Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [110]
The other project that we need to start immediately is the Total Health Project. In the shantytowns where the girls of Bahia Street live, open sewers run through the middle of the streets. Rats and cockroaches roam freely both in and outside the poorly constructed shacks. Tuberculosis, AIDS, malnutrition, drugs, alcohol, and gang and police violence are endemic. Women and girls must cope with brothers, fathers, and friends being killed, and live with the constant threat of physical and sexual violence.
It is vital that a health program be incorporated into the Bahia Street curriculum quickly. The girls need to know the risks their environment presents and how to deal with violent threats. Bahia Street needs a visiting nurse and counselor as well as a health curriculum to help them deal with physical and emotional health issues as they occur.
The Bahia Street Center is a haven for the girls who study there. It must provide them not only with excellent academic support, but also deal effectively with their physical and emotional well-being.
In the meantime, let us here take joy in what we have, in the people we love, in our homes, and our luck to be living in relative peace.
Warmest thoughts to all and thank you so much for your support. Margaret
twenty-four
love
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the phone awakened me at seven in the morning. It was my sister on Vashon Island.
Her first sentences garbled flat against my drowsy ear. She began to cry and blurted out unintelligible sentences.
I was now fully awake. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No, not me,” she said. “It just—everything’s falling apart.”
“Is your husband hurt?”
“No, no, you don’t understand, it’s, oh my God. What are we going to do?”
“But you’re not hurt? You’re OK? Everyone else is OK?”
“Yes, yes, but no, none of us is.”
My mind raced to the most horrific unimaginable scenarios I could conceive. “Did Mount Rainier blow up? Has someone dropped a nuclear bomb?” No, I thought, such explosions would have awakened me.
“No, no, they just crashed right into them…”
“Are you personally in danger, right now?”
“No, no…”
I felt the fear slide out of my body, replaced by an open awareness, cold, sharp, alert. It was the same balance I knew from skirting gun battles and knife fights on the streets of Salvador, from times spent in Papua New Guinea waiting for local marauders to attack, of odd experiences with crazed men in the South Pacific when I was young, of being in the Underground in London when a bomb scare was announced; all circumstances when I knew my survival hung on a single move, mistake, or on sheer chance.
“It’s OK,” I said to my sister. “Breathe. Focus on the plant beside you.”
Gradually, she calmed down and told me of the New York and Washington, D.C., plane attacks. After we had talked for some time, she hung up and went, I knew, to visit her best friend down the road, to walk and think.
Later, I saw the television footage of the attacks. I permitted myself to view it once. Then, I turned off the television and turned on the radio. Beginning about ten in the morning, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, the phone began to ring. Rita was the first to call.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“New York is on the opposite side of the country.”
“I know, but…I don’t know, you could have been visiting. And your brother’s a fire fighter, isn’t he?”
“Yes. But we were all here.”
“It’s strange, Margaret, but I feel more empathy for the people of the United States than I ever thought possible. They now must understand—what we went through with the dictatorship, what went on in Chile, Argentina. How it feels to know fear with no escape, to have something fundamental shattered, to realize how fragile