The Region under Snow

Once you have walked a city's streets, with friends, old and new, the fortunes of that place touch your heart. Lepa sent me these photos to show us what her neighborhood looked like now; Belgrade like so many other towns and cities in the region are in the grip of cold, weather so severe that over 200 people have died from exposure to it. To all we met in the summer of last year and beyond, we send our love.

Lepa writes that she cannot take pleasure in the beauty she sees outside her window for she is warm and has running water, but just doors away lives a Romany family and like so many in the region, they do not have the comforts of indoor plumbing or heat. In her letter she tells of how she and her other lesbian friends are doing all they can to share their basic securities with these families. Children laughing in tubs of hot water, mothers washing their hair in warmth--she writes me these things to share the laughter, not for me to talk about on this journal, but I offer this sound, the happiness of children, not one's own, their laughter because they have been given moments in which they can be children again, ringing out over these snow covered roof tops of Herzegovina. This is what are States can do, must do, make joy possible for the dispossessed.