From audio diary. July 4

(I forgot to include this into my Verdun post but after the events of last week in Lebanon and France, maybe it is ok...)



I'm not sure which day is it of my trip. Today it's Saturday I think. I am near Verdun. I should be half way through, so maybe that's a good thing, but I hitch-hike a lot and that doesn't count as walking...
As I stand here, in this small cold stream trying to refresh my feet, I wonder, whether my "PeaceWalk" was doomed from the start because it had the wrong approach. Maybe a nice idea but the wrong approach...
A Peace Walk for the dead... I don't think that the dead care whether we are at peace or at war. Maybe they feel a little bit dishonoured if we wage wars on one another when they fought "the war to end all wars". But other than that, I think that they don't care at all. It's just that if we go to war, this is us disrespecting them. But while on the PeaceWalk, that right from the start didn't go as planned, and maybe because of that, everything kind of cascaded. Due to my decision to go back to Basel, I met wonderful people: the Swiss, Sebastian, people, whose names I forgot to ask, Alain and Marie... I will carry memory of them through all my life. They did so much, even though we weren't able to communicate. I met so many people that are kind, generous. That are ready to go beyond their polite limits for a stranger who's from another country and can't speak their language. So maybe it is a Peace Walk, just a different one. Well, maybe not a walk entirely, but a Peace Trip; because through that experience I know that people are good. The simple people, from their inner core - they are good. Somewhere along the way people loose that and this is something we should try to fix. So my answer to the question "weather we are born good or bad" would be - born good. And its all because of all the many many incredible good, kind, generous people.

So I don't know if I should call this trip a success, because I did not went across the Western front. Because it's impossible to do: it's either a very thick forest or the "no-man's land" is "someone's land". But in another kind of way, I would call this trip a success and an example of the peace that we can have. Because for goodness and kindness there are no barriers. No cultural. No lingual. No species barriers. If only we just wanted to achieve that.

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