The Picture

It is my last day at work and as I sit here in my last lunch break I feel a few words are in order. I could go on at length about the war, how much I have learnt about a different culture, the many funny misunderstandings and the sometimes particularly undiplomatic behaviour of some of my colleagues in the last three years.

But I won't. The colleagues in question are long gone and already posted in some other country where they are hopefully picking up some much needed people skills, the misunderstandings are not as funny when you aren't there and know the people, I will do a bigger peace on the culture clash at some point in some shape or form and when it comes to the war I don't know what to say anymore. The strange thing is that the more I read about it the more difficult it is to say anything that makes sense.

I spent last night reading a book by a man who has spent most of his adult life there working on various development projects and the only thing he could really come up with regarding the future of the country he knows so well was that there is always hope.

I agree with him of course. But I find it hard to believe that the many people affected by this awful long lasting war do. And how do you take it from hope to actual peace?

Out of all the destruction I have written about over the last three years there are two incidents that I will never forget. One is the editorial "And Then They Came for Me" written by editor Lasantha Wickremasinghe where he predicts his own death, printed in The Sunday Island a few days after he was gunned down on his way to work. The other is a picture of a grieving woman after her husband was killed in a blast in Colombo.

This particular picture was printed in one of the largest newspapers here over two years ago and when I first saw it I actually nearly cried. Since then I have found myself thinking about it every now and again. So the other day I decided to try and find it. I couldn't really remember all the details surrounding the incident. Only that it involved a suicide bomb and that the person it was intended for, probably some politician or army person, survived, but that about ten security people were killed. One of them was this woman's husband.

Was it the blast where a politician lost both his leg? The woman who blew herself up inside a public office? Or what about the guy that was killed by a pregnant suicide bomber? Or maybe the attack inside the security zone a while back?

In the end I decided to just do a search for Suicide attack + Sri Lanka. And after working my way back through the many bombs over the last two years I found it. I'm sure the original picture wasn't cropped quite that much and that it was even more effectful as you could see how the poor woman was staggering down the street. But really the composition isn't the most important aspect of this picture. It is the grief.

And if her grief can make such an impact on me, what does it do to her country?