The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [34]
Finally, the United Nations walked the streets of Bosnia trying to keep the peace. After days of chaos, the National Guard became the peacekeepers in L.A. Even though the United Nations and the National Guard were very successful at stopping the violence, the intolerance is still there.
I can’t believe that someone I don’t even know, who lives thousands of miles away, could have so much in common with me.
Diary 39
Dear Diary,
I don’t understand! I mean, it’s not right, yet it’s still happening as we speak. I just can’t believe it. How sick can it get?
Why is it that women get molested? Why is it that people in general get molested?
Peter Maass’s article about Bosnia that we read today in Vanity Fair was like a gun that triggered the lost memory in my mind. Here are these women in Bosnia, getting molested, raped, harassed, and even impregnated by soldiers that want to feel powerful by depriving them of their womanhood, pride, and self-esteem.
Why?
After reading the article about the atrocities in Bosnia, my memory returned and made everything seem like it happened yesterday. I was only six when a friend of my father’s molested me in his home. Yet to this day, I haven’t told my parents. Keeping this secret inside was very hard for me. There were times when I felt that I had to tell someone, but I didn’t know who. Reading the article makes me feel like I’m not the only one who felt alone. Although I’m so many miles away from Bosnia, I wish there was something I could do.
When I think about this, I think of how grateful Zlata and her whole family are because they have escaped from all of this. This very same thing could have happened to Zlata or any other person that would have remained behind.
The mere fact that the story revived the lost memory within my mind gave me goose bumps. On the way home from school, I felt like reaching out to any one that had a similar story. Even standing at the bus stop, I realized that the women and girls standing next to me may have been, molested, harassed, or even impregnated at one point in their lives.
Then there was the bus ride home. My mind was working like a shotgun with every bullet acting as a question. Round one—What if the elderly woman sitting across from me was sexually molested by her uncle when she was young? Round two—How about that man standing in the back? Had he ever harassed a little girl?
All of these questions ran through my mind at the thought of the story and of all the traumatizing things that women faced. I was glad in a way that Peter Maass had uncovered an issue that I believe we should all be aware of, and also to realize that we are not alone.
His story was written to expose the war in Bosnia and its similarity to the Holocaust. Knowing that people are getting murdered and that thousands of women were being raped is shocking. It makes me both sad and angry because history is indeed repeating itself.
Diary 40
Dear Diary,
I joined Ms. Gruwell’s class a few days ago. I don’t know if I should have joined in the middle of the year. Oh well, I’ll just have to try to keep up with whatever they’ll be discussing in the class. So far, all I’ve heard about is a girl named Zlata. I was clueless about who she was when I started this class, so I asked my friend Ana who Zlata was.
“Wait here,” she told me. Ana searched through a box located behind Ms. Gruwell’s desk. She quickly brought back a book entitled Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. She handed the book to me to read.
I still tried to keep up with the class discussions that were usually concentrated on Zlata. The class talked about her like they knew her, like they knew what she went through while she was in the middle of the war. But how could they know, they’ve never been in the middle of a war…or so I thought. I learned