Writing in Silence, Editing at Risk
Who could find Belarus on a map, or even knows such a country exists? I live in Europe, the second country to the left and below Belarus and had to look it up to find out where it was. Ten million people. Who cares?
The thing about caring is, it’s necessarily done one by one. And counting ten million people, one by one, is more people trudging home from work in the thin early winter darkness, to light the gas under their tea, than you and I can comprehend in a single sentence.
But they are twinkly-eyed grandmothers, scowling, dispirited workers in mindless dead-end jobs and kids; kids with the bright-colored promise that kids everywhere bring to gray streets, gray apartments and gray snow.
We should all be kids, the world would be a better place.
Kids become young people and some of them, before the light goes out of their eyes, become the Iryna Vidanavas of gray places.
Iryna is Belarusian, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. She’s been in America for just a year, a student, r…