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| Thursday, 9 October 2003 |
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Jolie releases journals on Lanka, Kosovo GENEVA - The UN refugee agency's Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina Jolie has released two journals offering rare insight into her recent experiences with displaced people in Kosovo and Sri Lanka. The journals available on the UNHCR web site capture the hope and despair of the refugees, returnees and displaced people Jolie met while on mission to these post-conflict societies. In Kosovo from December 27-30 last year she visited return sites and met a team of women de-miners in the capital, Pristina. She also travelled to various enclaves in the volatile Mitrovica region, where she met Croatian refugees, minorities and mixed communities. "It's a sad place," she notes. "Hard to see how it can ever return to normal. No real joy, but there is the ability to survive. To move on, to try to rebuild. To try to make neighbours of old enemies." In Sri Lanka which she visited from April 14-15 this year, she encountered similar survival instincts. Life is hard for Sri Lankans after 20 years of civil war. At the home of a returnee family in the north, Jolie reports. "The wife says simply, 'We are finding it very hard to live. Sometimes we think maybe we starve - maybe we will set fire to ourselves. Maybe it will be better somewhere else.' The kids tell us, 'No , we have to stay strong. It will get better, but I don't know when.'" But the will to survive is strong. At another house, "the grandfather points to a large pile of rubble and says, 'My brother's house. He has not seen it yet.' He jokes, 'Much work to do.' There is nothing to do but cry and start all over," writes Jolie. Such personal insight and day-to-day accounts are not new to the goodwill Ambassador, who keeps a journal on all her missions to the field. Many of those journals can now be found in a soon-to-be published book, Notes from My Travels (Simon and Schuster). |
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