How do we just walk away?

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James had not been missing for seven and a half weeks. I am not sure if the campaign has slowed down or if I am just becoming more acostumed to the pace, but things seem physically easier now. Emotionally this is still hard. Although it is also now easier to think about other things. I think about coming home, about where I am going to do my Masters, if I will be able to pull off a road trip this coming summer... and only from time to time now does reality break into these thoughts. That is the beauty of human beings I guess, that we are able to think about other things, that we have this ability to distract ourselves from reality long enough to be able to survive reality.

We received information from a reliable source about 2 weeks ago that James is still alive. To be honest, that fact that he is still alive after almost two months in military custody is a miracle. They don't always keep the victims of enforced disappearance for that long. Frequently the body of the person is found around the two month mark, indistinguishable, in the woods somewhere. Knowing that a James is alive is amazingly heartening. But at the same time, that doesn't change our campaign at all. That doesn't put us any closer to finding him, or any closer to forcing his abductors to surface him.

I am worried now that he will not be surfaced before I go home. I leave in two months, at the end of December. I hadn't thought about that when this campaign started. Of course when this campaign started I don't think any of us suspected that it would take this long. The military or police usually surface their illegal detainees within the four or five days, parading them around on the news as surrendered rebel leaders. Or, like I said, we find their bodies. To be honest I thought about so little at the beginning of the campaign other then the campaign. I had the luxury I guess of not having other things on my mind, or not having my own family, of not having responsibilities outside of myself and this job. And so I just focused on the task in front of my, the moment in which I was living, the few hours stretched out a head of me seemed as far in the future as my mind could grasp. It is only now, when things have started to slow, that I have realized that there is the possibility that I might be going home without a resolution. It is entirely possible that I will be uprooted form this campaign well before it is finished. Though I have been mentally preparing to go home I can't imagine how I will go from a campaign to save the life of an abducted activist to normal life at home.

I guess the reality is that I can't just go back to normal life at home again. I can't go back to Canada the same girl I was when I came here. A friend of mine insisted that I was going to be so different by the time I finished this internship that I would have shaved my head and be wearing only hemp fiber clothing. ummm... that has not happened. I have learned in fact that the most important thing for my mental survival here has been holding on to my personality, holding on to myself, those parts of me that I am certain about and that I love and rely on. But there are parts of me that maybe haven't changed, but have definitely become more important, more convicted, stronger parts of my being. My need to be involved, my need to make a difference, they are like oxygen to me now, absolutely necessary parts of my being. And so I doubt that I will be able to go home and just relax. Letting this education go would be a shame, but I also don't worry about wasting it, because I don't know if I could possible walk away from it all now.

It is going to tear my heart out of my body to have to leave the Philippines knowing that James is still missing. But the reality is that I might have to. The only way to get past that I think will be to continue to stay active when I get home. To stay active in the Surface James Balao Campaign, but also stay active in the Philippine situation and in my own country. I am looking forward to finding myself a spot in the Canadian activism scene again. I need that new life blood to connect me to both my life here and my life at home - a life that needs to be richer more involved.

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