The photo above is of the plaque outside the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, in Santiago, Chile.  It is the only photograph I took, but what I saw and felt that day will remain forever vivid in my memory.

The museum chronicles the holocaust of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1973 to 1990.  Our guide spoke only Spanish; our professor would translate as needed.  Since most of our group understood Spanish, there was little translation done.  My Spanish is not so good; and, in a situation that evokes strong emotion, I hear very little, even in my native tongue.  As we entered the Museum, I already had an overpowering feeling of dread about what we were about to witness.  The Pinochet era was filled with human rights abuses and many were tortured, killed and/or disappeared during his reign.

I tried to pay attention as we moved through the building, but one of the first exhibits we saw was a metal-framed bed with a large battery and electrical cables attached that was used as an implement of torture.  I heard very little after that.  We moved from exhibit to exhibit, from floor to floor.  My breathing became more and more labored until, finally, I was close to hyperventilating and tears poured from my eyes.  I dropped out of the tour and found a glassed-in area in which to sit with my feelings.  As I gazed through the glass, on the wall across the way I saw an array of photographs, hundreds of people who had been disappeared never to be heard from again.  And that was only a small percentage of them.

The awareness of unmitigated evil was all around me.  I breathed in the bad and breathed out the good – a yogic exercise I had heard of before but never understood until that moment.  Evil exists in this world.  The German Holocaust was not an isolated blip in the history of the world.  It continues.  We must keep our hearts and minds open to seeing it where it is and confronting it.

In the United States it is more clandestine and insidious.  It exists when corporations are considered people, children are allowed to go hungry and without healthcare, and millions populate prisons having passed through the cradle to prison pipeline.  I will keep my eyes open and speak the truth.