Open Writing

I met Tsering Llamo when I was celebrating Lozar in India.

She captured my attention with simple and direct words.

'The Chinese had invaded us many times and we always chased them back. So when they came this last time, we packed some things and went to the Mustang mountains in Nepal to wait. To some of us, it was like a holiday. We would return to Tibet when it was safe, like before,' she said.

Tsering and her family have lived in India ever since, having joined the Dalai Lama, in exile.

'But I do not unpack my things, and I will not take out Indian citizenship! I am ready for the day we can return to a free Tibet. I REFUSE to unpack!'

Tea chests are stacked one on top of another in a dark corner.

Present and past equally unrelenting, claiming room in her life.

An Adelaide student told me that her elderly parents still live in Palestine.

'Women keep the keys to their homes, even after they have been bull-dozed or otherwise destroyed.

They walk among the rubble and point out 'Here is my kitchen. This is the bedroom. Our family gathered out here in the back garden to make olive soap.'

The Nablus region was famous for its soap. This was a centuries old tradition as well as a viable cottage industry before the ancient olive groves of Palestine became war targets.

Hundreds of thousands of olive trees have been bulldozed and destroyed in the past three years.

Recently, I watched Karen Hughes’ film Pijuri; the snake that does not sink, based on Sister Ruth Heathcock, an Adelaide nurse who worked in the Northern Territory for over a decade, treating Aboriginal leprosy patients.

She and Aboriginal women prevented their deportation to Channel Island which would have resulted in their spiritual alienation. Karen relied on the Aboriginal women who knew Sister Ruth to help document this story.

In the process of making this film, and over a period of years, Karen was adopted in the Aboriginal way, by one of the women.

She will continue recording the stories of these Aboriginal elders.

The elders’ fluency in numerous Australian indigenous languages, their knowledge of women’s songs, and their memory of historical events from an Aboriginal woman’s perspective will vanish with these women, one day.

A couple of years ago a friend sent me a news clipping taken from a Japanese newspaper.

The article was based on the diseased and dying river; the Rio Grande.

This great river was called Rio Bravo (Ferocious, Spirited River) by the Mexicans, and Rio Grande (Big River) by the Texans. All residents of the Rio Grande Valley were economically dependent on it.

We took pride in being nursed by this river. Of being formed, of rising out of the silt of river and delta.

We WERE the river!

Since the Los Alamos experiments further up the river, the manufacturing of Agent Orange, and the pouring of industrial waste by multinational factory owners into the Rio Grande, it has begun to die.

The inhabitants, like starving children on both sides of the border, still cling to its withered breast for dear life.

The thought that the world, that this planet, may continue to exist without the Rio Grande, is of unbearable sorrow to me.

I cannot imagine seeing a map without this river’s name appearing on it.

We all carry the history of our people within us, as sure as we carry our ancestral DNA.

Tsering Llamo carries a free Tibet packed within her luggage.

The Palestinian woman walking amongst rubble carries her homeland locked in the key of her demolished home.

Aboriginal women’s songs echo the life, the spirit and the intimate knowledge of a country unknown to most of us.

The Rio Bravo is poisoned and dying, but its fertility lives and flows in my blood.

© Alma Iris Ramirez