did too. I helped my parents in the family business. I'd also become a bit of a rebel, embracing my vitiligo with an attitude that was very Portuguese: If you don't like it, don't look!

[00:15:16] Louise: I had promised my mother, I would marry the man they chose for me. My future husband had lived through the wars in Mozambique, and then in 1989, he'd come on his own to Portugal to pursue a new life. My father had chosen someone for me that was just like him. I remember clearly that my mother said, 'this proposal has come and you may not receive another. You have to accept this offer.'

[00:15:43] Louise: When we married my husband and I started to work together. And in 1993, we had an opportunity to go to Luanda. Angola was at war and our families did not want us to go, as we had our first daughter by this time. But m y husband suspected there'd be opportunities for us there despite the war, or maybe because of the war. So he said, 'we're going.'

[00:16:11] Louise: The move to Luanda caused us to suffer a lot of hardships. Nevertheless, we were lucky to find the right business, a small shop, and we saved and saved and then we expanded importing containers of our product, domestic electrics. Within a short period of time we did really well. In fact, we flourished

[00:16:37] Louise: The third excerpt is from Penny Imrie's story. And by way I'm setting the scene, I'll mention that Penny's parents were both English, but she grew up in Brazil and lived in south America until her forties, when she moved with her husband to Portugal. Penny is now 70 and retired.

[00:16:59] Louise: Ian, the man I eventually married, worked for British American Tobacco, as their Panamanian marketing manager. He was English. Born in London. But he'd spent most of his life in Latin America.

[00:17:14] Louise: In early 1981, Ian was transferred to Nicaragua. We joked at the time, the good news is your general manager; the bad news is it's Nicaragua. Despite the unrest, I felt I could cope with Nicaragua. I could speak the language and I understood the culture. Also, the revolution was just over when Ian was transferred there.

[00:17:39] Louise: Nicaragua had been under Samosa, the dictator, for 40 years. The Sandinista revolutionaries ousted him, taking control by the early '80s. Once the Sandinistas were in power, they also took control of all the big companies, mainly because Samosa had shares in companies like Coca Cola, The Rum Factory, and Flor de Caña. BAT never went to bed with the Samosa government so the Sandinistas had no shares in the tobacco company. It ended up that in our circle of friends, Ian was the only one working for a big corporation. Everyone we knew was either a diplomat or working for the UNICEF, the UN or other aid programs.

[00:18:24] Louise: Due to Ian's corporate job there were times when we felt scared, such as the days around July 19th, which is independence day. The celebrations were broadcast on TV and we thought BAT would be taken over. But we concluded that the Sandinistas gained more from BAT running their company and generating the 85-to-90% tax revenue from the sale of cigarettes.

[00:18:51] Louise: Despite the fact that the revolutionaries were in power, initially I found it all quite novel. I was in my early thirties, Ian was 24 years older, and I was happily married with two young boys.

[00:19:06] Louise: There was a lot of fighting in the north because of the Contras, the US-backed anti-Sandinistas. Every week there was someone at BAT who had someone near to them who had been killed. I chose not to go to the funerals, but each morning I prayed that nothing would happen to my family.

[00:19:26] Louise: We had a big swimming pool and I taught my kids to swim before they could walk. You couldn't take children for a walk in the park. There was no park. There wasn't anywhere to walk. Absolutely nowhere. Swimming was one of the things we could do. When my second son was born, I started teaching swimming. I set up a swimming school for moms and their babies. I taught every morning, every day. It kept me busy.

[00:19:54] Louise: Food was rationed and as head of the household, I'd go to the market on a weekly basis to collect our allocation of black market staples: rice, sugar, oil, beans, and coffee mixed with chicory. I was driving to the market one morning with the kids in the back seat when a policemen stopped the car with the intention of taking me to the police station. I started to cry. And in between my sobs, I told him that he must let us go. Usually if anything happened, and obviously this was before mobile phones, I'd get word to Ian and he'd send someone to help.

[00:20:33] Louise: We held British passports, but we always spoke Spanish. It was rare that Ian and I spoke English. And even then only if we were in a room on our own; we worried people might assume we were American. And in Nicaragua, you wouldn't want to be singled out as American.

[00:20:55] Louise: We'd throw company parties at which we'd also have to wine and dine the Sandinistas. They loved my crystal glasses and our French Brandy. I became very cynical living with this. They did do some good, mainly in education, but in the end they abused their power. Nobody liked the Sandinistas, but many years later they voted Daniel Ortega, the head of the then Junta, back as their president. He's now president of Nicaragua and good friends with the president of Venezuela who is considered a dictator and responsible for the socioeconomic decline of his country.

[00:21:36] Louise: It was an interesting time and everyone kept saying, 'we're living history, we're living history.' By the eighth year, I was sick of living history. We were going to be in Nicaragua for only two years. We ended up staying 10 years.

[00:21:54] Louise: This fourth excerpt is from Sarah Eckt's story. Sarah is in her mid-40s and now living in Australia.

[00:22:03] Louise: My maternal grandmother was one of 11 children. She and her twin brother escaped Nazi Poland in the late 1930s, fleeing to Australia where she went on to marry and have six children. My mother was the second youngest. And when she was eight, her father died. My grandmother with no skills was left to raise the children on her own. Although her twin brother was around. I don't know much about my grandmother's other siblings in the wider family. Some survived the Holocaust, many did not.

[00:22:40] Louise: My maternal grandfather, who was from Budapest, Hungary, survived the war. He was a book publisher and an intellectual. My father was born in 1947 and when he was 14, the story goes that a black car arrived and took my grandfather away. He was never seen again. So that coupled with my father growing up under communism, actually it was fascism, was also traumatic.

[00:23:10] Louise: My father escaped Hungary when he was 18, smuggling himself across the border into the former Yugoslavia, where he took a ship to Italy and sought political asylum. He sought refugee status in three countries, Canada, the USA and Sweden, and ended up in Sweden. My parents met when they were traveling. In those days, one of the only acceptable places for a young Jewish woman to travel on her own was Israel. And that's where my parents met.

[00:23:41] Louise: At university I did three study abroad programs. All three were at human rights institutes. As a child, I loved the TV show, Perry Mason, a criminal defense attorney who wins all his cases by proving his client's falsely accused. That TV show led me to believe that one of the ways to right the wrongs in the world was to become a lawyer using the tools of justice. In both my studies and in my career, my area of focus was human rights.

[00:24:15] Louise: My home life had been emotionally and physically violent, as both my parents suffered intergenerational trauma as a result of the war and the Holocaust. My sense is that the unresolved tragedies of their past led to the highly dysfunctional and abusive environment in which I grew up.

[00:24:36] Louise: By my third year at university, I had this vision that I wanted to build schools for children. I'd had teachers who'd believed in me and supported me. I'd thrown myself into my studies and into social justice campaigns. The reading the study, education was my savior and my escape and it's what got me through the dysfunction of my family and home life. My thinking was that that's what I could help facilitate for other children.

[00:25:09] Louise: My life experiences, visions of a better world for children and my studies coalesced when I graduated with a double degree with honors followed by a master's in international development and a PhD in human rights law, all of which led to a career in child protection in emergencies.

[00:25:31] Louise: In 2004, through 2005, I was in Timor-Leste. A colleague and I set up a non-governmental organization to do psycho-social support for children focusing on human rights for children, non-violent discipline and nonviolent conflict resolution. We worked with children, parents, teachers, police, and with youth in prison.

[00:25:58] Louise: While in Timor-Leste. I also did an internship with the UN criminal tribunal, a hybrid national-international human rights tribunal that had been created specifically to hear cases against the Indonesian military police and Timorese militia involved in the post-referendum violence of 1999.

[00:26:22] Louise: In 2011, I went to Darfur to work for an NGO. There I spent a year-and-a-half doing child protection work with communities and children who had been displaced by the Janjaweed militia. It was a bleak experience. Darfur was a desert of concrete, sand and barren trees. My heart just ached for green and for the sight of water.

[00:26:49] Louise: In 2012, after my stint in Darfor, I was offered a job in Guinea Bissau, on the west coast of Africa, with the human rights section of the UN mission. It was a political stabilization mission and it meant moving out of child protection into human rights. My focus in Guinea-Bissau was combating impunity for political crimes and addressing human rights violations against women and children in particular, female genital mutilation, rape, and child early-forced marriage.

[00:27:23] Louise: By 2015, I was starting to feel as though my work was no longer having an impact. I decided it was time for me to move on from Bissau. A job offer came through in Myanmar. This position was with UNICEF and back in child protection. Myanmar was an exciting country to be in as 50 years of military rule had just come to an end. Plus it was another one of three countries: Timor-Leste, Burma now Myanmar, and Tibet for which I had done social justice campaigning in my early 20s, so I was excited at the opportunity to be working there.

[00:28:03] Louise: Almost a year into the Myanmar contract my 40th birthday was fast approaching and I realized I was missing Australia and my connections there. So I went back to Australia and gifted myself a mindfulness retreat. On that retreat. I stopped. Totally stopped. I became aware of just how exhausted and close to burnout I was. I hadn't processed things from my previous assignments. Instead, I just gone from one intense emergency duty station to another, and then to another. And in Myanmar, the intensity continued. It's now public knowledge, due to media reports, that up north, the military were going through villages, killing men, women, and children, and raping women and girls. In retrospect, the work was causing me to feel traumatized on a near daily basis.

[00:29:10] Louise: After the mindfulness retreat, I had a few coping strategies at my sleeve to help me self-soothe during times of stress. I also determined that I would do one more year and then take a break. Out of the blue. I received a call from human resources telling me that a decision had been made to convert my post, which meant that the position no longer existed and that my contract would not be renewed. My 12-month plan went out the window, but the universe foisted upon me a break, which I may not have taken if left to my own devices.

[00:29:53] Louise: The fifth excerpt is from Tody Cesar's story. Tody is an American in her mid-70s, retired and living in Lisbon. She mentions working on a restoration project in Kosovo. This was after the Balkan war in the 1990s.

[00:30:12] Louise: My father's family is from the Ukraine. They were Russian Jews who struggled just to survive. I went to Odessa in the Ukraine, but there are no records. I did go to a graveyard, but there were no names. During WWII, there was mass killing so if the Nazis hadn't killed them, Stalin might have. My grandmother would never talk about it. And she had lost touch with our Odessa relatives.

[00:30:42] Louise: I'd always been interested in art conservation. And when I looked into studying it, I discovered that you need chemistry and algebra. Despite not being a good student, I thought this is the time to do it. I ended up studying Art Restoration in England and once I moved there, I knew I wasn't going back to the US.

[00:31:06] Louise: I looked for work on the conservation / restoration website, and there I saw something in Kosovo. I made inquiries and they asked me to do an inspection for the UN of damage to churches and mosques.

[00:31:21] Louise: I'd completed an internship at the British Museum so I went back to the library to research, but there wasn't much about Kosovo or Balkan art. I knew Kosovo had had a war, but that was about all I knew. On the job, inspecting these monuments. I met a local man who eventually became my lover. He actually knew what he was doing, thank God, as I didn't. He was treated rather badly by the UN people. I remember once he got up to speak as the expert and they said, 'sit down, we have our expert here,' referring to me. And I said, 'you have an expert, but it's not me,' it's this man. Local people weren't given any consideration.

[00:32:12] Louise: After the work with the UN, I was asked back to work in a mosque that had been damaged. I didn't know anything about Islamic art, but I discovered that in the Balkans it's so colorful, we worked on and off in that mosque for nine years. It was really challenging and incredibly rewarding.

[00:32:33] Louise: There was a lot to be done. They built a new minaret, as it had been destroyed. The door was badly damaged as there'd been attempts to burn the whole building. I restored the door. I'm very proud of that. It was such a beautiful thing. There were panels that needed to be completely replaced. The charred panels have been saved. So I'd have an idea of what had been there. There was enough information so that I could work from those pannels.

[00:33:05] Louise: The six excerpt is from Birgit Weber's story. Birgit is 61 and living in the south of Portugal.

[00:33:18] Louise: A midwife delivered me in her farmhouse in a village in Bavaria. My grandparents lived there, but my parents lived in a town about four hours away, close to Frankfurt. My mother had gone to visit her parents to give birth to me with her mother's support.

[00:33:36] Louise: My child would look quite normal on the outside, but it was kind of rough. Both. My parents were survivors of world war two, and both sets of grandparents had lived through world war one. So there was this intergenerational sense of loss first or loss of security, and then a sense of displacement.

[00:33:59] Louise: My father was in Italy during the war where he was captured and imprisoned as a prisoner of war. He contracted hepatitis, which he seemed to be dealing with in one way or another for the rest of his life. It was a huge burden for his health and wellbeing. I think the stress probably post-traumatic stress, which both my parents experienced, carried over into our home so that my oldest sister and I grew up with it too. Consequently, I don't have memories from my childhood of well-being or abundance or relaxation.

[00:34:39] Louise: So as I finish up, reading these excerpts I'm once again, struck by the historic closeness of war and its effect on not just the generation that is immediately impacted, but on the generations to come. In other words, as both Sarah and Birgit mention in their stories, the trauma of war is intergenerational.

[00:35:04] Louise: This has not been easy listening. And I hoped I might find some soothing words of wisdom to end this episode, but perhaps all that needs to be said has already been said by the women whose excerpted stories I've shared. So instead of more words, I want to encourage listeners to just be in contemplative silence for a few minutes. And with that in mind, there'll be no outro with music, instead, I'll simply say thank you for listening.