Yes, I’m back
Sorry it’s been so long since I wrote. I reentered the US at the end of July and I’ve been home in MN since then. I’m working now on transcribing, oh joy. I got a lot more done last year than this year, and I think part of that is that last year I genuinely thought if I just worked hard enough I’d finish them all. Well, I worked damn hard and didn’t even get halfway through. I often feel kind of hopeless about the task at hand—we’ve gone down three times, we’ve gotten a lot of information, but I feel like there’s still so much I don’t understand fully, and so much left to be done, and how will it ever possibly get done, especially since I have no clue what I’m doing or how to go about it. I try to get myself psyched up to transcribe, and I just feel like it will never get done, and we’ll never have a book, and what’s the point in even putting forth the effort.
Right now I’m transcribing the part we lost last year of Alicia’s testimony. She was captured (that is, before being processed by the judicial system) for about 20 days, and in that time she estimates she got about 4 hours of sleep because they were torturing her NONSTOP. So, the work is heavy. I mean, literally, I finish for the day feeling like I’ve been carrying around a 50 pound pack all day.
I haven’t put up pictures. It’s bad, I know. I don’t know which to put up. Do I put up the pictures of the mountains and the clouds? The Madres cooking lunch and teaching us how to make tortillas? The mangled bodies? I have over 350 pictures from this trip, including about 70 from their archives, so you can imagine it’s a little hard to know where to start. In the mean time, I’m just hoping if I ignore the task, it will go away.