• Guardians of Memory
• Education
• Trees
• Writing
• Publicity
• Memorial Meetings
• Religious Meetings
• Burial Grounds
• Monuments

Some committees of relatives, like the Argentinean organisation H.I.J.O.S (which unites the children of the disappeared), dedicate their efforts to establishing education projects. They give lectures and provide information. In Chile, a committee of relatives has set up a museum and a temporary exhibition about history and its victims. In addition to this, there is also a project in which school children have written letters to disappeared persons. These letters were subsequently wrapped around a beautiful stone with a piece of rope and stored into a glass box. This box now has the function of a monument.

People write books in remembrance of disappeared persons. Especially the books which have been written by the relatives themselves, are very personal. The books ‘Grain de Sable’ and ‘Noces d’Absence’ by Nadine Bari, for instance. With these books, Nadine Bari takes the readers along on her search for her husband Djibril who has disappeared in Guinea under Sékou Touré (1971). In Grain de Sable Nadine Bari tells about her requests for help to Amnesty International, the Vatican and the Red Cross. She also tells about the hope, the uncertainty and the support she found with fellow-sufferers. Bari’s other book, 'Noces d’Absence', is even more touching. It describes her return to Guinea with her children years after her husband disappeared. This, again, is a search. Her feelings, her fears and her recollections are written down in monologue and are a homage to her husband, Djibril.

In 1996, Sylvia Dlomo Jele, co-founder of the South African Khulumani Support Group, attended a meeting in the Netherlands organised by Linking Solidarity. She told us back then that she wanted to return home as soon as possible because she did not want to miss a memorial meeting which took place the day after the conference. She had to return to light candles, one candle for each disappeared person. She remarked that she had to hold as many candles as possible because some disappeared persons did not have relatives to do this for them.

In Chile, but in other countries too, certain sections of cemeteries have been reserved for disappeared persons who cannot be buried. This way of remembering provides the disappeared persons with their resting-place after all. At the public cemetery of Santiago de Chile the names and four faces of disappeared persons have been engraved in granite and marble. This provides them with a presence which otherwise would not have been possible.