Inese's Story of Pain and Triumph

Inese before the fire

Our paths have crossed in 1998. I was looking for an elegant but inexpensive dress in Parisians, a department store in the newly opened mall in the neighboring town. The stylishly dressed blonde, blue-eyed associate seemed out of place; she certainly did not look southern, did not dress southern, she belonged in a chic boutique in Europe.

With her foreign accent and impeccable professionalism, she offered to search off the show floor for a classy dress. After about ten minutes she returned with a beautiful black dress with tiny white polka dots, perfect for a teacher like me. I bought the dress and, while chatting with Inese, I found out that she was from Latvia and had recently gotten married to a local man named Mike, thus explaining her American last name.

This chance encounter was meant for a reason but I did not know why at the time. I had returned many times afterwards and we spent time eating out, socializing, and talking about the past and the future. We invited her into our home and she visited a few times with her young daughters. We built a friendship based on the common experiences of having lived in Eastern Europe under the communist boot, and the life of a foreign transplant married to an American.

Trying to fit into the southern culture was challenging because acceptance was based on how many generations of one’s ancestors lived in those parts. A college education or the willingness to assimilate and contribute to society in a positive way was far less significant. Seven generations of southern residence, we were told, was the passport to societal acceptance. Little did they know that, instead of legal immigrants like us, in two decades Americans would be forced by their own governments to accept illegal immigrants and dangerous refugees from far more threatening locales and backgrounds.

Inese was born and raised in Riga, Latvia, and speaks fluent Russian and Latvian. Her love of tea changed her life forever on a fateful day in May 1974. She was eight years old and home alone. As she turned on the gas stove, a slow leak which had built up gas in the small room blew up in her face and ignited her flannel nightgown. Not knowing what to do, she crouched down and hid her face inside her knees, a move that saved her face but burned her entire torso. By the time the fire was put out, she had third degree burns on 60 percent of her body. A neighbor pulled off what remained of her thick gown which had exacerbated her severe burns.

The same neighbor called an ambulance and the day care where her father was picking up her three-year old brother. He dropped everything and rushed home.  The ambulance was already there and Inese was being whisked away on a stretcher, to the children’s wing of the Riga hospital.  Her mom was so distraught that she had to be admitted as well for a nervous breakdown. For two weeks she was cared for in the same hospital in which her daughter was struggling between life and death. Doctors did not expect Inese to survive and had told her dad to prepare for the worst.

But miraculously, she did wake up from her coma and told her doctor that she had seen a long and narrow tunnel with a bright light at the end. A booming voice had told her, it was not her time, she had to go back. That’s when she opened her eyes for the first time to such excruciating pain that she still remembers it vividly today, more than four decades later.

Inese endured three months of agonizing and unimaginable pain; her dad watched over her with devotion and fervent prayer. He sold most valuables and emptied his savings in order to bribe doctors and medical personnel with walk-around cash in envelopes, as it was the case in every socialist/communist country, to give extra medical attention to his little girl. One doctor, who was to care for her for many years, refused any money.

Once a week, Inese was taken to a special bath where she was soaked in a purple solution that would help nurses cut away, peel off, and remove the bandages that would stick to her burned flesh. The purple dye was an antiseptic to prevent infection. When morphine wore off, the eight-year old little girl would suffer merciless pain.

At the end of three months of torturous care, she was released just in time to start second grade. Her dancing days as an aspiring ballerina were over. Physical therapy did not help her much – the wounds were too fresh and she needed more grafts and many plastic surgeries for years. That is how her eight-year trek to St. Petersburg, then part of the USSR, began, every spring and summer vacation, for much needed reconstructions.

She and her mom traveled by train from Riga, Latvia, to St. Petersburg from 9:00 p.m. to 9 a.m., a 12-hour overnight ride. A caring friend would put her mom up in her small apartment for the duration. Remarkably, the courageous Inese remained an honor roll student through her entire ordeal. By the time she finished all possible plastic reconstructions, high school was almost over.

After college, Inese met, fell in love with, and married a Russian officer in 1987, at the age of 22, and settled into a difficult life on his assigned base in Irkutsk, Siberia, in the former USSR. To visit her mom and dad, Inese would fly for nine hours to Riga, Latvia, and back, even when she became pregnant. Despite all her pain and suffering, Inese gave birth to two beautiful girls in 1988 and 1989. The difficult marriage, drowning in infidelity and alcohol, ended five years later and it seemed that she was going to remain a single mom in Riga until God brought Mike into her life.

It was hard for most men to accept the responsibility of raising someone else’s little girls but Mike had a deep faith in God and a rare generosity. His kindness, determination, and love convinced her to marry him even though it meant that she had to uproot again and move to another foreign country. They were married in 1998, the year I met her in Tupelo.

A young grandmother, Inese is living today the peaceful life full of grace she always yearned for, even though one of her daughters is estranged from the family. Church, prayer, family, and God are very important parts of her life. She confessed to me recently that all the pain she endured during the eight years of constant physical therapy, skin grafts from her legs, and plastic surgeries, even the botched one in the U.S., do not even compare with the pain of not having the love and respect of her estranged daughter.

Yet Inese feels blessed and remains happy, positive, and hopeful, centered on her Christian faith, a true inspiration for other burn victims. During her life’s struggles, she had crossed the globe; she emerged from the difficult times of communist tyranny in USSR and landed in our vast country, where she built a better life for herself and for her family.

Tattoos, Artistic Expression, Fashion Statement, or Self-Mutilation

Tattoos used to represent gang affiliation, prison time, or brotherhood in the military. Hollywood’s narcissistic behavior has changed that; imitation has become a misguided form of flattery.

Tattoos are a billion dollar industry. Considered now a form of self-expression, my body is my canvass, tats are not cheap. Tats are so desired that unemployed and partly-employed youth go into debt to pay for tattoos.

Tattoos and body piercings are considered a rite of passage in primitive cultures, and are more painful and more expensive to remove in western cultures. Some Christians object to tattooing because it defaces the perfect body that God has created.
On any given day, it is hard to scan any crowd without finding more and more people of all ages with visible and huge tattoos, body piercings, hooks, horns, chains, facial holes, gauged piercings, and other forms of body enhancement. There has been an explosion of young people covering their arms, their legs, their backs, necks, faces, and hands with colorful tattoos and body piercings in painful places.

A few tats are beautiful, masterfully done by skilled artists, some are ugly caricatures or stretched blotches of black ink, others picture words in foreign scripts the wearer does not understand, some represent kinship or brotherhood with an organization, a few make delicate or indelicate fashion statements, some are obscene, others represent prison time, the number of people murdered and gang affiliation, and others pay homage to a place, a person, a special date, a life-altering event, or a decision made while inebriated. No matter what the reason, tattoos become an indelible part of how that person is perceived for a lifetime regardless of their good, imperfect, or bad character.

Pirates had only one ear pierced because they believed it improved their visual acuity.

Holocaust victims at Auschwitz had numbers tattooed on their forearms by their jailers and torturers, a vivid expression of the utter brutality of Nazism and its attempt to dehumanize Jewish people.

When I first saw Otzi, the Iceman, the well-preserved mummy of a man who lived about 3300 B.C., in Bolzano, Italy, I focused on many details besides his belongings. Discovered in 1991 on the Austrian-Italian border between Bolzano and Innsbruck, Otzi had 57 tattoos. Scientists revealed that some tats were located near modern acupuncture points and they may have treated his degenerative arthritis. If that is indeed true, tattooing for medicinal purposes, a form of rudimentary acupuncture, occurred way before acupuncture was known to be in use in China around 1000 B.C.

“Otzi had several carbon tattoos including groups of short, parallel, vertical lines to both sides of the lumbar spine, a cruciform mark behind the right knee, and various marks around both ankles.” http://www.crystalinks.com/otzi.html

Two mummies, a man and his wife, from 2,500 years ago remained frozen in Pazyryk on the Altai steppes near the Mongolian border and western Siberia until it was found by Russian archeologist Sergei Rudenko in 1948. The man’s body was covered with tattoos, his arms, legs, and trunk – “monsters with wings and cats’ tails, lion-griffins with snakelike bodies, deer with huge antlers and eagles’ beaks.”

The Scyths (Scythians), Iranian equestrian tribes, who lived in central Asia from 7th to 3rd century B.C., were famous for their tattoos. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) wrote, “the whole mass of the Scyths, as many as are nomads, cauterize their shoulders, arms, and hands, chests, thighs, and loins, for no other purpose than to avoid weakness and flabbiness and to become energetic.”

Tattooing then was a painful status symbol for Scythians. Skilled tattooists punctured deeply into the flesh of their customers elaborate designs of real and imaginary creatures and then “filled the holes with a black liquid.”

Another Pazyryk people discovery was made in 1993 in Novosibirsk, a 25 year old blond princess preserved in the Siberian permafrost. The Ukok Princess had perfectly preserved 2,500 year old tattoos on both arms. Dr. Polosmak postulated that tattoos were a means of personal identification, status and position in society, as well as the ability for the people of the same clan to find each other in the afterlife. “The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position.”

Other bodies found in 1929 in the Siberian permafrost, such as that of a man, exhibit animal tattoos from head to toe:  mountain sheep called argali, griffons with vulture beaks, winged snow leopards, and fish.

(Photo: The Siberian Times reporter, August 14, 2012)

 

 

This is the photograph reconstructing a warrior’s tattoos, warrior found on the same plateau as the Ukok Princess. The drawing of tattoos was made by Elena Shumakova of the Institute of Archeologyand Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science.

The princess’ tattoos were highly intricate and artistic, representing mythological animals and fantastical creatures: “a deer with a griffon’s beak and a Capricorn’s antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of griffons. And the same griffon’s head is shown on the back of the animal. The mouth of a spotted panther with a long tail is seen at the legs of the sheep. She also has a deer’s head on her wrist, with big antlers. There is a drawing on the animal’s body on the thumb on her left hand.” http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/

Tattoos are as old as our civilization and, for whatever complicated reasons humans seek and get tattoos today, they appear to be an outer expression of the inner self screaming to be noticed.