Refuge

It’s not always in a hospital that one can recover from a medical condition. For Vietnam War veteran Scott Harrison of Nederland, Colorado, there was a special place that helped him get rid of his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The psychological distress common to war survivors prevented the retired Marine from living a normal life after his tour of duty in Vietnam ended in 1968. He became an alcoholic and a recluse, living solo on a boat, trying hard to stop the terrifying battlefield memories that haunted him.

In 1986, he decided to make a life-size version of the music box that his sister had sent him while he was fighting the Viet Cong. Then, the tinkling of the music box had comforted Harrison in his outpost in Vietnam by momentarily stopping him from thinking of the horrific killings happening around him.

Harrison bought a broken-down carousel and carved new animals for it in the next two decades, CBS News reports. He opened the carousel to the public in 2010 and co-established the Carousel of Happiness, a nonprofit whose mission is simply to spread joy, according to CBS News.

Since then, seeing the joy of more than a million children riding his carousel removed his thoughts of the war, helping him to fully recover from PTSD.

Meanwhile, for a mother who lost her son in a car accident in India last year, grief overtook her and led her to live a life outside the city together with her two young daughters.

But Nina Kutina’s choice of home was controversial when Indian authorities learned about it. Not just because the 40-year-old Russian had overstayed her visa but because their dwelling was deemed unsafe for her children.

Police patrolling near the Ramteertha hills in the Gokarna forest of Karnataka state stumbled on Kutina and her girls aged 4 and 6 living in a cave on 9 July.

Despite Kutina’s insistence that the cave was safe for them and they liked living in nature, the undocumented foreigners were moved to a detention center in Bengaluru prior to their deportation.