I keep thinking of a teddy bear I received on my 13th birthday. It was the first summer of the war and the first of many deadly seasons for the hundreds of thousands struggling to survive Sarajevo under siege. I hadn’t yet been wounded, that came 3 months later, but even by that first summer, on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I hovered somewhere between being a child who couldn’t help but fight sleep in a delicious anticipation of her birthday, and a ragged semi-adult who berated herself for being so selfish as to hope for a gift when life had been reduced to mere survival.
Around midnight, the door creaked open and my brother’s half-lit silhouette placed something on my desk. I still remember how difficult it was to fall asleep, to shush the curiosity of a child still flickering inside me, while trying to make out the shape of what I knew was my gift. I don’t know how they managed, but my family found the softest teddy bear with the kindest blue eyes ever sewn on a toy—not a humble feat in the midst of the daily struggle to procure food and water and the fact that most stores were either looted or devastated by the bombings.
I named him Dronjo which translates to ragged because his empathetic gaze and the patches of various materials that made up his hide, made him look worn in the best possible sense: Like he had already been loved, like he had already lived. For a young girl desperate to cling to any scrap of childhood, it was the best present ever.
For the next 3 years, Dronjo quivered in my arms as I winced and braced for yet another explosion, wept with me as I soaked his face and paws, sat on my desk, bed and lap while I fretted, dreamed and hoped as the world around us throbbed and thundered. Finally, tucked inside my backpack, he made the treacherous escape to America and in some really low moments of homesickness, in half-secret and shame for still having a teddy bear at 16, I shared with him my first months in America. Less than a year later, during a toy drive at my high school, I said goodbye to Dronjo, resolved in my heart that there was a child who needed him more.
Why am I thinking of Dronjo as I prepare four long ponytails for a donation?
It’s because I feel that my hair could serve someone else more than it serves me. It takes 10-12 ponytails, and who knows how much love, resources and labour, to create a single hairpiece for a child suffering from alopecia, cancer and other conditions.
During this pandemic, like all of us, I have felt loss, a myriad of losses both small and big, peskily inconvenient and deeply heartbreaking. One of the most poignant albeit mundane losses for me has been the joy and the banal carefreeness of chatting with a neighbor or a mailwoman, running into a friend and having her hand brush my shoulder in support, empathy, or just as a warm goodbye. These tiny points of connection, so small that most of us went our whole lives without noticing them, have now become delectable morsels of memory.
Yet, I know that connection is food for all of us whether in a war or a pandemic. It is as essential as bread and water. During the siege, when our 19-storey building belched and moaned from the nearby explosions, my whole family rushed to the narrow hallway between the elevators and the thick walls to seek shelter. There I huddled with our neighbors, their company and hushed assurances that all will be well, providing as much comfort, (if not more!), as the thick walls. Connection.
As this pandemic continues to rob us of so much, the need for listening, sharing and empathy has never been so acute or so essential. I believe we must continually seek ways to connect for they are as infinite as our hearts and imaginations.
It is a humble gesture, but by donating my hair so that it can become a hairpiece which will offer a child some comfort is one way I have found connection. It is rewarding as well as healing for the girl that lives on inside the woman.