Water under the bridge?!

It's hard for a village person to dream big... you're trapped in that small place mentality, you convince yourself that you're too small to change anything...

This sounds like the absolute truth in your head only until you start reading fantastic stories of extraordinary people.

The library is your best friend. So many magical stories! They give you wings... you allow yourself to dream, to fly!

You do everything right. Follow every rule, although you do question quite a few of them!!

That's who you are. You have to ask questions. Never a follower just because you've been told.

For example, why is electricity cut off in the evenings? And with it central heating?

Why are people scared to talk about anything important?

Why are we all going to the town stadium to cheer The Party and The Supreme Leader on the 23rd August?

Why do we have his photo and that of his wife on the front of all our school books? Why are we only allowed 2 hours of TV per day filled with how much The Party is driving productivity and how rich our country is? When you've seen with your own 7 year-old eyes poverty and people queuing for bread. In fact you've been pushed and pulled in that queue as you're holding on to your family's ration card, allowing one big loaf every two days, like it's the most precious thing in the world. Because it is. Your family trusted you with the job of getting bread! What can be more important than that?!

Some days you don't get it. Bigger and stronger people get to the front of the line before you... some go round the back.

It's a survival game. And you learn this lesson the hard way.

There's only a limited amount of bread the baker has resources for. And the people queuing are neither organised, kind, nor relaxed. It's a survival race, as I said. Empathy and humanity are stripped out of people every day, with every new restriction and austerity measure The Party imposes.

A lot of people try to find ways around it. It becomes a virtue "to find workarounds" to be inventive and resourceful.

If you know someone at the grocery store, at the bakery, at the butchers, better still if one of your family members works in those sought after places, it's the closest you'll be to royalty.

This wasn't me, obviously.

Everything we did had to involve hard work and determination. Nothing came freely. And it still doesn't.

But this is how an entire nation changed. This is how the people became susceptible to bribe and nepotism. The survival game required this quality. It required a flexible backbone and an open mind.

I could never achieve that. My stubborn, fused vertebrae wouldn't budge.

In those days nobody knew who to trust. Trust was a liability. Who could guarantee that your neighbour, your friend, your brother won't turn you in for something you may or may not have done?

People started disappearing a while ago. Nobody knew what their crimes were or where they went. We only saw a few men in suits asking to speak to them and then they were gone. Forever. At least that's what we thought then.

Our neighbour Paul from number 3, for example. College professor. He taught history or politics or something like that. He heard a knock on his door one evening, was invited to chat to The Secret Police and that was the last time we all saw him.

They call themselves "the secret police" for fun, I think. Everybody knows they exist, they're not secret.

The difficulty comes from identifying who works for them.

For all we know it could be anyone. Even family. That's the hardest part.

Is anyone then surprised that the nation's soul was crushed in those few decades of communism? That we don't volunteer, that our enthusiasm for advocacy and activism is low? Of course it is! The regime crushed the collective spirit with all it had.

And most people are still fighting to survive now. If you're in constant fight/flight/freeze mode, you can't stop and think about another person very easily... it requires engagement of completely different brain parts.

But let's be honest, not everyone was afraid and merely surviving in those decades of communism. Not by a long way!

There were enough people who created and enforced the rules. The "more equal" ones. People who weren't queuing like the rest of us. No. They had no such trivial worries. They were brainstorming more and more repressive ways to control the nation, to silence it.

There were also the people who snitched on others for their own gain, access, and influence. Lots of bendy slithery spines and kiss-assery.

And if you do that for long enough it becomes a fixed flexion deformity, no amount of intervention can correct that. You become it. You embody it. And then you model and teach it to your children.

Why would these last 2 groups of people change their behaviours and beliefs all of a sudden when the regime is toppled? If these behaviours are exactly what served them so well for so long? Oh, no. They adapt. They call themselves capitalists now. They keep the power, and influence and continue to practice their old beliefs in a new system. They don't persecute others, they don't sow fear anymore, but they steal, and cheat and sell the country's resources to the highest bidder.

Of course they keep the money! They've earned it! They've had this right for decades, why on earth would they stop now?! One thing they aren't - is stupid.

And that, my friends, is a short glimpse into the destruction of a nation, still trying to heal itself with no open discussion, no apologies, and no accountability.

Murky waters still flowing under that bridge.