【英语语言学习】我在战争中所看到的
时间:2019-01-24 作者:英语课 分类:英语语言学习
英语课
This is how war starts. One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment. The next thing, the telephones go out, the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street, there's roadblocks. Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation 1. It stops.
I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate 2 for you exactly what it feels like. She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. Great person. And suddenly she sees a tank ambling 3 down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin 4, in her high heels and her miniskirt. And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos 5 and she thinks, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again."
A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, "Take my child! Take my child!" and passing her son to someone through a window. And she didn't see him for years. The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.
I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. I learned about compassion 6. I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes. I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie 7. Most of all, I learned about love. Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping 8 people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals.
I learned so much about myself. Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility." I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo.
Last April, I went back to a very strange -- what I called a deranged 9 high school reunion. What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "anniversary," because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. It was a very somber 10 gathering 11 of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian 12 aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous 13 people of Sarajevo themselves. And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized 14 a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children.
I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told. I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend 15, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. They don't get their money out. They stay because you want to stay in your home. And then war and chaos descend.
Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. In 1994, I briefly 16 left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered 18. Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. And to give you some example, I remember standing 19 and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. And that was just a small percentage of the dead. And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes.
So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter 17 in the first place. And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation 20, and I find this remarkable 21. So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why.
When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. And that's pretty much why I do it.
In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. And I called him Luca, which means "The bringer of light," because he does bring light to my life. But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with Luca?" And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody 22 time in Iraq, "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it." And he said, "Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
And there, sadly, will always be wars. And I am deluding 23 myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless. A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. And that's what I try to do. I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating 24, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings 25 of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux 26, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude 27 myself.
But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate 2 for you exactly what it feels like. She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. Great person. And suddenly she sees a tank ambling 3 down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin 4, in her high heels and her miniskirt. And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos 5 and she thinks, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again."
A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, "Take my child! Take my child!" and passing her son to someone through a window. And she didn't see him for years. The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.
I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. I learned about compassion 6. I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes. I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie 7. Most of all, I learned about love. Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping 8 people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals.
I learned so much about myself. Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility." I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo.
Last April, I went back to a very strange -- what I called a deranged 9 high school reunion. What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "anniversary," because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. It was a very somber 10 gathering 11 of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian 12 aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous 13 people of Sarajevo themselves. And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized 14 a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children.
I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told. I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend 15, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. They don't get their money out. They stay because you want to stay in your home. And then war and chaos descend.
Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. In 1994, I briefly 16 left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered 18. Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. And to give you some example, I remember standing 19 and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. And that was just a small percentage of the dead. And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes.
So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter 17 in the first place. And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation 20, and I find this remarkable 21. So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why.
When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. And that's pretty much why I do it.
In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. And I called him Luca, which means "The bringer of light," because he does bring light to my life. But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with Luca?" And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody 22 time in Iraq, "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it." And he said, "Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
And there, sadly, will always be wars. And I am deluding 23 myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless. A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. And that's what I try to do. I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating 24, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings 25 of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux 26, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude 27 myself.
But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
n.活泼,兴奋,卡通片/动画片的制作
- They are full of animation as they talked about their childhood.当他们谈及童年的往事时都非常兴奋。
- The animation of China made a great progress.中国的卡通片制作取得很大发展。
v.举例说明,阐明;图解,加插图
- The company's bank statements illustrate its success.这家公司的银行报表说明了它的成功。
- This diagram will illustrate what I mean.这个图表可说明我的意思。
v.(马)缓行( amble的现在分词 );从容地走,漫步
- At that moment the tiger commenced ambling towards his victim. 就在这时,老虎开始缓步向它的猎物走去。 来自辞典例句
- Implied meaning: drinking, ambling, the people who make golf all relatively succeed. 寓意:喝酒,赌博,打高尔夫的人都比较成功。 来自互联网
n.箱柜;vt.放入箱内;[计算机] DOS文件名:二进制目标文件
- He emptied several bags of rice into a bin.他把几袋米倒进大箱里。
- He threw the empty bottles in the bin.他把空瓶子扔进垃圾箱。
n.混乱,无秩序
- After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后,城市一片混乱。
- The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。
n.同情,怜悯
- He could not help having compassion for the poor creature.他情不自禁地怜悯起那个可怜的人来。
- Her heart was filled with compassion for the motherless children.她对于没有母亲的孩子们充满了怜悯心。
n.同志之爱,友情
- The camaraderie among fellow employees made the tedious work just bearable.同事之间的情谊使枯燥乏味的工作变得还能忍受。
- Some bosses are formal and have occasional interactions,while others prefer continual camaraderie.有些老板很刻板,偶尔才和下属互动一下;有些则喜欢和下属打成一片。
n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的,辅助的
- The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
- By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。
adj.疯狂的
- Traffic was stopped by a deranged man shouting at the sky.一名狂叫的疯子阻塞了交通。
- A deranged man shot and killed 14 people.一个精神失常的男子开枪打死了14人。
adj.昏暗的,阴天的,阴森的,忧郁的
- He had a somber expression on his face.他面容忧郁。
- His coat was a somber brown.他的衣服是暗棕色的。
n.集会,聚会,聚集
- He called on Mr. White to speak at the gathering.他请怀特先生在集会上讲话。
- He is on the wing gathering material for his novels.他正忙于为他的小说收集资料。
n.人道主义者,博爱者,基督凡人论者
- She has many humanitarian interests and contributes a lot to them.她拥有很多慈善事业,并作了很大的贡献。
- The British government has now suspended humanitarian aid to the area.英国政府现已暂停对这一地区的人道主义援助。
adj.勇敢的,有胆量的
- We all honour courageous people.我们都尊重勇敢的人。
- He was roused to action by courageous words.豪言壮语促使他奋起行动。
v.象征,作为…的象征( symbolize的过去式和过去分词 )
- For Tigress, Joy symbolized the best a woman could expect from life. 在她看,小福子就足代表女人所应有的享受。 来自汉英文学 - 骆驼祥子
- A car symbolized distinction and achievement, and he was proud. 汽车象征着荣誉和成功,所以他很自豪。 来自辞典例句
vt./vi.传下来,下来,下降
- I hope the grace of God would descend on me.我期望上帝的恩惠。
- We're not going to descend to such methods.我们不会沦落到使用这种手段。
adv.简单地,简短地
- I want to touch briefly on another aspect of the problem.我想简单地谈一下这个问题的另一方面。
- He was kidnapped and briefly detained by a terrorist group.他被一个恐怖组织绑架并短暂拘禁。
n.屠杀,屠宰;vt.屠杀,宰杀
- I couldn't stand to watch them slaughter the cattle.我不忍看他们宰牛。
- Wholesale slaughter was carried out in the name of progress.大规模的屠杀在维护进步的名义下进行。
v.屠杀,杀戮,屠宰( slaughter的过去式和过去分词 )
- The invading army slaughtered a lot of people. 侵略军杀了许多人。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- Hundreds of innocent civilians were cruelly slaughtered. 数百名无辜平民遭残杀。 来自《简明英汉词典》
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的
- After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
- They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。
n.和解,和谐,一致
- He was taken up with the reconciliation of husband and wife.他忙于做夫妻间的调解工作。
- Their handshake appeared to be a gesture of reconciliation.他们的握手似乎是和解的表示。
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的
- She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
- These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。
adj.非常的的;流血的;残忍的;adv.很;vt.血染
- He got a bloody nose in the fight.他在打斗中被打得鼻子流血。
- He is a bloody fool.他是一个十足的笨蛋。
v.欺骗,哄骗( delude的现在分词 )
- They used Teresa's desolation as another proof that believers are deluding themselves. 他们用德肋撒嬷嬷的孤寂再一次论证信徒们是在蒙蔽自己。 来自互联网
- There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. 比如说有一些对当代世界时局自我欺骗式的阐释。 来自互联网
adj.产生挫折的,使人沮丧的,令人泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的现在分词 );挫败;使受挫折;令人沮丧
- It's frustrating to have to wait so long. 要等这么长时间,真令人懊恼。
- It was a demeaning and ultimately frustrating experience. 那是一次有失颜面并且令人沮丧至极的经历。 来自《简明英汉词典》
n.弦
- He sat on the bed,idly plucking the strings of his guitar.他坐在床上,随意地拨着吉他的弦。
- She swept her fingers over the strings of the harp.她用手指划过竖琴的琴弦。
adj.十字形;难事,关键,最重要点
- The crux of the matter is how to comprehensively treat this trend.问题的关键是如何全面地看待这种趋势。
- The crux of the matter is that attitudes have changed.问题的要害是人们的态度转变了。