3 Earthquakes, 1 Coup d'etat and a Handful of Revolutions

Penelope Curling

Description

3 Earthquakes, 1 Coup d'etat and a Handful of Revolutions is a light account of the often ridiculous and sometimes alarming situations the author encounters while working as a psychologist with the United Nations.Tracing the path from growing up in South Africa and as a young student opposed to the apartheid regime in the 1970s, her subsequent work takes her to a string of humanitarian crises, starting in Albania in 1999 where she meets and falls in love with a younger man, a coup d'tat in Madagascar in 2009, the 2010 revolution in Thailand and to places off the beaten tourist track such as Liberia, Haiti, Syria, and Darfur.The tales of her extraordinary experiences and those of the humanitarian workers she encounters in these challenging contexts reveal the impact of this work on their lives and the toll it takes, highlighting the shortcomings in their protection and care.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800469662
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 Penelope Curling

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1800469 662

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Author’s note

I have deliberately glossed over certain elements and changed several names along with occasional identifying details to protect the privacy of the people involved. The timing of a couple of events was also changed to facilitate the flow. Otherwise all the events described in this book are true to memory.
Because part of the book relates my experience living under the apartheid regime in South Africa, which classified and segregated citizens according to its definitions of race, I have used the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ as broad descriptions of skin colour.



“…captivating narrative. The reader is granted a rare glimpse behind the curtains of workforces employed to work in disaster-hit areas. I strongly recommend this.”
Annemarié van Niekerk, co-author of ‘My Mother’s Mother’s Mother’ (2019)


“…an insightful picture of the difficulties she and her colleagues encounter in hotspots and disasters… a valuable testimony against many forms of injustice and negligence. I heartily recommend it.”
Jaap Goedegebuure, author of ‘Kellendonk. Een biografie’(2018)


Contents

Author’s note
Chapter 1 South Africa: the apartheid years to the late 1990s
Chapter 2 Tirana, Albania, 1999: The Kosovo crisis
Chapter 3 Windhoek, Namibia, 2000
Chapter 4 Nigeria, 2003
Chapter 5 Bombing of the Canal Hotel, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003
Chapter 6 Liberia, 2003 & 2004
Chapter 7 Nazran, Russia, 2004
Chapter 8 Darfur, Sudan, 2005
Chapter 9 Eswatini, Botswana and Namibia, 2005
Chapter 10 Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, 2007
Chapter 11 Antananarivo, Madagascar, 2009 Coup d’état
Chapter 12 Pakistan, 2010
Chapter 13 Haiti, 2006 & 2010
Chapter 14 Thailand, May 2010 revolution
Chapter 15 Bombing of the UN offices, Abuja, Nigeria, 2011
Chapter 16 New York, 2011
Chapter 17 The Hague to Rome, 2016: Three earthquakes
Epilogue Bangkok and New Delhi, 2017 to 2019
Acknowledgements


Chapter 1

South Africa: the apartheid years to the late 1990s
I leave South Africa, the land of my birth, in the early 19 80s. In the twelve months before I leave, as a result of my few, minor acts of resistance to the apartheid regime, my mail has been intercepted; my phone tapped; I have been briefly detained in a police station and threated with arrest under the Terrorism Act; threatened with arrest on another occasion when I intervene in a late-night police razzia, trying to protect a woman in her nightgown as she is dragged by a policeman; and threatened with physical assault by a right-winger wearing a Nazi helmet who objects to the fact that I am with a black man. The incident which shakes me most takes place one morning, on opening the front door of the apartment in Johannesburg I have moved into just two days prior, where I am greeted by a uniformed police officer on my doorstep with the words: “You’d better watch yourself Miss Curling.”
I feel the thud in my solar plexus as my stomach drops, and I am enveloped in a cold fear.
“How do you know my name?” I manage to force out.
“We know everything about you Miss Curling. You’d better watch your step,” he jauntily repeats his warning, enjoying, no doubt, the evidence of the shock I am struggling to hide.

Growing up in a family critical of the regime in South Africa, I have been made aware of the unjustness of the apartheid it enforces. My South African-born parents are opposed to racial segregation and have little to no respect for the ruling Nationalist party which had sided with the Nazis during the Second World War. My father fought in this war on the side of the British, and my mother was courted by a succession of young British men who were based close to her home town in South Africa to train as Royal Airforce pilots. My parents’ opposition to the apartheid regime is largely expressed through criticism and ridicule. Television was introduced in South Africa only in the mid-1970s and for the first couple of years there was just one channel, which, despite its use by the government as a propaganda tool, we were all glued to. My father in his comfortable armchair and my mother seated on the matching floral couch would mock the men who were the leaders of apartheid as they preached the evils of racial integration from their political pulpits, stabbing their stubby fingers at us, their captive TV audience. A photograph of my father signing a petition against the apartheid government’s dreamed up scheme of imposed ‘Bantustans’ or ‘black homelands’, a system designed to deny black South Africans citizenship of their own country, was printed in our local newspaper. As a result, he received anonymous death threats.

From my comfortable, protected life as a young white girl growing up in suburban apartheid South Africa, the unjustness of the enforced racial inequality had been obvious, even though, under the strict censorship imposed on a highly controlled society, the reality of the worst atrocities was effectively prevented from filtering through. As a young teenager I had been distressed by the news of the shooting of school children protesting on the streets of Soweto and other townships armed only with placards and stones. These were teenagers, like me, protesting against enforced instruction in their schools in Afrikaans, a language to which I, too, had an aversion because it was the language of the oppressors. The leaders of the apartheid regime were Afrikaans and the police force was made up primarily of white Afrikaners, as was the bulk of the civil service. My disdain for the apartheid regime extended to Afrikaners in general. Feeding this was my father’s story of how during the second world war the Afrikaners, opposed to the British after the horrendous atrocities they had perpetrated on the Afrikaner civilian population during the Anglo-Boer war only 40 years prior, sided with the Nazis against the Allies. He told us how Afrikaner youths would lie in wait for unsuspecting soldiers home on leave from the war, and beat them up. Only many years later do I understand that my generalised disdain for Afrikaners is a form of discrimination, not that different from the racial discrimination for which we condemned them.

My cosseted life of the mid-1970s was far removed from the harsh daily reality of these protesting school children, but we were around the same age and I knew I would fail at school if all my lessons were taught in Afrikaans, so I felt I could relate to their grievances. That other children and the adults around me seemed less concerned about the shooting than about the threat that these protests would pose if they spread and distrupted their comfortable lives than the shooting of innocent children has left me feeling isolated, disconnected from my community. These adults preached Christianity, yet didn’t practise it. I was confused by their hypocrisy and puzzled over why I saw things differently from most people around me.
At school I had enjoyed being intentionally provocative by suggesting that we should open our expansive school swimming pool to black children from the townships. The mixing of races in public pools and on beaches was strictly prohibited under apartheid.
“Their colour doesn’t wash off, you know,” I’d say to my schoolmates, enjoying the discomfort and squirms my words provoked.
In the mandatory religious class I welcomed any opportunity to set up the teacher, an earnest young woman, by deliberately playing the ingénue.
“So when it says in the bible: ‘love thy neighbour’, does that mean only love thy neighbour if he’s white?”
“No, of course not. Jesus wanted us to love everyone.”
“So does that mean apartheid is wrong, then? That it’s against the bible? Because we’re not allowed to love a black man, or have black neighbours.”
As sniggers spread she realised she’d fallen neatly into the trap I had set for her, and I was firmly reprimanded for discussing politics in class, which was forbidden.

It was not that I hadn’t been afraid of a revolution invading our safe, white suburbs. Whites were outnumbered more than eight to one by black South Africans and I couldn’t imagine that we’d stand much chance if it came to a violent showdown; but that still didn’t detract from my sense that the murder of these children, taking place all around us as their protests proliferated, was the immediate outrage. This was the time when the first seeds of my idea to leave South Africa were planted. If I had wished then for international travel, a wish fairy must have been hovering over me to grant it, her wand somehow stuck on repeat. I could never have imagined, then, how many times I would move home across countries and continents, to how many pla