Neighborhood women pulled stools and sitting room seats up to
windowsills in preparation. They licked salt sweat off their
lips, adjusted scarves around heads, massaged arthritic hands
and waited. Girls gathered around them, giggling, pulling hair,
anticipating. Men and boys loitered outside, on driveways in front
of gates with cigarettes and stones, respectively. Ivy, bougainvillea
and jasmine draped the weights of their flesh from the high marble
walls blocking neighbor from neighbor, street from home. All comings
and goings paused; only the used water, draining down descended
stone ditches on each side of the street, moved. Just before noon,
just before prayer, before lunch and nap, Abadaan Street quivered
deliriously in the gaseous heat of midday, subsumed by stillness.
The residents stood at the ends of their properties, pulled like
magnets of audacious curiosity: the attraction of positive to
negative. Here, a curtain swept aside to reveal a face or two;
a servant's eyeball, there, pushed up against the hole in the
concrete washroom wall; everywhere, children's toothless mouths
gumming windowsills. All of Abadaan Street, but for the rivulets,
draining off to some unknown stream, paused as one, to watch the
parade death made.
The young boys, who played on the cobblestones of Abadaan Street
every afternoon with beaten-up balls or kites, knew first. Slowly
fathers and old men heard the news at smoky teahouses. Before
eating the evening's sofre, they told their wives, and the listening
daughters heard. Mohammed Reza, the old man down the street, died
last week. "So what?" thought the daughters, for girls'
lives existed only within the walls of the house. "Interesting,"
thought the mothers and grandmothers chewing on the news. Fathers
and grandfathers sighed, thinking of death's inescapability, "Will
I be next?" "Pass it to me! Here! Here!" The boys
went back to playing in the street, unaware.
Mohammed Reza: the old man with the family, neighbor of many
years, the man with the limp and occasionally the cane, the owner
of the only bookstore that sold foreign books in Tehran's bazaar,
a respectable bookseller (everyone assumed from the brown suit
he wore and the hat donned every morning and carried home each
afternoon), the man with the wave and the smile, the man without
words, the man down the way, across the street, next door, the
man with the light-eyed sons and fabled daughters -- the oldest
of whom he sent to school and the youngest harboring a beauty
only whispered about: an unremarkable man never associated with
cause or calamity. Even in death it was impossible to fatten his
gaunt, lifeless frame by suspicion or suspense. Aside from educating
his oldest daughter at the Armenian school, none of his acts called
for inquiry, his wife met the meat and milkmen every afternoon
with a shawl tightly wrapped about her head. So on the morning
of his burial they gathered, these view-hungry neighbors and non-friends,
not to see Mohammed Reza, nor spit upon his passing grave, nor
grieve the loss of an otherwise unknown neighbor, but for a clear
view: of the tragedy of death, the moving feast of sadness that
belonged to someone else, the slow exposition of grief. And for
a glimpse of the daughters, a drop of liquid gossip to replenish
their well of whispers long since dry.
At their evening washings, with a slathered hand across a bony
shoulder, a supple slippery haunch, questions were asked. Mothers
probed sons for information. Beauty on Abadaan Street was one
thing, a common thing, even, but the word was out that Mohammad
Reza's daughter flaunted an exquisiteness of the dangerous sort.
So how old is she? What color are her eyes? Will she go to school,
too? The boys, wet, with bubbles of the day's street dirt floating
off them, held back, pretending to know more than they did. Mohammed
Reza's sons, 14 and 12, played in the street occasionally, when
they weren't studying, and the network of playing boys caught
their offhand words: "She's got men calling already."
"We can't wait until she's gone, she doesn't do anything
around the house, thinks she's too good." "Baba spoils
her." The games would continue, the boys ignoring the brotherly
complaints. Only at home, with a piece of honey candy dangled
in front of them by the fat fingers of their tired mother, did
they associate worth with information. "She's 9," eyes
glazed, "she doesn't do any work," mouth watering, "her
eyes are blue," snatch, unwrap, suck, "ywess" (mouth
full), "zzthey are bluuu."
All for this day, with their knees pressed up against the area
beneath the window (they couldn't get any closer), brazenly staring
out onto the street. Searching other head-filled windows for recognizable
faces and seeing only silhouettes. Hoping only silhouettes of
them would be seen. Mothers and fathers alike gathered, pushed
out of their own dark secrets to watch Mohammed Reza's family
march and weep behind him, thinking about their own deaths in
passing, and inshallah, catching a glimpse of the salacious; the
tragedy; the menace of beauty. They sat reassured, waiting; the
little girls tying each other's hair into knots, the men cautiously
not smoking the last cigarette in the pack, the boys bemoaning
the emptiness of their street. For while all else went into the
wrought iron gates and high walls of the houses on Abadaan Street
-- love, deceit, comfort, beatings, caresses (illicit and maternal),
revelation, disgust, devotion, misery -- only death came out.
Ali Akbar sat on the balcony protruding elegantly above the garden
of his house, knifing out the dried secretions and dead skin crusted
underneath his fingernails from last night's harem girl. "Dirty
whore, my hands are filthy, and for what? Next time I'll get my
money's worth and give her a little something to remember ..."
His thoughts trailed and a shower of flakes and follicles snowed
like builder's dust onto the ground near his feet. Pausing to
sip his tea, he noticed an unusual amount of activity in the second-story
windows and front gardens of the houses on Abadaan Street. Curtains
pulled aside and silhouettes shifted in the window frames; men
and boys caged behind the gates of their houses, pacing. The street
itself was empty, usual for mid- morning. Ali Akbar mimicked the
street, sitting without movement, the demitasse poised at his
lips, striking a pensive pose equal to any of the elegant V-neck-clad
men he'd seen in European magazines. He was reminded again of
last night's whore. He put the tea down and dug beneath his fingernails,
ignoring the street's sizzling murmur.
Abadaan Street ignored Ali Akbar as well. The wealthy 45-year-old
rug merchant who gave the boys their first smell of European aftershave,
took such good care of his mother and father, came home every
day at the same time with a newspaper and a bag of groceries for
the cook, was, like his recently dead neighbor, an unfaultable
man. True, he was a little old not to have been married at least
once. But he was a man and time was his to take.
Without sons, or a nosy wife, Ali Akbar was not privy to the
information of Mohammed Reza's death. Or the news of the two daughters
he left behind, one more beautiful than the porcelain head of
a European doll. So when the screaming started at the end of the
street, Ali Akbar flinched, piercing himself in the space between
finger and nail. "Mother of a dog." He shook his hands
and drops of blood fell from the finger: a liquid point.
She pounded her chest with a rhythm Ali Akbar found appealing.
With each step she fired out a fist, retracted it and released
a wail. He stood up and watched, pulled to the procession like
all the other eyes on Abadaan Street. Leaning his pelvis against
the bar of the balcony he rubbed himself on the metal banister,
a not-quite arousal, something to be seen, what is it? What is
it? He scanned the street below. Not the coffin, a formality of
transport to be abandoned at the rim of whatever hole the poor
bastard would fill. Not the pallbearers, the sons and uncles of
death marching in small steps, their mustaches and eyelids drawn
down by the weight of honor, careful to shoulder their duty with
manly faces of un-grief. It was not the widow, with her screeching
sobs and one drum rhythm of grief (though her sharp blue eyes
did call to something in him, she was old, tears streaking down
her elastic face). Ali Akbar continued pushing his pelvis up against
the bar, arousing not so much a feeling of stimulation as of curious
assurance. Something good is coming. Something good. At the end
of the formal procession, last to leave the gates of Mohammed
Reza's house, came the girls. Covered, but for their downturned
faces and their clasped hands. Aha, Ali Akbar swayed his hips
back and forth, never once losing contact with the bar. Aha.
A taller and a shorter. This much everyone expected. A young
and an old. The veils were not as much a surprise as a disappointment.
Old women began to rely on the experience of age, interpreting
a swagger and analyzing a gait. The younger women, mothers and
daughters, used expert eyes to gauge weight through the black
draperies falling around round heads, across one set of sharp
shoulders and one set of curved shoulders, down one chest of formidable
femininity and another of gaunt girlishness. The men with their
street-level views left the scrutiny aside and waited patiently.
Their vantage point would bring them a clear view. Be it the slant
of a nose, a lid of lashes falling on a cheek, or even an open-eyed
stare, their position afforded them a look. Everyone on Abadaan
Street itched in anticipation for those first few minutes, forgetting
the dead, swaying to the beat of the widow's death drum and freezing
with the fall of the youngest girl's shawl.
From her head to her shoulders the loose head shawl dropped.
Quickly the older sister pulled it back up. Quickly the youngest
tugged it down. Shaking her hair out from its confines, pushing
it away from her eyes, getting a clear view of the street she
had never seen.
At 7, Ali Akbar's mother opened a door in him that led to an
empty room. She placed him between her legs and showed him the
scar of his birth. Her gentle eyes begged him to touch it, to
place an unused child's finger on the wound. With contact, a history
of pain flashed before his eyes: the pain his slick oblong body
caused her, the pain his father had caused and the pain of herself.
Into his mother's gentle eyes he smiled, delighted. Into every
whore and harem girl since he has probed for pain. He lived without
compassion, but not without curiosity; making a point, as of late,
to seek out the youngest girls, the ones without histories of
pain, for a different experience, a push into an interior landscape
not yet charred; verdant, and unscarred. Gazing down at the dead
man's youngest daughter as she, unsheathed, illuminated the street,
Ali Akbar pulsed toward the purity in her. He saw a blank canvas,
a place where he would leave the first mark. The original stroke
in a lifetime's shape of pain.
Laleh Khadivi is a master's of fine arts student in creative
writing at Mills College. "The Parade" is an excerpt
from a work in progress that takes place in Iran in the 1940s
and '50s. She lives in Oakland.
[22] Written in August 1940, for an American symposium on current
matters concerning women.
The Germans were over this house last night and the night before
that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in
the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any
moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool
and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound‹far
more than prayers and anthems‹that should compel one to think
about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we‹not
this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be
born‹will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death
rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only
efficient airraid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop
pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then,
sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away, a bomb drops.
Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are
fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are
men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy
or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet
if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight
by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom,
she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English.
How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making
arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting
for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make
ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in
the sky to defeat the enemy.
But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off.
We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses
another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in THE TIMES
this moming‹a woman¹s voice saying, ³Women have
not a word to say in politics.² There is no woman in the
Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who
are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought
that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not
bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile
activity of ideamaking? Because there are other tables besides
officer tables and conference tables. Are we not leaving the young
Englishman without a weapon that might be of value to him if we
give up private thinking, teatable thinking, because it seems
useless? Are we not stressing our disability because our ability
exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt? ³I will
not cease from mental fight,² Blake wrote. Mental fight means
thinking against the current, not with it.
That current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of
words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they
tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom.
That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into
the sky and keeps him circling there among the clouds. Down here,
with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business
to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. It is not true
that we are free. We are both prisoners tonight‹he boxed
up in his machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with
a gas mask handy. If we were free we should be out in the open,
dancing, at the play, or sitting at the window talking together.
What is it that prevents us? ³Hitler!² the loudspeakers
cry with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness,
tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy
that, and you will be free.
The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead.
Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly
above the house. Another sound begins sawing its way in the brain.
³Women of ability²‹it was Lady Astor speaking in
THE TIMES this morning‹³are held down because of a subconscious
Hitlerism in the hearts of men.² Certainly we are held down.
We are equally prisoners tonight‹the Englishmen in their
planes, the Englishwomen in their beds. But if he stops to think
he may be killed; and we too. So let us think for him. Let us
try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that
holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to
dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made
visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted
women; dressedup women; women with crimson lips and crimson
fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we
could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny.
Hitlers are bred by slaves.
A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The antiaircraft guns
are getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with
strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn
leaves, guns are concealed. Now they all fire at once. On the
nine o¹clock radio we shall be told ³Fortyfour
enemy planes were shot down during the night, ten of them by antiaircraft
fire.² And one of the terms of peace, the loudspeakers say,
is to be disarmament. There are to be no more guns, no army, no
navy, no air force in the future. No more young men will be trained
to fight with arms. That rouses another mindhornet in the
chambers of the brain‹another quotation. ³To fight against
a real enemy, to earn undying honour and glory by shooting total
strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals
and decorations, that was the summit of my hope. . . . It was
for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my education,
training, everything. . . .²
Those were the words of a young Englishman who fought in the
last war. In the face of them, do the current thinkers honestly
believe that by writing ³Disarmament² on a sheet of
paper at a conference table they will have done all that is needful?
Othello¹s occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello.
The young airman up in the sky is driven not only by the voices
of loudspeakers; he is driven by voices in himself‹ancient
instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition.
Is he to be blamed for those instincts? Could we switch off the
maternal instinct at the command of a table full of politicians?
Suppose that imperative among the peace terms was: ³Childbearing
is to be restricted to a very small class of specially selected
women,² would we submit? Should we not say, ³The maternal
instinct is a woman¹s glory. It was for this that my whole
life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything. .
. .² But if it were necessary. for the sake of humanity,
for the peace of the world, that childbearing should be restricted,
the maternal instinct subdued, women would attempt it. Men would
help them. They would honour them for their refusal to bear children.
They would give them other openings for their creative power.
That too must make part of our fight for freedom. We must help
the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals
and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for
those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct,
their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the
loss of his gun.
The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights
are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any
moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four,
five, six . . . the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during
those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save
one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard
board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile.
Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively
revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it
can create only from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other
Augusts‹in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking
over the Campagna; in London. Friends¹ voices come back.
Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory,
was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the
dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate
the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must
give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness.
We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his
prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young
Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?
The searchlights, wavering across the flat, have picked up the
plane now. From this window one can see a little silver insect
turning and twisting in the light. The guns go pop pop pop. Then
they cease. Probably the raider was brought down behind the hill.
One of the pilots landed safe in a field near here the other day.
He said to his captors, speaking fairly good English, ³How
glad I am that the fight is over!² Then an Englishman gave
him a cigarette, and an Englishwoman made him a cup of tea. That
would seem to show that if you can free the man from the machine,
the seed does not fall upon altogether stony ground. The seed
may be fertile.
At last all the guns have stopped firing. All the searchlights
have been extinguished. The natural darkness of a summer¹s
night returns. The innocent sounds of the country are heard again.
An apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from
tree to tree. And some halfforgotten words of an old English
writer come to mind: ³The huntsmen are up in America. . .
.² Let us send these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who
are up in America, to the men and women whose sleep has not yet
been broken by machinegun fire, in the belief that they will
rethink them generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into
something serviceable. And now, in the shadowed half of the world,
to sleep.
Does the statement, "We've
always done it that way" ring any bells...?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance
between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates
built the US Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who
built the
pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge
then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and
tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular
odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels
would break
on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's
the
spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England)
for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else
had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
were
made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge
of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived
from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
And
bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a spec
and told we have always done it that
way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may be
exactly
right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough
to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Now the twist to the story...
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there
are two big
booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These
are solid
rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their
factory
in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred
to make
them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from
the factory to
the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens
to run through a tunnel in the
mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel
is slightly
wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you
now know,
is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world's
most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand
years ago by the width of a Horse's ass.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't
important ??
¤
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
¤ ¤
A parable for our times
A man approached the gate of an unfamiliar
city. As he reached
the gate a magician standing there said "Wait! You shouldn't
go in
there without a weapon! Demons lurk there!"
The man said "I need
no weapon and have nothing to do with demons."
The magician drew a sword
from the sheath he held; as he drew it
a frightful demon appeared, but the magician was able to kill
it with
the sword.
"Now will you take
a weapon!?", he said, but the man still refused.
"Are you blind!?",
said the magician, "Do you see the sword
I drew killed the demon?"
"Are you blind?"
the man responded, "Do you not see that the sword
you drew created the demon?"
And he walked on into the
city, armed only with the clarityof his mind
and being.
(Adapted
from Leonard Jacobson)
The bonds of friendship
in a bitter war
In a year of unspeakable
horror, Israeli and Palestinian teens
join in a Maine refuge to seek a path toward peace
Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman
By Amanda Paulson
8/15/2002
OTISFIELD, MAINE – In the end, Ariel
Tal came back and Saja Abuhigleh stayed.
Simple acts, perhaps. But also acts of courage
and hope at this wooded Maine camp, a refuge from the devastating
daily violence of the Middle East, a place where teenagers from
Israel and Palestine meet in an effort to find solutions rather
than propagate hatred.
Ariel had twice before attended Seeds of Peace, as the camp is named.
But that was before a suicide bomber in Jerusalem last December
blew up his friend just 20 feet from the ice cream store where Ariel
was sprinkling jimmies onto a cone. Had he not lingered a few seconds,
he knew, it could have been his funeral for which the neighborhood
turned out.
Amid the carnage, he looked down and realized
he was wearing his green Seeds of Peace sweatshirt. "I got
really confused," Ariel says. "I didn't know what I
was looking for here, and why I was chasing it so hard."
Even before arriving for her first year
at camp, Saja had her doubts about sharing a bunkhouse and breaking
bread with Israelis. On her second day, she called home and learned
Israeli soldiers had occupied Ramallah, her hometown. They had
detained her great-uncle's son and struck the elderly man when
he asked why.
"When [my family] told me, I started
crying, and I said, 'I want to go to my home in Palestine right
now! I can't stay here,' " Saja says, stumbling over
her words in the rush to get them out.
But Saja stayed and Ariel shed short-lived
thoughts of vengeance and came back, one of the small group of
returning campers who offer support and mentoring to new arrivals
each year.
Their experiences, however, attest to the
challenges facing a camp that some call naively idealistic and
others see as the only sane response to a world situation that
seems to have lost all reason. Journalist John Wallach founded
Seeds of Peace in 1993, prompted in part by the first bombing
of the World Trade Center. He invited 46 teenagers that year,
hoping to teach young people from this bitterly divided region
how to listen to one another.
But the camp has never faced a summer quite
like this one. Working for peace in the Middle East has always
been a courageous choice. Doing it amid the horrific violence
of the current intifada, and Israel's brutal backlash, is practically
inconceivable. It is a violence that has become personal, even
for teenagers, even for children.
And if the camp is to succeed – if
the three weeks teenagers from each side spend laughing, arguing,
and living together is to mean anything – it is a violence
they somehow must find the strength to look beyond.
Getting acquainted
On June 24 – the same day President
Bush called for the ouster of Yasser Arafat in a much-anticipated
Middle East policy speech – 166 teenagers arrived at this
sleepy lakeside retreat 30 miles northwest of Portland, where
only the names of the campers and the constant presence of police
cars at the gate indicate that this is any different from the
dozens of other camps nearby.
Almost all the campers are sponsored by
Seeds of Peace; all went through a lengthy, competitive application
process to get here, and all were selected by their education
ministries in part for their potential to lead.
Their mission: to get to know one another
as individuals rather than as the enemy, in a place removed from
the hatred back home. Though Seeds of Peace has expanded over
its first decade – it now accepts young people from other
regions of conflict and has established a year-round Center for
Coexistence in Jerusalem – it still rests on the same simple
premise: that interaction breeds understanding.
You don't have to like each other, camp
director Tim Wilson reminds the campers at the opening ceremony
– just recognize that each individual is a human being deserving
of respect.
"You can go home, and yes, there are
things there we have no control over," Mr. Wilson tells them.
"But here, we do have control. You have the right to sit
down and talk to someone you normally would not talk to."
The campers listen eagerly, applauding
vigorously. When it comes time to sing the Seeds of Peace song,
they belt it out: "People of peace, rejoice, rejoice/ For
we have united into one voice...."
When the gathering ends, however, they
cluster with others like them, finding comfort in a shared language
and traditions. It takes a few days, or more, says Wilson, before
many start branching out. When he sees girls from different sides
"sitting around talking about P. Diddy," or boys discussing
the World Cup, he knows they've reached common ground.
The camp is designed for informal interaction.
Six to nine campers, grouped by conflict region, share each of
the well-kept bunkhouses that line the shore of Pleasant Lake.
Campers eat with a second group and join a third for the daily
90-minute "coexistence session." With this third group,
they also play sports and participate in activities intended to
build cooperation and trust, from a ropes course to a dance exercise
in which they mimic each other's movements.
One of this year's new campers is Sami
Habash, an articulate, blond Palestinian from Jerusalem who plans
to attend Israel's prestigious Hebrew University next year although
he's only 16. An intense young man, he's pleased to be in an environment
where everyone wants peace. But his first interest is in scoring
political points.
"I want to tell [the Israelis] that
we don't have water at night. I go up to drink, and no water."
During debate, Sami hopes "to see Israelis themselves freely
admitting their country's mistakes."
Adar Ziegel, an Israeli from Haifa who
for as long as she can remember has dreamed of being her country's
prime minister, has less formulated plans. She's heard great things
about the camp from her boyfriend and is excited to see whether
teens on opposite sides of the checkpoints can find solutions.
Adar shares her bunkhouse and her coexistence
session with Saja. Sami will be in a coexistence session with
Ariel. The Monitor chose to focus on these four teens – two
Israelis and two Palestinians – to gain some insight into
the small triumphs, epiphanies, and setbacks that occur in these
weeks of typical camp fun mixed with not-so-typical discussion
and debate.
All four arrived with hope, but also a
degree of skepticism – their homeland, after all, is in tatters.
Saja, who has never met an Israeli before, came armed with photos,
downloaded from the Internet, that graphically portray Israeli
soldiers' abuse of Palestinians. She cannot forget the day she
saw a soldier strike a small boy on the head, causing blood to
spurt out.
And Sami, though ready to listen, has a
long list of grievances from life under occupation to share with
his Israeli counterparts.
In past years, says Ariel, discussions
focused mainly on policy. "We just argued about the past
and whether or not we want Jerusalem to be united." This
year, "the new kids have personal experiences. I have experiences
of my own."
Trying to win
In a nondescript one-room cabin, words
– and allegations – fly.
Facilitator Marieke Van-woerkom had eased
into the coexistence session with a rather vague question: "What
does it take to have peace?"
But after a few predictable, detached responses
– "Stop war," "End the bombs," "Both
sides have to trust each other" – the campers switch
gears to get at specific gripes, often using a "we-you"
phrasing.
"We can't trust you," says one
Israeli. "We gave you weapons in Oslo. Today, we see those
weapons being used on us." And, he asks, why did Arafat reject
Israel's offer at Camp David two years ago?
"It wasn't enough," responds
a frustrated Palestinian. "We want our land, but also to
be free in this land. We want borders like other countries. A
government, like other countries."
"What – do you want us to build
a government for you?" the Israeli shoots back.
"When you give us the land, you must
trust us."
Saja objects when one Israeli refers to
suicide bombers as terrorists. A fellow Palestinian likens them
to messengers, delivering a message from a people who have no
other resources.
"Do you think the message is being
delivered in the way you want it delivered?" an Israeli girl
wants to know.
After about 90 minutes, Ms. Vanwoerkom
brings the session to a close with a final suggestion: "What
I'd like for you to think about is, what it is inside of us that
makes it so hard to truly listen and understand each other? You
feel you're not being listened to, but where are you not listening?"
Ariel, in his third year, has seen campers
doggedly stake out their own positions before: "They come
to win." So did he, when he first arrived, a camper with
right-wing politics and the view that the best solution was to
remove all Arabs and "put them somewhere else."
"It changes," he says. "They
face the reality and say, 'OK, we can't win. What next?' You realize
understanding is the important part."
Still, even during this particular heated
session, the teenagers have accomplished what many of their compatriots
back home seem incapable of. They've carried on a debate without
violence or, for the most part, raised voices.
Besides, reaching consensus is not really
the goal. Vanwoerkom says she's wary of pushing campers too far,
too fast. The "brick wall" they hit when they get back
home will be that much harder – especially this year. "I'm
trying to find that balance," she says, "between learning,
development, growth – and going back home and being able
to build on those lessons."
Facing challenges
Midway through camp, Adar finds her political
foundations shaken.
She considers herself progressive, even
pro-Palestinian.
But when Saja compares the Israeli occupation
of Palestine to the Holocaust, Adar loses her composure. Her grandparents
narrowly escaped Poland and Germany. Many of her relatives died
in concentration camps.
"[Saja] said that from their point
of view, we can just go back to Germany and Italy and stuff,"
says Adar angrily. "I myself would never go back to a place
that put numbers on my grandparents' arms."
Still, she thinks carefully about how to
teach as well as react, giving Saja a copy of "Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl." "She's actually reading
it," Adar says a few days later. "I feel that once she
reads that book she'll have a much more wise understanding."
For Sami, facts have been the primary source
of tension.
The Israelis in his coexistence session,
he says, get them all wrong. "When I'm talking to [one Israeli
settler], I'm counting on some facts that I know. When he changes
the facts, I say I'm sure my facts are correct. He's changing
my facts just to make it more difficult for me to talk!"
Like Saja, Sami in his session pressed
the point that Israelis should leave Palestine. He remains baffled
by the outburst his comment provoked.
"They got really crazy about it,"
the normally mild-mannered Palestinian says resentfully. "They
said they were offended because some of them understood it as
'Go back to Hitler.' Others understood it as, 'I don't agree with
the idea of a Jewish state.' "
Neither is true, Sami insists. What he
wants is for Israelis to acknowledge they took land that wasn't
theirs. Finally, he lets it drop. But the experience leaves a
bad taste in his mouth. "At the beginning of camp, I had
some more positive ideas about the people I was negotiating with.
But now – some of [those opinions] have changed."
Final days
If the informal mingling of Israeli and
Palestinian teens signals success, then camp this year could get
high marks.
The camp's color games – three days
of athletic competition – further erode national allegiances.
The competition here is between blue and green, not Israel and
Palestine.
"My team won!" says Saja brightly.
She played baseball and canoed for the first time. Now she's running
around like a senior before graduation, asking everyone she knows
to write indelible-ink messages on her T-shirt.
Adar, meanwhile, eagerly recounts tales
of the talent show, for which she coached a boys' bunkhouse in
a ballet routine.
Now, with a teenager's bent for melodrama,
she says she's heartbroken at the thought of leaving. "I'm
going to hug a tree and carve myself into it," she sighs.
She's already making plans to visit Nada, an Egyptian girl in
her cabin, and says she's even forgiven Saja.
"We have the best bunk ever,"
Adar says firmly.
But all hasn't been perfect.
In the middle of color games, John Wallach,
the camp's founder, died in New York.
"I didn't want to continue any more,"
says Ariel, who knew Wallach. "I was unable to think. But
I realized the kids are looking up to me, and if I were to leave
color games, they would do the same. [So] I kept on going."
Just days after Wallach's death, Dateline
NBC runs an hour-long special about the camp, focusing on five
teenagers from its first summer. One Israeli is now a right-wing
settler, and a Palestinian he befriended at the timeis active
in promoting nationalist causes. The other three also seem to
have drifted a long way from the idealistic teenagers who shook
hands with Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat 10 years ago.
The camp may create an aura of hope, Dateline
implies, but the dreams the teens walk away with will likely wither
in the heat of the violence back home.
It's a charge the camp's leaders are familiar
with. They accept that some campers will lose the lessons of peace.
Still, Bobbie Gottschalk, the camp's executive
vice president, says she's heard from most of those original campers
since Wallach's death. One, an Egyptian named Tamer Nagy, is this
year's program coordinator. Koby Sadan, who attended Seeds of
Peace in 1994 and '95 and just finished his three-year stint in
the Israeli army, is also working as a counselor this summer.
Seeds of Peace now has more than 2,000
graduates, Ms. Gottschalk says. If just a few of them hang on
to what they've learned – and eventually become leaders in
their region – they could have a big impact.
"We're just trying to get people to
think for themselves," she says. "And to care about
people who are not like them. If we can expand the circle of their
concern to go beyond people who are not exactly like them, then
we've gone a long way toward building a citizen of the world."
Heading home
No one can say what makes the camp's message
stick with one person and fizzle with another. All that's certain
is that it will be tested back home, one reason the camp has created
a year-round center in Jerusalem to continue work with former
campers.
Saja is excited to have made Israeli friends.
But she hesitates when asked what life will be like when she returns
to Ramallah. "Here, I can do everything I want," she
says. "But [in Palestine] I can't move.... To go to school
from Ramallah to Jerusalem, I have to pass three checkpoints.
When I stand there I think that I want to kill these soldiers,
and I don't want peace with them."
Adar insists the bonds she has formed in
three weeks, with Palestinians as well as Israelis, are stronger
than those she's formed over three years back home. She still
feels her country is "falling apart," but she takes
heart from something Tim Wilson, the camp director, told her.
"Tim [who is African-American] asked his father when segregation
will end. And his father said, 'When this generation dies.' "
She and her fellow campers, Adar hopes, will form a new generation.
Sami, however, finds it harder to imagine
how Palestinians his age, pushed to a boiling point, might respond
to a message of tolerance. "They're going to tell me, 'Can't
you see what's happening? Aren't you living in this country? You
still want peace after all you can see?' "
To a point, Sami shares their rage. He
is furious when he thinks of Israeli tanks and guns overpowering
unarmed Palestinians. Still, he has thought carefully about the
situation. "There is no way but peace for Palestinians. The
Israelis have power. They can manage with peace or without peace.
We Palestinians have rocks. We have nothing. So, of course, I
will keep trying."
A few days after he returns home to Jerusalem,
Sami is already thinking about contacting the Israeli friends
he made and visiting the Seeds of Peace center. Recent events
have changed one plan, though: He no longer wants to attend Hebrew
University, shattered last month by a cafeteria suicide bombing.
The Technion, in Haifa, he reasons, is as good a school –
and less of a potential target.
From what Ariel suggests, much of what
Sami, Saja, Adar, and other new campers learned at Seeds of Peace
this summer has yet to sink in. He has learned that the emotional
highs campers take with them from Maine can quickly crash to devastating
lows. Only then can they begin to decide whether what they experienced
was illusion or truth. "The experience is different [for
each one]," says Ariel. "Camp is a bubble."
Ariel, who toyed with the idea of vengeance
after the suicide bombing he saw in December, is now firm in his
own path.
"I got to a conclusion that we have
no other way [but to work for peace]," he says. "We
can do this. We can't do anything else."
Jerusalem -- On the day of the bombing,
my friend Julia and I arrived at Hebrew University around 12:45
p.m., said hello to friends in the student forum and walked to
the Frank Sinatra cafeteria to buy sandwiches. On our way out,
we ran into one of my professors. He jokingly reminded me that
I still owe him a paper from the fall semester. We walked
across the plaza, down the steps and through the pedestrian tunnel
that connects the outside courtyard and the cafeteria to the Boyar
Building.
I went upstairs to pick up a registration
form for my Hebrew exam, then went looking for Janis Coulter,
assistant director of academic affairs for the Rothberg International
School. She worked at the university's New York office and had
arrived in Israel the day before to greet new students and meet
with colleagues. My friend Daniel had sent Janis a package of
lecture notes and tapes, which she had agreed to bring to me.
We met at 1:15, exchanged phone numbers and planned to meet again
after my 5 p.m. exam. It was the first time Janis and I had
met -- and it turned out to be only 15 minutes before she was
killed.
I went to the third-floor foyer, a large
open area with seats. A few minutes later, as I sat eating my
sandwich and reviewing for my Hebrew exam, I watched Janis walk
out of the building on her way to lunch. Marla Bennett walked
with a friend out the same door. Julia pointed out Ben Blutstein,
someone she knew from Pardes (Institute of Jewish Studies), as
he walked out, playing his drum as he strolled off to eat lunch
at Frank Sinatra.
Suddenly, a tremendous boom rocked the
building. A huge roar seemed to come from the general direction
of the cafeteria. Everything continued as normal for the next
few minutes, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to the explosion.
Then it all changed. Slowly, people began running into Boyar,
screaming and crying. A woman came through the entrance with her
hair singed and her arm burned by the blast. I will never forget
the smell of her burned hair.
She sat down next to an Asian man, who
had blood on his back. I asked if he was hurt and needed help.
He answered in Hebrew that he couldn't hear me. The blast was
so loud he couldn't hear anything.
The next hour is a blur. We crowded together
in the lobby and on the stairs,
watching out the window, as the campus
became engulfed in a sea of police officers, soldiers and emergency
officials dressed in orange and yellow vests. There was a crowd
of people on the bridge in front of the law school, so at first
I thought the explosion had taken place there. Someone else said
he saw the bomb go off in the parking lot. As I walked toward
the third floor exit, a woman was laid on a stretcher, her clothes
drenched with blood from her head to her waist. I started to cry
and had to turn away.
The staff of the overseas school gathered
students in the auditorium, making announcements in several languages
that the phones would be open to call family abroad. I called
Janis' cell phone right after the bombing and then again in the
evening, leaving two messages, asking her to please call and let
me know that she was OK. She never returned the call.
A few friends and I left the university
around 3:30. I spent the rest of the afternoon answering phone
calls, assuring everyone that I was OK. I finally reached the
professor I'd bumped into on my way out of the cafeteria. He was
walking out of the cafeteria when the bomb went off. Thankfully,
he was not injured.
Julia and I needed to get some fresh air
and went for a walk in the park around 7. Gan Sacher Park was
full of families picnicking and barbecuing. There were several
soccer games going on, kids riding their bikes, people having
fun. It was as if they lived in another world and had no sense
of what had just happened. Or perhaps they knew too well and had
made a point of getting on with their lives.
A few friends gathered at my apartment
for dinner later. As we ate, Julia got a phone call from a friend
named Michael Simon, saying that his girlfriend,
Marla, was not on any of the hospital lists.
The following morning, Marla Bennett's body was identified. She
was from San Diego and only 24. Ben Blutstein's name was also
listed among those killed.
The next afternoon, Julia and I went to
Pardes so she could pay her condolences to Michael, a friend and
Dorot fellow. A group of teachers, staff and students was standing
in the common area, talking quietly, hugging and just being with
each other.
As soon as I saw Michael, it suddenly occurred
to me who Marla was. I hadn't put the names and faces together.
Both Michael and Marla were in a couple of my classes, and I saw
them occasionally at Shabbat dinners, at Merkaz Hamagshimim and
other social events. Marla was a friendly, outgoing girl, full
of life and energy. I can see clearly an image of her face --
her sweet smile and warm eyes.
Until the attack at the university, the
bombing at Rehavia's Cafe Moment in March had been the most difficult
attack to digest. It struck right in the heart of my neighborhood,
two blocks from my apartment. Those killed were mostly young Israelis,
but I was lucky not to have had any friends injured or killed.
This time, I knew two who were killed and several of those injured.
I had never considered the possibility of a terrorist attack at
the university. Like many others, I considered it off-limits.
I now realize that there are no boundaries or rules in this game
of violence and terror.
I ran into one of my professors this morning
who asked: "Why are you still here? Why don't you go back
to your home in America?"
"Because my home is here," I
said as I pointed to my apartment building down the block. "I
made Aliyah and chose to live my life here. I am staying here,
and not going anywhere."
As Israel continues to suffer through these
difficult times, I will endure the strain as well. There's no
doubt that the road ahead will be bumpy. But in my heart, I know
that the struggle must eventually come to an end. I want to be
here to smell peace when it comes.
Victoria Blint, a former Bay Area resident,
is studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
This article is excerpted from a recent e-mail
she sent her family and friends.
Natasha Walter reports
from Kabul on what the future
holds for the women of Afghanistan
The Guardian, July 20, 2002
The students
are crammed on to the benches in the cavernous lecture hall of
Kabul University's science faculty. Four hundred eager faces stare
down at us, and 150 of them are female. A few rows from the front
sits a young woman wearing a white lace scarf tucked tightly around
her rosy face. Her name is Zohal Faiz Mohammed. She shakes her
head, smiling, when I ask how she feels to be back at university
after five years' absence. "I can't say my feelings - you
can see. For the first time we can experience the university,
this atmosphere. We can all study, boys and girls together."
That evening, Zohal invites us to have
supper with her and her parents. They live in what is, by Kabul's
standards, a comfortable neighbourhood, but that still means a
chaotic stretch of apartment blocks with blown-out windows and
walls riddled with bullet holes. While Zohal prepares the meal,
we sit on cushions on the floor of the pink sitting room, talking
to her parents. Suddenly Zohal rushes in, worried that we are
bored, and shows off one of her most precious possessions, a video
of songs from Indian films. "My father and I love these,"
she says eagerly.
She watches the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai
dancing in a Technicolor field of dreams. "Isn't she beautiful?"
As she watches the video, Zohal, in jeans and a white shirt with
the sleeves rolled up, her thick black hair in a ponytail, looks
younger than her 22 years.
She is determined to be young, determined
to be happy, determined not to talk about politics - instead,
we talk about her errant fiance and her plans for the future.
After dinner, she, her mother and her cousin squabble over the
arrangements for the photographs. "Don't fight!" Zohal
says. "All right, do fight." "I'll be Rabbani and
you can be Hekmatyar," says the photographer. Peals of laughter
ring out. Those are the names of the men whose armies laid Kabul
waste in the 1990s. "All you can do sometimes is laugh,"
says her mother, wiping her eyes with a corner of her scarf.
As we talk over dinner, I can't help thinking
that Zohal's happiness feels like the uncomplicated optimism of
any young woman at the start of her life. But Afghan women are
not like other women, and when they sound optimistic, this is
an act of determined bravery. On another day, when Zohal and I
meet for tea, she talks about the past. Her face changes, loses
its pink glow, and she fumbles with her fingers.
Her comfortable childhood came under siege
in 1992, after the Soviet-backed regime fell and mujaheddin armies
- armed by the west - battled for control of Kabul, street by
street. "I remember every night, sitting in the corner of
the room, listening to the rockets and the bombs," says Zohal
in a dull tone very different from her earlier quick chatter.
"And every morning we would go out and help to collect the
dead bodies. There was nothing to think about. We were just waiting
for our death. We had no hope for the future, not even for our
lives."
Zohal's family were forced out of their
home more than once when the fighting concentrated around their
area. They became refugees again when they fled from the extreme
oppression of the Taliban, and spent two years in Pakistan, but
the destitution that faced so many Afghans there forced them back
to Kabul last year. They went on the move again to the Pakistani
border during the US bombing last winter. Refugees three times
- from the mujaheddin, the Taliban and the Americans - Zohal's
family are now starting over, trying to put their lives back together
out of the fragments they have left.
But Zohal's face is set towards the future.
She wants to be an engineer, studies at the university in the
morning, and takes English and computing classes in the afternoon.
Since today is a holiday, we visit one of Kabul's newly opened
beauty salons. Marya salon sits next to a restaurant where lamb
kebabs are seared over open barbecues, and beside a music stall
that is stacked with colourful Indian and Iranian cassettes. But
even here, in this reawakened part of Kabul, if you stop on the
street for a moment, the beggars, women and children, tug at your
arms and hands.
Inside the salon, the air is thick with
hairspray and scent, and Fazila, the owner, a stout woman in a
black dress with neatly styled auburn hair, is getting through
one client after another with astonishing speed. She and her two
young daughters work like an assembly line. Curlers are whipped
out and in, tweezers tug at eyebrows, kohl is rubbed on to eyelids.
Shaima and Suheila, two sisters, both doctors, are waiting on
Fazila's couches. Both have their hair pinned up under hairnets.
Tomorrow is Shaima's wedding day and they are determined to do
it in high Afghan style, all glittery dresses and curled hair
and hennaed hands.
"When she had her engagement ceremony,"
Suheila explains, "we couldn't take photographs - though
we did, secretly. We couldn't even have musicians." What
would the Taliban have done if you had invited musicians? Suheila
draws a finger across her throat. "But I played a cassette,
quietly, and I danced - I was determined to dance." She is
about to tell me more when a little boy runs in. The girls at
home need more curlers. Suheila springs to her feet and picks
up her burka. "Don't you want to know why I still wear this?"
she asks. She stands silhouetted in the bright doorway, holding
the swathe of blue nylon above her face.
The western press has made so much of the
idea that, as the Taliban left Kabul, the liberated women threw
off their blue shrouds. But in Kabul, almost all the young women
are still wearing the burka. This is not through force of tradition.
There was a custom of wearing the burka among some ethnic groups
in Afghanistan, but not among educated women in the cities. I
asked 20 or 30 women why they were still wearing it, and all gave
the same answer. Fear.
"We aren't safe yet," says Suheila
succinctly. This sense of insecurity is understandable. The mujaheddin
and the Taliban weren't just a few maniacs who have now disappeared,
but hundreds and thousands of "willing executioners"
- men who gang-raped women as part of their wars, as the mujaheddin
did, or who beat women savagely for showing their faces, as the
Taliban did. These men have not gone away, and although in Kabul
they are kept quiet by the presence of the international security
force, if that departs, many women fear that the violence will
start again.
"Of course, the burka was not the
worst thing about the Taliban time," Suheila emphasises.
"But until we are safe, we can't take it off." Even
now, reports of politically and religiously motivated violence
against women continue. Human Rights Watch has documented rapes
and assaults against certain ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan.
Female aid workers have even been withdrawn from Mazar-i-Sharif
after one was gang-raped. In Kabul a month ago, two women wearing
scarves instead of burkas had acid sprayed in their faces. So,
for the women of Afghanistan, the anonymity of the burka still
gives them a sense of protection. Zohal, who also wears the burka
when she goes out, agrees with Suheila.
"Of course we would like to take it
off," she says, "but it just isn't possible yet."
Some of the women who have taken off the
burka are those now moving into politics. My visit coincides with
the start of the loya jirga, the gathering of a council of 1,500
delegates who are to decide the structure of the future government.
Nearly 200 are women. I visit the council offices, where dozens
of Afghan men circle the courtyard, talking eagerly. Out on the
parched grass is a tent, and inside the stifling tent sit 15 women,
newly arrived delegates from western provinces of the country.
A woman in her early 30s, also called Zohal,
talks enthusiastically about what this means to her. Her two-year-old
daughter, silently playing with a wilted pink rose, sits on her
lap as she talks. "The doors of everything have been closed
to women for so long," she says. "Now we hope that the
doors are swinging open. This loya jirga is only a first step,
but in the future parliament there must be equal representation
for women and for men."
Mindful that even in western countries
women haven't achieved such representation, I ask the other women
in the tent if they feel the same. There is an eruption of noise.
"Yes, they all agree," my translator says solemnly.
"They say that women make up more than half of the population
of Afghanistan and that they have been the first victims of war.
They must now be allowed their rights."
"It hasn't changed at all from the
KGB," said a former intelligence operative familiar with
the agency's workings. "They use the same methods."
The literacy course in Sarasia is funded
by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
This extraordinary organisation has been going since 1977 and
is a testament to the determined resilience of Afghan women. The
thousands of RAWA members have worked underground and in exile
for nearly 30 years - against the Soviet regime, the mujaheddin,
the Taliban - and they are now stronger than ever. But although
RAWA is beginning to operate more openly, most of its work is
still anonymous and underground. Oddly, despite the west's much-touted
support for a more liberal society, RAWA has never received support
from any government.
But RAWA's members are still agitating
for women's equality and a secular government, and they are also
passionately involved in rebuilding civil society. In contrast
to some of the rather chaotic government and non-governmental
projects, the couple of RAWA schemes I see, in Sarasia and Kabul,
are models of good organisation and sustainability. One day, I
visit one of their schools in Kabul, which operates in the family
home of a former radio broadcaster from Mazar-i-Sharif, who prefers
to remain anonymous.
Sitting next to Zohal is Bibi Kur, a woman with a look of the
younger Doris Lessing. She comes from Herat. "There, our
leaders did not want a single woman to go to the loya jirga,"
she says scornfully. "But people from Kabul came and insisted,
so they said there could be one woman from each province, one
out of eight delegates." Is she scared to be a delegate when
the warlords are so against women's involvement? "I am afraid,"
she says. "I know these men. But I've survived 23 years of
war. I have been injured.
"My husband has been injured. Now
I am happy that I am here and that I can defend women's rights."
It is easy to be delighted by the energy
and determination of these women who are moving back into politics.
But in the weeks that follow, as the loya jirga progresses, the
idealistic women are sidelined. The power is still held by men
who control the guns and the money, former mujaheddin who gained
their influence through bloody fighting and terrorising civilians;
men such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan and Burhanuddin Rabbani,
all of whom retain power over areas of Afghanistan and who pack
the loya jirga with their supporters. Although we in the west
see such men as useful allies, the women I spoke to have not forgotten
their crimes. Indeed, on the first day of the loya jirga, some
female delegates, among them Tajwah Kakur, confront Rabbani. "Why
did your armies kill and rape so many women?" Kakur asks.
"Why are there so many widows in our country?" He is
silent.
I spend an afternoon talking to Kakur at
her office in the women's ministry, set up last year by the interim
administration. Kakur, the deputy women's minister, sits still
as a monument behind her glass-topped desk, her silver hair piled
up under a grey voile scarf. She is unusual among the new women
in Afghan politics, because she was even tolerated by - and herself
accepted - the Taliban regime, and ran a boys' school in Kabul
during their rule. Even so, she says her dreams have now come
true: "I am so happy looking at women going back to work
and school. I think, is this a dream? Or is it real life?"
But for all her optimistic talk, Kakur
is angry about the current situation and the men who are moving
back into power. "All Afghan women know who I am talking
about. These men kidnapped and raped the women of Afghanistan.
Until the guns are taken away from them, women will not have security.
Yes, now we are told that these men are heroes. But who broke
all the buildings and kidnapped the women? They are not heroes.
They are zeroes."
But women in Afghanistan are not only struggling
against the men who rule them. Many are simply struggling to survive.
As we leave Kakur's office, we walk through a corridor where dozens
of women with their burkas pushed back from their faces are squatting
outside the offices. A female official shoos them away into a
courtyard. We follow them into the blinding glare of the midday
sun, and ask who they are and why they are here. As they speak,
I catch a glimpse of another Afghanistan, the one where so many
women, especially those whose husbands and brothers were killed
in the decades of fighting, now live.
One of these women, Khandijal, is five
months pregnant, although her bump hardly shows on her skeletal
frame, wrapped in its blue burka. Five months ago, a US bomb killed
her husband and injured her leg. "For four months I have
been coming here every day to beg for work," she says. "There
is no work for us." Khandijal has five daughters, all younger
than 12. "Every day I go back home and my children cry out,
'Where is the money, where is the food?' I have nothing for them.
My children are starving and nobody here will do anything for
me."
"Life for me was better under the
Taliban," Hanifa, a tiny, skinny woman, says defiantly. Her
husband was killed three years ago, and she has seven children.
"The UN gave the widows in Kabul a card to take to a centre
to get food free. We got five naan bread a day. So our children
ate lunch and dinner. Now we have nothing. At first, when the
Americans came, I was happy. I thought, our lives will get better.
But there is nothing for us. The Americans never asked about us."
"Will you help us?" all the women
ask, one by one. "Will you help to find us work?" When
we explain that we don't work for the UN or an aid organisation,
they look puzzled. I go on asking questions, which they answer
eagerly, perhaps hoping that we will give them something in return.
We have all seen and read tales of such desperation a thousand
times, but looking at desperation is very different from having
desperation look back at you, hungrily.
If you listen to the talk of the amount
of money that has been promised to Afghanistan, it is easy to
feel complacent about the way the international community is stepping
in to reconstruct the country. Certainly, for many people life
has improved - despite what Hanifa says, for instance, the UN
World Food Programme tells me that it is now reaching about three
times as many destitute people as it could under the Taliban regime.
But although more aid is coming in now, far more has been promised
than is reaching the country, as donors hold back in case the
fragile peace collapses. And what has arrived - around $800m in
the first half of the year - is not enough to stop the immediate
suffering of millions of ordinary people. Afghan women are thought
to have the highest maternal mortality rates of women in any country,
at around 1,700 per 100,000; life expectancy is about 46 years,
and around 50% of children are stunted through malnutrition -
yet donor fatigue is already a real ! danger. Dr Lynn Amowitz
of Harvard Medical School, who is leading a new maternal mortality
survey in Afghanistan, said recently, "Afghanistan is falling
off people's radar screen and funding is becoming harder to find."
One of the women standing with the widows
is younger than they are, and her face still has the sleekness
of a girl who eats every day. Akala is only 19.
"I started school again last month,"
she says. "But every afternoon I come here and ask for work.
There are 10 of us brothers and sisters, and my father is too
old to work. For us, life is becoming worse day by day."
Has she seen anything get better? "Yes, of course, we are
free to go outside," she says quickly, "and now I can
go to school. But what can I say about my future? Unless I find
work, I will have to leave school. I can't pay for paper and pencils.
And I can't go to school if my brothers and sisters are starving."
As we drive away from the government buildings,
clouds of dust rise from the roads and even the men walking on
the streets pull scarves over their faces to protect their eyes
and mouths. This is the regular Kabul dust-storm that rises up
every afternoon. One returning Afghan told me that in his childhood,
before the wars, they never used to have this weather, these clouds
of dust blocking out the sunlight and surrounding the mountains
with what looks like drifting smoke. He was probably right, since
this drought started only a few years ago, but his statement sounded
metaphorical - as if the very earth had begun to choke on its
burden of misery.
The idea that Afghanistan was destroyed
by war was only an image to me until I actually saw Kabul, with
the rubble and ruins stretching for mile after mile into the bleak
mountains, like a film set designer's vision of a city after a
nuclear war. I had to keep reminding myself that Kabul was not
always a dystopian city - that once, in the 1970s and 1980s, it
was cosmopolitan, with women walking down the streets in miniskirts,
crowded jazz clubs and colourful parks. It's also important to
remember that Afghan women were not always victims. In the 80s,
40% of doctors and 50% of university students in Kabul were women
- and though such liberation did not extend throughout Afghanistan,
many urban, educated women lived lives of relative freedom.
But one thing that astounded me was that
even those women who have lived all their lives in the most traditional
sections of society can still speak a language of resistance.
One day, for instance, I visited Sarasia, a bleak little village
west of Kabul. Women here live close to the edge; even the village
well, after three years of drought, is no longer working, so the
women and children traipse across the fields to the neighbouring
village every day to collect water. In one of the stark white
houses, a literacy class is in progress. The women in this class
couldn't be further from the educated elite. Soraya, for instance,
is a widow of 50 and has been illiterate all her life. "If
you are illiterate, it is as if you are blind," she says.
Her eldest son doesn't want her to learn to read, but she has
finally won his permission because this class is run by women
for women in their own village.
In this village, all the women wear burkas;
they always have. None can leave the village without the permission
of the men in her family, and none of the women in the room has
had any formal education. And yet, somehow, they have kept alive
the idea of a different society. Aisha, a middle-aged woman whose
husband is too old to work, says, "Because we are uneducated,
we can't speak out and defend our rights. We don't want that for
our daughters. We want them to know how to speak up in front of
outsiders." Again and again, I ask if all the women they
know, even in the most traditional families, feel the same. They
almost get angry trying to convince me, and the hot little room
seems to get hotter as they all speak at once. "Of course
we want more freedom," says Soraya. "Even women who
are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands
and brothers and fathers don't want it. The mullahs keep saying
freedom is not good for us."
The literacy course in Sarasia is funded
by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
This extraordinary organisation has been going since 1977 and
is a testament to the determined resilience of Afghan women. The
thousands of RAWA members have worked underground and in exile
for nearly 30 years - against the Soviet regime, the mujaheddin,
the Taliban - and they are now stronger than ever. But although
RAWA is beginning to operate more openly, most of its work is
still anonymous and underground. Oddly, despite the west's much-touted
support for a more liberal society, RAWA has never received support
from any government.
But RAWA's members are still agitating
for women's equality and a secular government, and they are also
passionately involved in rebuilding civil society. In contrast
to some of the rather chaotic government and non-governmental
projects, the couple of RAWA schemes I see, in Sarasia and Kabul,
are models of good organisation and sustainability. One day, I
visit one of their schools in Kabul, which operates in the family
home of a former radio broadcaster from Mazar-i-Sharif, who prefers
to remain anonymous.
On the street outside, it is the usual
Kabul scene: heaps of rubbish, a blinding glare, dust-filled air.
Then you push open a large blue door to a courtyard. Here, somebody
is growing herbs and vegetables, and two white-and-yellow butterflies
dip their wings over the thick green fronds of radish plants.
Under awnings on the sides of the courtyard, one group of women
is spelling out its Persian lesson and another is cutting bright
cloth, learning to make shirts.
One of the teachers here is Zahmina Nyamati.
She is 42, with a weather-beaten, sensible face. Twenty years
ago, Zahmina was like Zohal Faiz Mohammed, an optimistic science
graduate from Kabul University. She married a civil servant and
had five children. But after her husband died seven years ago,
she took her family to live in a refugee camp in Pakistan. She
became a servant for Pakistani families all day and sewed all
night, trying to earn enough money to keep her children in school.
As she speaks, the tears run down her face. She doesn't try to
wipe them away.
"I have good memories in my life,
from my childhood, and when I was first married. But then everything
was lost. I worked in houses where I was dirt, and I was allowed
as a great favour to collect the food they were going to throw
out to take to my children.
"When I got married, I thought at
least we will live in peace. At least we will have a simple house,
where we can say, 'It's my room'; at least when my children go
to school, they can say, 'These are my shoes, this is my pencil.'
But my children sit alone. They never play with other children.
When I come home, they say, 'What have you brought us?' And I
can't say anything. My life is over. But I want a better life
for them. This is why I work all day and all night. I must be
strong. I pray every day, 'God make me strong.' "
After her class is over, Zahmina takes
me to her home. This neighbourhood is what most of Kabul looks
like - a slum, where the sewers drain into the street, and the
street is just packed dust. She lives in one room with her four
children, one of whom is handicapped and lies on the floor, unable
to walk or crawl. There is no furniture except for one bed heaped
with scraps of clothes and blankets. After the Taliban fell, like
hundreds of thousands of others, Zahmina returned to Kabul with
the help of the UN refugee agency, which gives returning refugees
$10-$30 per person. Zahmina's family also received two plastic
sheets, two blankets and three bags of flour. First, they went
to live in Chehl Sutoon, a ruined area where there is no running
water, no roofs, no windows. Now they feel lucky to have found
one room with a roof. If it wasn't for RAWA, she might soon be
begging like the other women whose claw-like hands grab at you
on the streets.
As we talk about the past, she asks her
daughter, a fresh-faced girl of 12, to get out the photographs.
Alya pulls the box from under the bed. The few family snaps show
a big, happy family at birthday parties, sitting around with the
children on their parents' laps, a cake and watermelon and biscuits
on a table, balloons in children's hands. Alya and her brothers
handle the pictures reverently, dreaming over them.
I ask Zahmina if she has any hopes for
the future. She doesn't hesitate. "I hope, it is my only
wish, that the international organisations that have promised
to help Afghanistan will fulfil their promises, especially for
women. And I have heard our politicians talk about women's rights.
I hope Afghan women will achieve these. We have known such suffering
for these 23 years. We just want to give our children what they
need, so they can grow up to fulfil their dreams." I am struck
once again, struck with an almost physical shock, by the way in
which Afghan women are facing the future with such stony determination.
Alya listens to us talk. The little girl,
who has grown up in a refugee camp, then moved to a ruin and then
to a slum, is slender and bright-eyed in green shalwar kameez.
I ask what she thinks she will do in the future. "I will
be a doctor!" she says determinedly.
We just stumbled into it, one of us starting
it off to pass the time, then me chiming in with a harmony, then
the next one with hers. It sounded, well, not bad.
Could it enhance our take? Since we had,
as a group, taken in zip, it couldn't hurt. For the previous 48
hours, we had been standing on streets and sleeping on concrete
as part of a religious witness of clergy and lay people, doing
our days and nights as many homeless people do, trying to understand
from their perspective.
We tried our song on a guy down a ways
from us on Polk Street, himself spread on a blanket in front of
a Walgreen's. At first he was uncomfortable -- these three white
women singing to him. But as he listened, well, he seemed to like
it. His face brightened. Then he was all advice, like a lot of
people on the streets, trying to be helpful to others among them:
"You go down to Powell Street, by the cable car, and you'll
clean up!"
So there we were that next morning, the
three of us (after a better night's sleep on the loam of a churchyard,
rather than the previous night's cement near the Transbay Terminal),
singing for enough money to avoid the institutional fare of the
St. Anthony's free food line and rise to the heights of breakfast
at MacDonald's. The song and our harmonies were all fine enough.
Especially for a sleepy 8 a.m. Powell Street work crowd making
its way, for the most part, passing us by.
We were better at singing than soliciting
donations, however. "Spare change?" We couldn't get
behind the idea one colleague had suggested. She'd consulted the
Internet before participating in this Sunday through Wednesday
street retreat. There she learned the number one-grossing line
to give to would-be donors on the streets: "Help the homeless
today?" We weren't homeless. Not really. We were there as
witnesses, and as it turned out, fair-weather witnesses (it poured
Sunday morning, but the sun was out by the time our turns came).
We didn't feel quite right, even though,
as this one well-meaning colleague had pointed out, we wouldn't
actually be saying we were homeless. No. "Spare change?"
followed by "Have a good day," whether they gave us
anything or not, seemed in keeping with our personal and collective
missions: to get money for food; to learn through experience;
to impart good will to all.
This first try, however, we just set the
styrofoam cup out on a prayer shawl and left it passively awaiting
the clink of coins. We sang till we were hoarse. We sang the song
over and over as people poured out of the BART station. And we
sang especially clear and loud when we saw someone who seemed
to need a lift, whether a commuter in a suit or a street person
in tatters -- anyone whose body language suggested he was in pain,
she was in despair, lonely and unloved or just having a rough
morning, we couldn't know.
After half an hour we'd collected all of
two dollars, and those two dollars had come one dollar at a time.
With what other change we'd already parlayed earlier individually,
we barely had enough money for one egg Mcmuffin meal with one
extra Mcmuffin.
Then there was the challenge of the coffee.
We could see our way to cutting the Mcmuffins into two-thirds
portions. But one cup of coffee? We had a tea bag. And how much
for a cup of hot water? Twenty-seven cents, in case you're saving
up. So we negotiated. Keep the one cup of coffee and just give
us three cups of hot water, OK?
These decisions of whether or not to give
three cups of hot water for one cup of coffee become major doings
in a world that gives authority to someone who is about an inch
away from being on the streets herself. Still, this woman behind
the counter traffics in such mercies all day every day, I figure.
She's not a counter person at McDonald's. She's a saint.
The lesson? It hardens a person to have
to ask for what she wants when she has nothing to give. If it
was true over only four days, imagine what stiffening oneself
for the potential rejection does to the spirit when you have to
do it day and night for what seems like will be, and sometimes
is, the rest of your life.
Weak peppermint tea was divine. It tasted
wonderful, and the thrill of having made it happen tasted even
better. Thankfully, one among us didn't care for the greasy potato
thingy (McDonald's version of hash browns) that I myself was unwilling
to relinquish. So we split that sliding slice of starch only two
ways. Judicially divided, the Mcmuffin pieces were exquisite,
an extraordinary culinary masterpiece. And we were satisfied.
The song we sang? It's by Libby Roderick.
The lyrics are these: How could anyone ever tell you,/ you are
anything less than beautiful?/ How could anyone ever tell you,/
you are anything less than whole?/ How could anyone fail to notice/
that your loving is a miracle?/ How deeply you're connected to
my soul!
We decided we'd do this again, singing
this very song, maybe once a month during a commute time. Any
money we collect we'll donate. Any good vibe we can impart, we
will donate that, too. We truly felt good about singing as a ministry,
you might say.
On the face of things, it may have seemed
we were doing it for other people. The truth is, we were doing
it for ourselves, to bring our own hearts, our own spirits back
to the basics of living. There is nothing more basic than trying
to figure out where you're going to get your next meal or where
you can find your next toilet. And, oddly, nothing more intimate
than singing to strangers how they, and you, are worthy.
"What source can you believe in order
to create peace there?" a friend writes when I come back
from Palestine. I have no answer, only this story:
June 1, 2002: I am in Balata refugee camp
in occupied Palestine, where the Israeli Defense Forces have rounded
up four thousand men, leaving the camp to women and children.
The men have offered no resistance, no battle. The camp is deathly
quiet. All the shops are shuttered, all the windows closed. Women,
children and a few old men hide in their homes.
The quiet is shattered by sporadic bursts of gunfire, bangs and
explosions. All day we have been encountering soldiers who
all look like my brother or cousins or the sons I never had, so
young they are barely more than boys armed with big guns. We've
been standing with the terrified inhabitants as the soldiers search
their houses, walking patients who are afraid to be alone on the
streets to the U.N. Clinic. Earlier in the evening, eight of our
friends were arrested, and we know that we could be caught at
any moment. It is nearly dark, and Jessica and Melissa and I are
looking for a place to spend the night. Jessica, with her pale,
narrow face, dark eyes and curly hair, could be my sister or my
daughter. Melissa is a bit more punk, androgynous in her dyed-blond
ducktail.
We are hurrying through the streets, worried. We need to be indoors
before true dark, and curfew. "Go into any house," we've
been told. "Anyone will be glad to take you in." But
we feel a bit shy. From a narrow, metal staircase, Samar, a young
woman with a wide, beautiful smile beckons us up.
"Welcome, welcome!" We are given refuge in the three
small rooms that house her family: her mother, big bodied and
sad, her small nieces and nephews, her brother's wife Hanin, round-faced
and pale and six months pregnant.
We sit down on big, overstuffed couches. The women serve us tea.
I look around at the pine wood paneling that adds soft curves
and warmth to the concrete, at the porcelain birds and artificial
flowers that decorate a ledge. The ceilings are carefully painted
in simple geometric designs. They have poured love and care into
their home, and it feels like a sanctuary.
Outside we can hear sporadic shooting, the deep 'boom' of houses
being blown up by the soldiers. But here in these rooms, we are
safe, in the tentative sense that word can be used in this place.
"Inshallah', "God willing', follows every statement
of good here or every commitment to a plan.
"Yahoud!" the women say when we hear explosions. It
is the Arabic word for Jew, the word used for the soldiers of
the invading army. It is a word of warning and alarm: don't go
down that alley, out into that street. "Yahoud!" But
no one invades our refuge this night. We talk and laugh with the
women. I have a pocket-sized packet of Tarot cards, and we read
for what the next day will bring. Samar wants a reading, and then
Hanin. I don't much like what I see in their cards: death, betrayal,
sleepless nights of sorrow and regret. But I can't explain that
in Arabic anyway, so I focus on what I see that is good.
"Baby?" Hanin asks.
"Babies, yes,"
"Boy? Son?"
The card of the Sun comes up, with a small boy-child riding on
a white house. "Yes, I think it is a boy," I say.
She shows me the picture of her first baby, who died at a year
and a half. Around us young men are prowling with guns, houses
are exploding, lives are being shattered. And we are in an intimate
world of women. Hanin brushes my hair, ties it back in a band
to control its wildness. We try to talk about our lives. We can
write down our ages on paper. I am fifty, Hanin is twenty-three.
Jessica and Melissa are twenty-two: all of them older than most
of the soldiers. Samar is seventeen, the children are eight and
ten and the baby is four. I show them pictures of my family, my
garden, my step-grandaughter. I think they understand that my
husband has four daughters but I have none of my own, and that
I am his third wife. I'm not sure they understand that those wives
are sequential, not concurrent-but maybe they do. The women of
this camp are educated, sophisticated-many we have met throughout
the day are professionals, teachers, nurses, students when the
Occupation allows them to go to school.
"Are you Christian?" Hanin finally asks us at the end
of the night. Melissa, Jessica and I look at each other. All of
us are Jewish, and we're not sure what the reaction will be if
we admit it. Jessica speaks for us.
"Jewish," she says. The women don't understand the word.
We try several variations, but finally are forced to the blunt
and dreaded "Yahoud."
"Yahoud!" Hanin says. She gives a little surprised laugh,
looks at the other women. "Beautiful!"
And that is all. Her welcome to us is undiminished. She shows
me the shower, dresses me in her own flowered nightgown and robe,
and puts me to bed in the empty side of the double bed she shares
with her husband, who has been arrested by the Yahoud. Mats are
brought out for the others. Two of the children sleep with us.
Ahmed, the little four year old boy, snuggles next to me. He sleeps
fiercely, kicking and thrashing in his dreams, and each time an
explosion comes, hurls himself into my arms.
I can't sleep at all. How have I come here, at an age when I should
be home making plum jam and doll clothes for grandchildren, to
be cradling a little Palestinian boy whose sleep is already shattered
by gunshots and shells? I am thinking about the summer I spent
in Israel when I was fifteen, learning Hebrew, working on a kibbutz,
touring every memorial to the Holocaust and every site of a battle
in what we called the War of Independence. I am thinking of one
day when we were brought to the Israel/Lebanon border. The Israeli
side was green, the other side barren and brown.
"You see what we have made of this land," we were told.
"And that-that's what they've done in two thousand years.
Nothing."
I am old enough now to question the world of assumptions behind
that statement, to recognize one of the prime justifications the
colonizers have always used against the colonized. "They
weren't doing anything with the land: they weren't using it."
They are not, somehow, as deserving as we are, as fully human.
They are animals, they hate us.
All of that is shattered by the sound of Hanin's laugh, called
into question by a small boy squirming and twisting in his sleep.
I lie there in awe at the trust that has been given me, one of
the people of the enemy, put to bed to sleep with the children.
It seems to me, at that moment, that there are indeed powers greater
than the guns I can hear all around me: the power of Hanin's trust,
the power that creates sanctuary, the great surging compassionate
power that overcomes prejudice and hate.
One night later, we again go back to our
family just as dark is falling, together with Linda and Neta,
two other volunteers. We have narrowly escaped a party of soldiers,
but no sooner do we arrive than a troop comes to the door. At
least they have come to the door: we are grateful for that for
all day they have been breaking through people's walls, knocking
out the concrete with sledgehammers, bursting through into rooms
of terrified people to search, or worse, use the house as a thoroughfare,
a safe route that allows them to move through the camp without
venturing into the streets. We have been in houses turned into
surreal passageways, with directions spray painted on their walls,
where there is no sanctuary because all night long soldiers are
passing back and forth.
We come forward to meet these soldiers, to talk with them and
witness what they will do. One of the men, with owlish glasses,
knows Jessica and Melissa: they have had a long conversation with
him standing beside his tank. He is uncomfortable with his role.
Ahmed, the little boy, is terrified of the soldiers. He cries
and screams and points at them, and we try to comfort him, to
carry him away into another room. But he won't go. He is terrified,
but he can't bear to be out of their sight. He runs toward them
crying.
"Take off your helmet," Jessica tells the soldiers.
"Shake hands with him, show him you're a human being. Help
him to be not so afraid.
" The owlish soldier takes off his helmet, holds out his
hand. Ahmed's sobs subside. The soldiers file out to search the
upstairs. Samar and Ahmed follow them. Samar holds the little
boy up to the owlish soldier's face, tells him to give the soldier
a kiss. She doesn't want Ahmed to be afraid, to hate. The little
boy kisses the soldier, and the soldier kisses him back, and hands
him a small Palestinian flag.
This is the moment to end this story,
on a high note of hope, to let it be a story of how simple human
warmth, a child's kiss, can for a moment overcome oppression and
hate. But it is a characteristic of the relentless quality of
this occupation that the story doesn't end here. The soldiers
order us all into one room. They close the door, and begin to
search the house. We can hear banging and crashing and loud thuds
against the walls. I am trying to think of something to sing,
to do to distract us, to keep the spirits of the children up.
I cannot think of anything that makes sense. My voice won't work.
But Neta teaches us a silly children's song in Arabic. To me,
it sounds like:
"Babouli raizh, raizh, babouli jai, Babouli ham melo sucar
o shai,"
"The train comes, the train goes, the train is full of sugar
and tea."
The children are delighted, and begin to sing. Hanin and I drum
on the tables. The soldiers are throwing things around in the
other room and the children are singing and Ahmed begins to dance.
We put him up on the table and he smiles and swings his hips and
makes us all laugh.
When the soldiers finally leave, we emerge
to examine the damage. Every single object has been pulled off
the walls, out of the closets, thrown in huge piles on the floor.
The couches have been overturned and their bottoms ripped off.
The wood paneling is full of holes knocked into every curve and
corner. Bags of grain have been emptied into the sink. Broken
glass and china covers the floor.
We begin to clean up. Melissa sweeps: Jessica tries to corral
the barefoot children until we can get the glass off the floor.
I help Hanin clear a path in the bedroom, folding the clothes
of her absent husband, hanging up her own things, finding the
secret sexy underwear the soldiers have obviously examined. By
the time it is done, I know every intimate object of her life.
We are a houseful of women: we know how to clean and restore order.
When the house is back together, Hanin and Samar and the sister
cook. The grandmother is having a high blood pressure attack:
we lay her down on the couch, I bring her a pillow. She rests.
I sit down, utterly exhausted, as Hanin and the women serve us
up a meal. A few china birds are back on the ledge. The artificial
flowers have reappeared. Some of the loose boards of the paneling
have been pushed back. Somehow once again the house feels like
a sanctuary.
"You are amazing," I tell Hanin. "I am completely
exhausted: you're six months pregnant, it's your house that has
just been trashed, and you're able to stand there cooking for
all of us." Hanin shrugs. "For us, this is normal,"
she says.
And this is where I would like to end this story, celebrating
the resilience of these women, full of faith in their power to
renew their lives again and again.
But the story doesn't end here.
The third night. Melissa and Jessica go
back to stay with our family. I am staying with another family
who has asked for support. The soldiers have searched their house
three times, and have promised that they will continue to come
back every night. We are sleeping in our clothes, boots ready.
We get a call.
The soldiers have come back to Hanin's house. Again, they lock
everyone in one room. Again, they search. This time, the soldier
who kissed the baby is not with them. They have some secret intelligence
report that tells them there is something to find, although they
have not found it. They rip the paneling off the walls. They knock
holes in the tiles and the concrete beneath. They smash and destroy,
and when they are done, they piss on the mess they have left.
Nothing has been found, but something is lost. The sanctuary is
destroyed, the house turned into a wrecking yard. No one kisses
these soldiers: no one sings.
When Hanin emerges and sees what they have done, she goes into
shock. She is resilient and strong, but this assault has gone
beyond 'normal', and she breaks. She is hyperventilating, her
pulse is racing and thready. She could lose the baby, or even
die.
Jessica, who is trained as a Street Medic for actions, informs
the soldiers that Hanin needs immediate medical care. The soldiers
are reluctant, "We'll be done soon," they say. But one
is a paramedic, and Melissa and Jessica are able to make him see
the seriousness of the situation. They allow the two of them to
violate curfew, to run through the dark streets to the clinic,
come back with two nurses who somehow get Hanin and the family
into an ambulance and taken to the hospital.
This story could be worse. Because Jessica
and Melissa were there, Hanin and the baby survive. That is, after
all, why we've come: to make things not quite as bad as they would
be otherwise.
But there is no happy ending to this story, no cheerful resolution.
When the soldiers pull out, I go back to say goodbye to Hanin,
who has come back from the hospital. She is looking dull, depressed:
something is broken. I don't know if it can be repaired, if she
will ever be the same. Her resilience is gone; her eyes have lost
their light. She writes her name and phone number for me, writes
"Hnin love you." I don't know how the story will ultimately
end for her. I still see in the cards destruction, sleepless nights
of anguish, death.
This is not a story of some grand atrocity.
It is a story about 'normal', about what it's like to under an
everyday, relentless assault on any sense of safety or sanctuary.
"What was that song about the train?"
I ask Neta after the soldiers are gone.
"Didn't you hear?" she asks me. "The soldiers came
and got the old woman, at one o'clock in the morning, and made
her sing the song. I don't think I'll ever be able to sing it
again."
"What source can you believe in order
to create peace there?" a friend writes. I have no answer.
Every song is tainted; every story goes on too long and turns
nasty. A boy whose baby dreams are disturbed by gunfire kisses
a soldier. A soldier kisses a boy, and then destroys his home.
Or maybe he simply stands by as others do the destruction, in
silence, that same silence too many of us have kept for too long.
And if there are forces that can nurture peace they must first
create an uproar, a vast breaking of silence, a refusal to stand
by as the boot stomps down.
Sometime in
November, I dropped into a depression that just wouldn’t
quit. Certainly, some of it was caused by the death of my mother
and the deaths of two old friends.
But there was something else too, and I
couldn't get a handle on it. Then Lynn Woolsey, my friend of over
3 decades who is now a Member of Congress, called inviting me
to join her on “the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage”
sponsored by the Faith and Politics Institute. The plan was that
I would join her on Feb. 28th, flying to Washington, DC, would
do whatever I chose to do the next couple of days, then we would
go to Alabama on March 2nd for the pilgrimage. Sounded good.
The time spent watching Lynn and her staff
conduct our business in Congress, working for so many things which
are dear to my heart, was wonderful. But the telling about that
will have to wait. We boarded a chartered plane in DC with about
20 members of Congress and some 70 others, landing in Birmingham
Friday afternoon. The next two and a half days were filled with
visits to historic places in the Civil Rights Movement, such as
16th Avenue Baptist Church, watching portions of "Eyes on
the Prize", the documentary of the Movement, as we moved
from place to place in buses. We sang familiar Movement songs
led by people who had been in the midst of the fray. We spent
much time in museums devoted to telling the story - the Civil
Rights Museum, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Voting Rights Museum.
Here were the stories and pictures of people who suffered so much,
even death, for the cause of justice, freedom and dignity for
all. Here was the reminder of that deep faith in God which sustained
them and which so undergirded the entire Movement.
In Montgomery an amazing exhibit allowed
us to look into Martin Luther King Jr.'s kitchen as he sat at
the table praying about the call to become a leader of the bus
boycott. I had forgotten he was only 26 at the time.
Our leader was John Lewis, a Congressman
from Alabama. He had been on of the first Freedom Riders, enduring
beatings from hostile mobs, and remained a Movement leader for
a decade. He and Hosea Willliams were in front of the march on
Bloody Sunday, when the tried to cross the Pettus Bridge leading
out of Selma and were set upon so brutally by the police. He suffered
a fractured skull and 3 days later was airlifted to Mass. General.
It's a miracle he lived but that he is in Congress is not a miracle.
It is a monument to his own courage and that of all of those whose
names we do not know but without whom that Movement would never
have gotten started much less prevailed. No march consists only
of leaders. There is no march without marchers.
The Civil Rights Memorial, like the Vietnam
War Memorial, is a product of the creative genius of Maya Lin,
who deems the memorial not a monument of suffering but a memorial
to hope. There, I put my hand into the waters that were constantly
caressing the names of 39 women and men who gave their lives,
famous and non-famous martyrs to the cause of God’s righteousness:
Lamar Smith, Medgar Evers, Louis Allen, Denise McNair (childhood
friend of Angela Davis). The 39th name is that of a man assassinated
in his 39th year: Martin Luther King, Jr.
I thought of my own small involvement in
that epic Movement, of the "soul force" that had suffused
it, and knew how much I yearn to tap into that again. Perhaps
that is greedy. Indeed, I do feel very grateful to have been the
age I was in the place I was with the people I was with during
those years.My life was totally changed. I came home energized,
revived in some deep place and know that "soul force"
is still very much among and within us.
The Sunday after I returned, was the day Presbyterians set aside
to "Celebrate the Gifts of Women" in specific ways and
I had been invited to preach in the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown.
The following was the closing for the sermon:
The
cure for depression is faithful, prayerful, informed action
for Life in solidarity with others. For as long as you live.
In the Selma Voting Rights Museum there is
a room devoted to women who fought for the right to vote. Susan
B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton died before the effort to
which they had given so much of their lives was won. Viola Liuzzo,
a homemaker who had come to help out on the march to Selma, was
gunned down as she drove to pick up some marchers at the bus station.
And there were so many others, in Birmingham we remembered Diane
Nash - RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU KNOW WHO SHE IS OR WHAT SHE DID. Diane
Nash, barely in her 20's was the coordinator for the Freedom Rides
which did so much to break down the Jim Crow segregation laws. In
Montgomery, we visited the Rosa Parks Museum where I bought a T-shirt
saying: "Quiet Strength". Rosa Parks was a 42 year old
woman riding the bus home after a hard day at work when she uttered
the "no" heard round the world. All this reminded me of
visiting Chile in 1980, at the invitation of the Union of Women,
to be in solidarity with those celebrating International Women's
Day in defiance of Pinochet's ban on public Political gatherings.
I met women who had endured unspeakable tortures, whose loved ones
had been made to disappear, who had been imprisoned, yet they were
out there again denouncing tyranny. What is most noteworthy about
all these women is that there is nothing particularly noteworthy
about them. They were just ordinary women - like us - who discovered
extraordinary courage and gifts when the times demanded it.
The times demand it now. It doesn't seem
likely that we will be called upon to suffer, as these women did.
But the times demand that we pour our life's energy, our soul
force, into the struggles to end racism, poverty, violence, the
awful destruction of God's beautiful Creation, the growing gap
between those who have more than anyone could every really use
and those who have nothing, the neglect of our children and our
elders. THE TIMES DEMAND that ordinary women discover the extraordinary
courage and gifts God gives to us each and all. And that we call
forth these gifts from each other and from the men we know. TAKE
BACK YOUR POWER, SISTERS. FIND YOUR POLITICAL VOICE. Who better
to speak up for life than those who birth it into being.
The cure for depression is faithful, prayerful,
informed action for Life in solidarity with others. For as long
as you live.
This was filmed four days before the 1906 earthquake. You'll
appreciate the research that it took to date this film so be sure
to read the material that follows.
The film is from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in
San Francisco, four days before the big earthquake/fire that destroyed
the area. You can clearly see the clock tower of the Ferry Building
at the end of the street at the Embarcadero wharf that is still
there. The quality & detail is great, so be sure to view it
full screen.
The film, was originally thought to be from 1905 until David
Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly
when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film
showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows
indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on
historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even
knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).
It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by
train to NY for processing. Amazing but true!
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted
material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. Lysistrata Project posts this material without profit for research
and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any
such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you
wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
