Maria Duran's Endless Wait

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030908F.shtml

Maria Duran's Endless Wait
By Emily Brady
The New York Times

Sunday 09 March 2008

The night last May when the soldiers came to her butter yellow house in Corona, Queens, with their solemn faces and formal dress, Maria del Rosario Duran was waiting for them.

A few hours earlier, as Ms. Duran was struggling through the front door with shopping bags in her arms, her daughter-in-law had phoned to warn her that the two soldiers would be coming. Their visit, Ms. Duran knew, must have to do with her 25-year-old son, Specialist Alex Jimenez, who was serving his second tour of duty in the dusty chaos of Iraq.

"Algo le pasó a mi hijo" - something has happened to my son - Ms. Duran repeated frantically to the 30 or so relatives, neighbors and friends who descended on her house on 37th Drive where her family has lived since coming from the Dominican Republic three decades ago.

The two soldiers, a young man and a young woman, wearing olive dress uniforms with gold buttons, made their way through the crowd and climbed the worn wooden stairs to the second-floor kitchen. There they delivered the news that would both torment Ms. Duran and sustain her with fleeting moments of hope during the months to come.

They did not tell her that her eldest son was dead - a message that, as the war approaches its fifth anniversary on March 19, has been delivered nearly 4,000 times to American soldiers' families - but that he was missing.

snip//

Inside the house, an enormous black-and-white photograph of Specialist Jimenez in his Army uniform dominates the wall above the dining room table. Next to the kitchen are metal shelves that Ms. Duran has turned into an altar, filling them with photos, religious figurines and a red candle that burns day and night. On the top shelf sits a vase filled with the blue flowers, now withered, that Ms. Duran received the day the six Latino mothers were honored.

On a Saturday afternoon not long ago, Ms. Duran stood by the altar and held one of the figurines, a small, robed figure with outstretched arms. It was St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things and missing persons. The statue was a gift from an Ecuadorean neighbor who told Ms. Duran that the statue normally holds the baby Jesus in his arms. The neighbor has promised to keep the baby until Ms. Duran's son returns.

[Joanne98]

1. Mayber he went AWOL

[TomInTib]

3. In Iraq?

I think not, Joanne.

Where the heck would he absent himsef to?

[Joanne98]

4. I was just hoping we wasn't captured.

[TomInTib]

5. I knew that when I read your reply, Joanne.

Because that's the kind of person you are.

I replied as I did in case someone else might see it.

It was certainly nothing directed personally at you.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Dear St. Anthony, look around

Something's lost that must be found.....

This prayer was taught to me by a Catholic friend, and I thank the Saint when the lost item shows up. I do hope that St. Anthony finds this young man so that his family may have peace.