Pendant ce temps, en Afghanistan, par exemple, la question se pose: pour nourrir la famille encore quelques jours, vaut-il mieux vendre une autre de ses fillettes, ou se faire prélever un rein ? Ah oui, le rein, il n’en plus qu’un, ça sera la dernière des filles alors.

C’est sans parler des 27 000 enfants qui croupissent et grandissent dans le bourbier qu’on appelle le camp Al Hor au nord-est de la Syrie; ils sont là depuis la ‘défaite’ de Daesh dont les “cellules dormantes” s’activent beaucoup, ces temps-ci.

Et…je m’interromps au bruit du clapet qui se rabat sur la boîte aux lettres. Ah, il signale l’arrivée du bulletin municipal. Images de notre “Noël magique”, annonce d’une première mondiale: le tannage de la peau de thon (bientôt, vous pourrez porter des baskets en peau de thon, tout en dégustant votre sandwich au thon et en réfléchissant au recyclage de leur habitat habituel, c’est-à-dire les boîtes de conserve, grandes et petites); visite du ministre de la santé dans notre désert medical; fête de la courge, les gloires sportives locales. Et que dire du Rotary Club ? Peut-on même trouver des mots pour exprimer tout le…

Je crois qu’il vaut mieux que je retourne à mes traductions et à mes écritures où j’ai laissé un jeune homme mal en point sur son pas de porte…

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The map on my wall does not show the zigzags of barricades marking borders. If someone went to the trouble of stacking them over time, you would be hard pressed to figure out the Sacred Duties owed to any Eternal Nation whatsoever. Apparently, the game is super-amusing for those “in power”. You get to rattle the sabers, threaten to send the troops, the missiles, to disrupt the ‘ennemy’s’ oh-so-sacred banking and industrial facilities. Who has time for Big Guy’s outrageously dismal performance prior to the Crisis? If “the troops” enter the ‘enemy’ territory, it’s time for rampages, massacres and other assorted rapes by those who still have all their limbs, and their life in the bargain. All this makes busy work, distractions, economic benefits (you have to rebuild destroyed towns, and new stocks of weapons, ah, “power” is a lot of worries, you know.)

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, for example, the question is: in order to feed the family for a few more days, is it best to sell off another daughter or one of your kidneys? Oh, true, there’s only one kidney left, so it will have to be the remaining daughter.

I won’t mention the 27 000 children living in the cesspool known as the Al Hol camp in Northeastern Syria, since the military defeat of the Islamic State; its ‘sleeper cells’ are quite active these days.

And…I stop at the sound of something being dropped in my mailbox. Ah, it signals the arrival of the municipal news bulletin. Photos of our “magical Christmas”, announcement of world first: the tanning of tuna skins (soon, you’ll be able to wear tuna skin sports shoes while eating your tuna sandwich and thinking about the recycling of their habitual habitat, which is to say tin cans big and small); a visit of the Health Minister to our medical desert; the Squash festival; our local sports celebrities. And what about the Rotary Club? Can we even find the words to describe its…

I think I’d best get back to my translations and my writing where I left a sick young man on his doorstep…