In chapter 2 and in this "what I'm reading" post, I quote the work of Helen Todd, who with her husband spent a year, basically 1992, living amid and studying in two villages in Bangladesh. Her book about the experience is a superbly written ethnographic study, albeit of an unrepresentative sample that excludes women who dropped out of Grameen Bank after less than ten years.Googling, I found this:
In September 1992, [the Center for Constitutional Rights] filed a wrongful death suit in Massachusetts federal court against Indonesian General Sintong Pangaitan on behalf of Helen Todd, whose 20-year-old son Kamal Bamadhaj, a citizen of New Zealand, was killed in 1991.Bamadhaj had been observing the funeral procession of a young East Timorese man killed earlier by the Indonesian military when hundreds of armed uniformed soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Bamadhaj, a student at an Australian university, was traveling throughout the area on his way home to Malaysia.The soldiers shot into a densely packed unarmed crowd for more than five minutes; as victims fell to the ground, soldiers continued firing at those still standing. Between 146 and 200 people were killed. Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman, U.S. journalists, witnessed the incident and were attacked by soldiers, barely escaping with their lives.
(Oddly, Goodman almost stayed at my house during the Obama inauguration.)The film Punitive Damage documents Todd's fight for the truth about her son's death and a modicum of justice (review, review).Todd hardly mentions the tragedy in her book. She acknowledges her husband, David Gibbons, "who helped me survive a time of great personal pain." In the epilogue, meeting a boy whose life she had helped save, "I wander off into the banana grove to hide my tears, thinking of my own son." How striking to watch these villagers through her eyes and hear her inner voice for 230 pages without sensing the wound in her heart.
