Dear all:

I have to echo Rachel Myr in that I truly appreciate our sisters Wendy, Toby, Esther, Winnie (and 
Rachel herself) who have posted about the difficult situation in Isreal and Lebanon.  

I cannot do this topic justice because I am hitting a point of emotional shutdown where I find the 
complicated situation overwhelmingly incomprehensible.  I stupidly watched Flight 93 with my 
colleague on Pay per View at the ILCA conference and could not sleep --- and spent a lot of time 
walking up and down the stairs rather than the elevators thinking at least I know my evacuation 
routes.  The emergency preparedness workshop at the ILCA conference showed shots of Goma, a 
place that I visited in my early 20s and loved - and was a hopeless mess after the massacres in 
Rwanda.  Today, I had a client in my old office that was directly across from the South Tower.  I 
actually sat in the clients living room which used to be the office for the Director of International 
Programs of Helen Keller International before September 11th.  A fireball went through this floor 
and so it had been completely rebuilt and it took almost five years to do so.  I also found out that 
the names list of all those who died on that day at Ground Zero --- a list that I always pass by for 
a few moments of paying my respects to the neighborhood firefighters and the father of one of my 
sons nursery school friends who perished on that day --- had been relocated to another site.  

For those of you who have not lived in areas where terrorism is a reality - I want to make it clear 
that the reality is that the romantic notion of freedom fighters is almost never the case when 
violence and brutality becomes the normal method of seemingly seeking justice.  As an American, 
I tend to think of us as being somewhat naive in this regard, but when I was in Peru and worked 
for a German nongovernmental organization -- GTZ, I discovered we do not hold a monopoly on 
this.  In the mid 1980s the Sendaro Luminoso  (Shining Path Guerillas) were in full force.  Many 
Europeans and Americans held the view that they were liberating the local population.  Spending 
time in the little pueblos in Sendero Luminoso territory taught me more about the more brutal 
reality.  The Campesinos were really caught between a terrible triangle of the Sendero, the Police 
and the drug traffickers.  All of these groups were equally destructive and the naive notion that 
the Sendaro Luminoso would liberate this population was ludicrous.  Reality is always far more 
complex.

So, my only coping mechanism at the moment is to allow myself the temporary emotional 
shutdown and think about what one can do for preparation for the next disaster as well as look at 
examples of humor to get me through the day.  

For those of you who were upset about marketing at the ILCA conference (someone stood up and 
mentioned this at one point) I offer up the most ludicrous example I have heard yet.  My husband 
told me tonight that the airlines have found a new method of selling advertising space.  I am not 
kidding about this  --- they are selling advertising space on the barf bags.  Brings back very fond 
memories of traveling on the Air Afrique route which touches down in every country in West Africa 
with a crazy epidemiologist named Kevin Sullivan.  He had never travelled in Africa before and was 
going nuts with the 10 stops we had to make every time we went to a new country.  He got so 
bored that he started decorating the barf bags.  He came up with the International Symbol for "DO 
NOT EAT THE CONTENTS OF THE BARF BAG".  I'm sure you can imagine the diagram.  We must 
have decorated at least 100 barf bags on that trip.  He got the idea from another epidemiologist 
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had visited over 100 countries and 
collected barf bags from various different airlines.  

We all develop our coping mechanims.  Hope you will all put up with this temporary mental lapse.

Best regards, Susan Burger

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