(no subject)

[ritaxis]

So this last chapter opens with my guy at the age of nineteen or so (I'd have to look that up, though it's nailed down in my notes), in his first posting as an intern in a refugee camp, reburying the victims of a massacre of several months before. There are several things wrong with the scene, as I have just discovered through conversations with Frank and reading the Wikipedia article here and the external links it leads to. Of course there's a wiki article about the health risks of dead bodies: think tsunami, earthquake, hurricane.

One, it's unlikely that the corpses will still smell corpsey at the time I've set this scene. I can tweak the season of the year and the lay of the land to maximize this, if I want. Two, all the literature says that mass graves in the first place are a waste of resources and bad for the survivors because they don't get to do what they want to do about the dead.

Now I first got an inkling of this because I was thinking about the washing of my father's corpse and then I realized that in the (later, well-run, no massacre) refugee camp clinic there would be family members washing corpses and the doctor would have to justify that to the security officer -- though why he would not have run up against that earlier, I don't know -- maybe the Sisters had some elaborate protocol in their camp clinics that was not in place here.

I'm on the trail of sorting this out. I already thought that the reason there was a mass grave in the first place was the hysterical behavior of the villagers who murdered the residents of the refugee camp. Somewhere I had a line or two about them making health problems for themselves by killing all these people, but that's not true, is it, except for mental health -- it can't be good for a person to go along with the experience of having murdered a bunch of innocent people. I can just remove that or tweak it to reflect what I know now. The trigger for the massacre in the first place was not simple xenophobia but fear of diseases that the villagers thought were being incubated in the camps. Which they were, but not exclusively: the whole region is a vast petri dish for rogue diseases because of the ravages of the war.

Okay, never mind. I know what Pablo's doing there: he's digging up the corpses in order to chronicle the remains so that back in the first chapter, forty years after the last chapter, when he returns to the site and it's been turned into a landmark site commemorating the war and the peace, there are all the memorial markers around the former camp -- cut into the paths and benches, names where possible, etc.

I have to wrap my mind around the stinkiness issue, though.

And now Frank has convinced me that Pablo is not an intern in this stage of his life: he's a Peacekeeper.

And just now, my computer clock was reading 47 minutes fast, when it was correct five hours ago.

Is there a malicious entity that would do this? Should I be worried?