Animals

I saw this horse on two different visits to Isla Bastimentos, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago.  Drawn to the salty taste of the surf, it would wade into the water and then mostly stand still, letting the occasional wave slap its face.  After maybe half an hour it would then return to the beach and slip silently back into the jungle.

It was a captivating scene: the clear and vibrantly colored water, the jungle-green backdrop, the horse maintaining such solid focus on its salty bath.  Its life didn’t seem that bad.  Certainly it was less stressful than many of its ancestors would have known, given that for much of human history horses have been instruments of war.  Since before 3000 BC they've been ridden in battle, and a training manual for chariot horses was in existence as early as 1350 BC.  It wasn’t until after the time of Christ, however, that the paired stirrup came onto the scene, revolutionizing yet again the tactics of war.  The English travel writer Colin Thubron, in his book Shadow of the Silk Road, explains its spread and significance:

The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brainchild as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight.  To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder.  The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

Yes, this beach-loving Panamanian horse had it pretty good, as did the rest of us on the island.  We had put our shirts and stirrups aside, and the history of war felt rather remote.

Got milk?  This calf in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta does.  But there are times and places where milk isn’t so easy to come by.  Chris Hedges, in his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, relates one such story.

The setting is Goražde, a predominately Muslim town in Bosnia, and the time is the early 1990s, when the Bosnian Serb army has put Goražde firmly under siege.  Most ethnic Serbs have fled town, but a few, including the family of Rosa Sorak, have decided to remain.

It was a decision Rosa and her husband would come to regret, not least because they would lose two sons, one in a car accident and one at the hands of the Bosnian (Muslim) police, who took the son and presumably killed him.  This second son left behind a pregnant wife.  When several months later she gave birth—in the midst of continued Bosnian Serb shelling, increasing harassment from Muslim neighbors, and a food shortage—another tragedy threatened the family, for the new mother was unable to nurse.  “Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves,” Hedges writes.  After five days of tea, the baby “began to fade.”

Enter Fadil Fejzić, an illiterate Muslim neighbor who milked his cow at night to avoid being killed by Serbian snipers.

Rosa told Hedges: “On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door.  It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots.  He handed up half a liter of milk.  He came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that.  Other families on the street began to insult him.  They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die.  He never said a word.  He refused our money.  He came for 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia.”

Rosa went on to tell Hedges that while she could never forgive her son’s Muslim murderers, neither could she be silent when her fellow Serbs spoke only disparagingly of Muslims.  She and her family were the recipients of one Muslim's courageous act of love, and her granddaughter was alive because of it.  This story needed telling too.

After Rosa's story concludes, Hedges locates Fejzić, who is living a hard life even after the war.  Hedges concludes with a reflection of his own:

The small acts of decency by people such as [Fejzić] ripple outwards like concentric circles.  These acts, unrecognized at the time, make it impossible to condemn, legally or morally, an entire people.  They serve as reminders that we all have a will of our own, a will that is independent of the state or the nationalist cause.  Most important, once the war is over, these people make it hard to brand an entire nation or an entire people as guilty.

For a short New York Times editorial about Bosnia today, click on "Bosnia Unraveling" (Feb 22, 2009)

Half an hour from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, sits Masaya Volcano National Park.  The vultures love it here, catching the warm sulfur-scented air that billows out of its crater.  A sixteenth-century Spanish friar once called the place "La Boca del Infierno” (The Mouth of Hell).  The birds, however, if they spoke Spanish or English, would probably just call it a fun ride.

Or, if the birds knew Russian, they would perhaps sit in trees and read Dostoyevsky, conversing with one another about the wisdom latent in passages such as the following, from The Brothers Karamazov:

My brother, a dying youth, asked the birds to forgive him.  That may sound absurd, but when you think of it, it makes sense.  For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world.  It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little.  Understand that everything is like the ocean.  Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too.  In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive you your sins.  And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others.