FOURTH NIGHT

ONE OF THE most disturbing sights one can experience in a wartime evacuation is that of a disabled old man or woman trying to flee a conflict zone.

The young have their sturdy legs and their health, and when lacking those, a constitution th at can endure, even thrive, in the changes and uncertainties of a refugee’s plight. Even the sight of young mothers being evacuated with their children gathered about them is somehow not as gut wrenching as we feel it should be.

Of course in the actual war zone it is different; there we lament the huddled family trapped in the shelled house or the hospitalized child staring unblinkingly out of a face pockmarked with shrapnel wounds. But in the evacuation it is the laborious stilted movements of the old that most upsets us. Continue reading