Diaspora Days

An acquaintance remembers people from her village selling their blood.

Another said -- a while ago -- that she's thinking of joining the police because it's been really hard finding work here. Her parents aren't keen though -- her brother did survive what a different set of police did to him in another time and place, but not unscathed. And there would be other complications too. I don't think she did join in the end and of that I'm glad.

A friend told of coming out from nightclubs rolling drunk as a teenager and stepping over the bodies of people sleeping in the street and his disgust for what he was then.

Someone I used to work with many years ago now -- far older than me -- recalled growing up amid the rubble of bombed out buildings.

Sitting in a pub chatting with an ex-colleague who has recently returned from Haj. "Can you believe the idiot?" she asks "The boss calls me into his office and says 'Oh I hope you aren't going to go all religious now."

On the way to go union organising, a friend and I compare notes about where we grew up. Two smoggy cities, one big, one little. Shared nostalgia for imagined countries irrevocably lost. If it makes it through June and July, hers is probably safe until September: after all from a marketing point of view, August is not a good month for introducing new product.

Talking about my all-too-brief stint backpacking (I'm happiest when travelling without purpose but with intent) -- and the way that it is possible to just submerge oneself into that transient society of hostelling Antipodeans (and at the same time also peculiar because they are on their big OE before they go back 'home' and their home is no longer yours) and to so quickly get used to drifting from place to place with what you have on your back (admittedly one of those things that you have on your back being an ATM card). "'Yes." he said "One does get used to things being different surprisingly quickly." But the person I'm sharing coffee with is remembering Kosovo.

A beloved friend -- more than a friend in fact, one of those rare people, fiercely brave, that you don't have to trust because you know. It's not that you know what she'll do exactly, but whatever she does is true. I haven't seen her for too long now. It's prohibitively difficult for me to get a visa to go and see her, even if I had the wherewithal. And if it's difficult for me, how much more so for her?

Like him, his parents were communists. He grew up with the knowledge that he should never discuss politics with his school friends.

It's not that we always left because we wanted to. Far from it. But it's true that if we had all stayed put, we'd never have met.