Often, while I’m getting ready to go to work, I listen to a live, online broadcast of the day’s news put out by a relatively new media outfit called Russia Today. I like RT because their reporters frequently bring an interesting perspective to their stories. Plus, I once lived in Poland and have traveled a lot in central and eastern Europe, so I like to keep up with what’s going on in that part of the world.
A few mornings ago–I forget which day it was now–I was wandering around my apartment, buttoning up my shirt or brushing my teeth or doing whatever I happened to be doing at the moment, when RT aired a poignant report about Maria Mamzurina-Volkova, a septuagenarian Muscovite with an interesting connection to the small town of Kistelek in southern Hungary. The “Spiritual Mission” hook used to introduce her story was enough to draw me into my living room where I ended up taking a seat and watching the entire four-minute video, the very same one embedded here.
Immediately after seeing this story about “family duty”–that’s Volkova’s phrase–I composed an email to myself which included a link to the archived version of the report and then wrote, in the subject line of the message I was typing, the following: “My Next Savvy Blog.”
I can’t entirely put into words why I find this story so captivating. Maybe it’s because the protagonist reminds me so much of any number of indomitable women I’ve known during my own lifetime? Or, perhaps it’s because I feel that I’ve had my faith restored in humanity after watching this report? In this age of the short attention span, when it seems that just about everything has become expendable, here is a story about a very strong woman who refuses to forget or discard, and that, my friends, makes her very precious.
For additional information about Volkova, her brother, and her life’s mission, check out this story, from 2006, on Pravda.
Tags: Women's Issues
