ariannaf
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« on: January 15, 2010, 08:50:02 AM » |
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Hi, someone suggested I repost this after editing. I think I have worked out most of the issues identified last time. -Arianna
By escaping to West Germany in the 1960’s, PAUL, a former German soldier captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, unwittingly alters the life path of a young girl in the 1990’s. That girl is ARIANNA, who was born legally blind in a scrap-lumber shack in the arid hills of Northeastern Oregon. Her transformation begins when she wins a high-school scholarship to study for a year in Germany.
Arianna grew up in a tight-knit community of eccentrics, social rebels and seasonal tree-planters and, amid the external pressures of the Cold War and the rise of Christian fundamentalism, she sees the world in terms of “us versus everyone else.” American schools are being forced to accept children with disabilities, and Arianna bears the brunt of the local backlash – from schoolyard ostracism to the disdain of school officials. She hopes Germany will be different but, when her disability is discovered by the Germans, she is spurned by her host father and barred from attending public school. To attend a private religious school, she must pretend to be a devout Protestant and question her deepest convictions.
Then, Paul’s grown daughters, who were long separated by the Iron Curtain, bring Arianna together with a romantic Czech musician and migrant worker. At sixteen, she takes off with him to Czechoslovakia on the eve of the break-up of that country. Her experiences there with a group of guitar-strumming young “Tramps” irrevocably tie her to the Czechs and broaden her worldview.
Arianna is convinced that she must prove her worth to all those who rejected her for her disability by doing something extraordinary. So, she sets out to study Russian in Siberia. On the way, she is detained by Ukrainian soldiers, who force her onto a train headed to Romania as a spiteful prank. To escape, Arianna must leap from the moving train in the middle of the night and enlist the help of railway workers to get the correct train to make an unscheduled stop. She then travels across the Trans-Siberian Railroad, bunks with Kazakh shuttle-traders and finds herself briefly held at gunpoint by an alleged ex-KGB officer. In the Siberian town of Kurgan, the mafia rules the shattered streets, food is difficult to buy at any price and some people don’t believe America even exists. While living with an unstable Russian family, Arianna learns to survive in the anarchic society of Siberia despite her vision impairment and struggles with her conflicted identity as a dissident American.
The following year, Arianna returns to what is now the Czech Republic on a journalism internship and is forced to come to terms with the dark side of her Czech friends – extreme racism against the country’s Romani (Gypsy) minority. In a further attempt to prove herself, she wins a place on a study program in Zimbabwe, over the objections of the program director, who fears her vision impairment will be a burden to the group. While in Africa, Arianna makes a disastrous attempt to work for a local newspaper, learns what it is like to have skin that glows the wrong color and forms an intense sister-like bond with a village woman. After she is sent home for contracting malaria, Arianna is emotionally shaken when her friend’s letters describe a terrible drought and then stop coming altogether.
After a few months back in the US, Arianna’s job application at a small-town American newspaper is rebuffed by an editor who says no blind person can be a reporter, so she sets out as a freelancer - from New York and Prague to Kazakhstan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Hounded by her fear of social ostracism, she struggles to make a living by writing, while visiting shanty towns and isolated villages. She befriends girls and women in each new place, and she sees each country from the point of view of the underclass. Eventurally, she marries a soft-spoken Czech man and becomes semi-settled in the Czech Republic.
Her “big break” in journalism comes when an acquaintance hands Arianna a job in Macedonia for Business Week. She sets out to interview a minister of finance and a Balkan war breaks out while she is there. Then, as the spreading conflict seals the borders, she is trapped in neighboring Kosovo with a photographer, a Finnish aid worker and a Romani interpreter. Since heavily armed Albanian gangs have forced most of the Romani population to flee for their lives, Kosovo becomes hostile territory for Arianna and her companions. After days of anxiety amid bombed-out villages and refugee camps, they hear of a breach in the blockade. But their jeep dies in a dangerous area at night before they can escape. Only thanks to the help of a courageous Albanian driver do they make it across the border to the relative safety of Macedonia, which is its self on the brink of civil war.
Arianna becomes a regular correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, covering the Macedonian conflict. She crosses the front lines, avoids snipers and interviews shell-shocked people on both sides. Then, the American military gets involved, setting off an anti-American backlash. Due to geopolitical circumstances, Arianna is now targeted by the Macedonian side and thrown together with the same Albanian militants that she recently fled from in Kosovo. She narrowly outruns an armed mob and survives a terrifying night of rioting and gunfire. Finally, she gains a measure acceptance in the elite community of international war correspondents.
September 11, 2001 forces Arianna to view war from a different angle and to reevaluate her priorities away from proving herself and toward seeking her own balance. Several years later, her experiences seeing the world through the eyes of diverse cultures, help Arianna to bridge a rift of cultures and religions that has divided her extended family for fifteen years. In the end, her experiences in Romani communities assist her in adopting a Romani child.
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