Her Stick Figure

1
I don't know what she is using. It's something dark that fills her hand
but goodness knows what it is. It isn't a crayon or a piece of
charcoal, that I know. She is intent, though, the child. She is intent
on her drawing.

She started with the head, but left the face blank while she drew a
small rectangular body no larger - in fact, somewhat smaller - than the
shape it is pretty clear she has drawn to represent the head. Four
lines sprout from the body square, one east, one west and two south.
The south lines remain just that: lines, indicating legs but remaining
footless. The east and west lines are issued with fingers at least as
long as the arm from which they grow.

I look from the child to her mother, kneeling with her back to me
within the tent she shares with her husband and her husband's
family.

2
The wind picks up and I raise my hand to prevent the dust and sand and
grit from blinding me as it has previously. It is cold and I am still
surprised by that. I heard people talking last night about how hard it
is to dig graves in the frozen ground. There are many bodies in need of
burial. People are dying here from the cold and the lack of food. I am
hungry myself but I don't speak of it so much because I know I can
leave here if I choose but I don't choose.

It is cold like Scotland here.

The wind picks up and it is morning. I have much to do today and three
pieces to record, but I will wait. There is much to see behind me, but
I will not turn.

The child and her drawing fascinate me.

3
She appears to be saving the face for last. Two circles have been added
to the top of the stick figure's head to indicate hair. She says
something to her mother. She could be asking her mother to look, but
her mother doesn't speak. It could be that doesn't hear. It could be
that she doesn't want to speak within my earshot.

I don't know. Not everybody here thinks I am a white devil.

4
I have been here a week, issuing reports from the camps to London three
times a day. I attempt to keep my suits clean. I attempt to remain
optimistic. I have watched international aid arrive. I have watched
soldiers attempt to bury the dead, telling jokes. I have not cried and
I have not seen people cry. It is grim reality. The camp is life
written small. The camp is life written in a language you do not
understand. Each day refugees arrive. Each day the camp expands here
and there, new tents. Food is given out from a portable kitchen to the
west of the centre. There is no hospital. The camp is a hospital.

It does not end. Each day more people and still more people flood
through by the soldiers at the gate. Each day people die. Old people
die. I spoke with a young man, one of the aid workers. He plans to
write a book, he says, on their last words. I spoke with a monster, a
reporter and former weather girl from the States, all hairspray and lip
gloss, even here. She cornered me, felt we were similar, wanted to talk
about that which we didn't report home. I thought of the aid worker and
his book. She told me she had her period. She wanted the people at home
to know what she had to go through.

5
The child has paused, as if she is considering whether to leave the
face blank. I find myself moved, want to will her to fill the space.
Leaving the face blank would be a token admittance. A blank face would
stare out at whoever chanced across the picture. I have not been drawn
by a child. I have been drawn by a creature that inhabits the body of a
child but is not a child.

You can only wonder what she has seen. The woman I presume her mother
to be may not be. The woman may be a neighbour. The child may be a
stray. There are many strays here. The child may have seen her family
die. The child may have seen buildings reduced to powder, people
reduced to cartilage and gristle.

The child is not a child like any other and yet here I am, watching her
draw a picture on a wall.

6
Behind me, the business of the day begins. I don't turn. I sit. You can
hear the sound of the generator, chugging, the sound conjuring images
of fan belts and exhaustion. Also the vans, the huge vehicles that
bring food under tarpaulin, their engines clumsy with mechanical
arrythmia. The vans come and go all day. The gates opening and closing,
admitting vans and people and dust and sand and grit.

People shout because people are always shouting. I can hear French and
American English. You don't hear the Afghans shout. The Afghans huddle
and whisper. The only people who hear them speak are those people being
spoken to.

It isn't that I consciously maintain a distance. My job here demands
that I attempt to communicate. It is just that I find the attempt to
comprehend their experience drains me. I have attempted interviews. We
have a translator. Or rather there is a translator, hereabouts. I have
spoken through the translator with old men and young men. The woman are
either not permitted to speak with me or choose not to. The men have
fought to stay alive and many of them envisage fighting again, although
not any time soon. At this moment, the men are tired. I want to say I
am tired also. I want to inform them that I am tired and that I want to
go home also, but I stop myself. I look at the American monster and I
stop myself.

7
Everything is compressed here, and nothing is as it seems. The people
are compressed beneath the weight of their history and the pressure of
current events. I am compressed and pressurised by that which
compresses and pressurises them. Only I am expected to report on what I
see and what I hear. I am expected to reduce what I see and hear to no
more than thirty seconds worth of words of one syllable. I am helpless
and unable. I am appalled by my need for consolation. All I have to do
is talk and yet I want and need these suffering people to understand
that I suffer as well. I am grotesque.

I think we should point a camera at a wall or a face and run that image
for thirty seconds on the news. Stillness would be different. Silence
would provoke a response. Look at this face. Examine this partially
shelled wall. Think about the buildings that used to stand here.
Articulate your own response.

Instead there is too much talk. I over-talk, attempting to graft my
limited understanding - the understanding that the people in London
feel the audience requires to comprehend the scale of what is going on
- and what for? I hear myself echoed uselessly in the words of others.
I find that the sounds I use, the tones I choose to adopt to suggest I
care, the easy relaxed quality of my onscreen appearance haunt me. I
feel like I am a symptom of something.

8
The child finishes her stick figure. There is a face with eyes and a
nose and a mouth. The only immediate distinction that occurs to me, the
only thing that sets this particular stick figure aside from other
stick figures drawn by five year old girls and boys the world over, is
the mouth.

Children draw happy mouths. Children draw sad mouths. This is what they
know.

This child draws neither. This child draws a line, a flat black gash,
across the space beneath a dominating nose. This stick figure is
withholding judgement, yet to decide how all of this will turn out.
This stick figure is caught on a wall that may be bombed at some time
in the future. I am reminded of the ashy silhouettes left in the rock
by the blast of Pompeii. The signs left for the future that exist as
the space around those who tell stories.

I want to act and stop myself. The picture should not be reported,
should - if faced by reporting - obliterate itself. I know I will do
this. I will come back here with a camera. I will be filmed in front of
the wall, talking about what I have seen. I will attempt to poke the
camera into their tent, attempt to see the child's face. Look at this,
world. Understand. I will do all this and I will not want to, but the
part of me that wants to stop is a stick figure drawn by a child on a
wall.