Thoughts on the Road to Holy Kerbala

Thoughts on the road to Holy Kerbala

We passed through Alexandria, one of Alexander the Great’s multiple cities
founded by himself. Our driver told us this is the last one he built
before he died. That may explain why so little evidence of his time here
still exists. Afterwards, the empire fell apart. Now it is a sleepy
little hamlet, which passersby would not suspect of such a notorious
heritage. We'll be going back soon though, to meet with an ambitious
young college professor who has started his own human rights organization
there. Perhaps then we will learn more. Iraqis, delightfully, love to
give tours to guests of their cities.

I never expected I’d spend so much time since being here in hijab, or
abaya (the long, loose black robe that rests on your head but is open in
front), or even that cheap indestructible polyester suit jacket I picked
up in Jerusalem before coming here last winter. Then again, I never
expected I’d be meeting so many high level Muslim clerics. Mainly these
have been the head Shi’a and Sunni clerics of Baghdad at their respective
shrines, (though I have recently befriended the Ssaid’s wife who is my
age). In Kerbala though, we met the Great Teacher (‘Ayatollah al-Odmah’)
Mohammed Taki al Mudarssy, who is of the same level as Ayatollah al Hakim
who was recently assassinated in Najaf, and Ayatollah Sostani, who has
taken his place. Each time I have met a new leader, I have been reserved,
respecting of the Shi’a gender roles and having the oldest male present
serve as spokesperson. Eventually, though, I get pulled into the
conversation to the amusement, then genuine interest of everyone involved.
I am well aware of this special privilege afforded to me in my role as a
foreign, Christian woman human rights worker.The Ssaids and Ayatollahs
have been most gracious hosts, and easy to talk with. I have now spent an
incredible amount of my short time here among the Shi’a and have had so
many of my preconceptions overturned. Shi’a, rather than being the
fundamentalists of Islam, are actually a lot more like the Catholics.
This is really quite easy to see when you have a Catholic priest with you
at these meetings. They are pious people who devote much attention to
shrines, pilgrimages, and physical and artistic expressions of their
faith. One beautiful custom is to stop after each meal and even in the
street to collect fallen crumbs of bread and place them up on a ledge.
This is because bread is the simplest, cheapest food one can eat, the food
of the poor, and to tread on it is to desecrate what others may need to
survive. I see this custom slightly altered in Palestine, Jerusalem
particularly. There, the Muslims are Sunni. I could write more now on
this but will save other new realizations for later.

The wife of Ssaid Ali in Baghdad presented me with a beautiful and ornate
ring the other day when we met. It is a stone called ‘Yacout,’ which I
believe comes from Yemen. It appears black, but has a reddish tinge when
held to the light. She also presented me with a plea, to help her locate
the body of her father, who was executed in 1983 by the former regime. He
was a veterinarian working at the military academy when he was called in
by the security forces and ordered to give injections to convicts. He
refused, and was thrown in to prison himself for two years before he was
hung. This conversation and plea leads our team to the mass graveyards in
Baghdad and many other cities. It will take a long time, I think, and the
task of finding one person among so many is immense. How can we do it, I
wondered to myself, without DNA testing? Of course, as the Westerner, I
look to technology for a solution. Our translator has a much simpler
idea: “Let us go to the graveyard and find the minder for this place and
talk to him and see what he knows. Probably they kept very good records.”
Ah.
And so we begin.

As we drive to Kerbala, we pass the date-palm jungles, the bullrushes
standing maybe twelve feet high above the marshlands along the roadsides;
the mudflats and the salt-gathering places. The villages are a different
kind of life than Baghdad, where the men wear long robes and head
coverings, all white, in contrast to the women robed all in black, a sort
of turned-around wedding scene.

I never thought I’d see machsoms here, the large earth-and-debris piles
blocking the roads that were a sad fact of life in Palestine. But they
are everywhere, whether placed by US forces to slow traffic near their
bases, or by locals to warn of danger from unexploded ordnance or bridges,
earlier bombed, that cannot carry heavy trucks. We crept over another
such bridge today, which mostly resembled a bridge but its sides were
somehow squashed, if you can imagine squashed, pulverised concrete and
flattened siderails. I didn’t know concrete did that.

We crossed that bridge over the wide, lazy Euphrates river, as wide as the
Mississippi, and lined with green, even in the heat of the summer.
Suddenly you pass from the dry brown mud flats to the jungles and even
thin green grass and pastures and wonder what happened until you see the
source of the green belt. These are prime farming areas, and favorites of
road travelers for stopping to rest.

I love roadside stops, literally ‘oases,’ here, under the date palms, with
little round huts build of dry reeds around a plastic patio table, where
you can drink fresh juice and tea in virtual seclusion. Other times there
are tiny amusement parks with aging rides for children. All have plenty of
colorful and curiously-shaped patio lights. And roofs from the sun.

As we pass these things I think that I am never sure which makes me want
to cry more when I am in Iraq: the heartbreak of people’s suffering,
which is much, and unabated during this new Occupation; or the sheer
beauty of this place, which endures throughout and keeps the people strong
as much as does their faith.

At a going-away party for a neighbor in our building last night, I met a
most suprisingly amazing man: a white-haired Swede, who has lived here
quietly the past 25 years. He first came to deal in oil, then after the
1991 invasion and sanctions turned to other goods. He actually was quite
well acquainted with Saddam and his sons (the sons he refers to as,
“absolutely nuts,”) and often went across the river as Saddam’s guest for
long talks. He was able to speak his mind freely with him, apparently
because the president realized he was unattached to any larger group and
had no clout. Truly, our solo neighbor just upstairs from us has seen it
all. One of my teammates is astounded. “Why aren’t the CIA and
journalists pounding down your door to interview you?” He shrugs his
shoulders. Perhaps its because he’s so unpretentious that nobody expects
him. He is a sort of wallflower, who I took pity on and tried to include
in the conversation. Little did I know!

He had something to say about what’s happening now, which rang true for me
in a new way. “The US had a golden opportunity here,” he said, “after the
war, when they were being welcomed with open arms. Then the post-war
looting began and they looked the other way, they allowed the country to
be ransacked while holding on to the oil alone. In doing so they
squandered their welcome. And then they became occupiers and everything
else ugly that goes along with that.”

When my same teammate also voiced his worry that Iraq would be exploited
by new corporations racing to move in and profit from the disorder and
post-sanctions economy, he said, “The Iraqis will never allow it. They
will resist them. They ousted the British occupiers and now will oust the
US occupiers. That’s the reason they are sabotaging the oil lines. They
see the corporations coming in and draining off the country’s wealth for
their own gain and they’re determined to stop it.”

I am still thinking of the Kadhum Pilgrimage last Monday, so unlike
anything I’d ever seen before. Swells of people, a solid human mass in
the streets; little stalls lining the way offering free breakfasts and tea
to those who may have journeyed up to 50km on foot to reach the shrine.
Iranians and Pakistanis mixed with Iraqi Shi’a, standing out only just
barely from the rest of the crowd. Brilliant colored flag processionals
entering the shrine, followed by triple-robed sheikhs and Ssaids,
Ayatollahs, and other holy men. Dozens of groups of young men flailing
themselves with metal chains to the beat of a funeral drum, followed by
beautifully decorated funeral platforms carried on shoulders. The human
river flowed slowly into and out of the gold-domed shrine, and everyone in
the crowd of millions knew their part in the ritual. Kadhum, the shrine
in the neighborhood which also bears its name, is the tomb of the great
Shi’a religious leader Musa Kadhum, who was martyred and left in a ditch,
an ugly way to die anywhere, and especially here. When his followers
discovered his body, they carried it on their shoulders to this place,
beating their chests and flailing themselves to convey their grief. Each
year, they re-enact this processional. That is, in addition to the very
real processionals they are forced to have quite often. Very few Shi’a
leaders live to die a natural death.

And so it is here in Karbala, where the twin shrines of Hussein and Abbas,
brothers hunted and killed in a brutal fashion, are built only a few
hundred meters apart from each other. The shrines themselves became
deathbeds for thousands of Shi’a during the 1991 Shaaban revolution
following the Gulf War, when the Shi’a took seriously Bush Sr.’s call to
revolt against Saddam and our government’s willingness to back them up.
Only Bush was not serious and the Shi’a were mowed down when the regime
crushed the revolution, even as they took sanctuary in their shrines. The
Human Rights Organization in Karbala, which we visited the same day,
estimates 25-30,000 are buried in mass graves around the city.

In beauty, these shrines surpass even the most famous churches of our own
religion, carefully hand-crafted of cut mirrors and painted tiles, and
lovingly washed each day. At night, they are aglow with the same lights
that adorn the roadside stops, causing them to glitter and seem
otherworldly in a world which by day is full of sand and sorrows. All the
poor come to lay their few wares down on the pavilions outside the
building, and many without wares take their rest on the cool marble floors
of the courtyard inside the gates. No one disturbs them all day.
Loitering is welcomed. This is what makes them most beautiful of all.

Two weeks on and lots to learn!

Hi everyone,

I feel quite badly for not having sent a message before this. It has been
a whirlwind existence these past two and a half weeks, mainly full of
meeting new partners (an ever-increasing number of local human rights
organizations especially), and also religious leaders, community leaders,
and lots of Iraqi families with heartbreaking stories to tell. I hope to
share many of these with you soon.

My first observation from my time here in Iraq is that it’s the first
project where I may not come back thinner than when I left. We’ve been
invited to lunch nearly every day this week. ‘Lunch’ is a massive meal,
even bigger than in Palestine, after which we need not eat until the next
morning. The benefit is that we’re all getting out of a lot of cooking
and dishes chores. Some of the people who are inviting us over are
English-speaking Iraqis who haven’t had a foreigner in their house in the
past thirty years and just want to make friends. Such is the case with
Musa (Arabic for Moses), a hyperactive guy who brought us a little vase of
silk flowers and a nice card just and invited us to his home to make
friends and encourage us to stay because so many internationals are
leaving.

My second observation, now after meeting about a hundred Iraqis, is that
everyone we meet says pretty much the same thing, whether they are
religious leaders, human rights workers, mothers of detainees, or
university graduates: It’s kind of nice that Saddam is gone, so thanks
for that, but we don’t need you to occupy us and tell us how to set up a
democracy. (After all, these are the best- and most
internationally-educated people of the middle east.) One university
student summed it up well: “We have oil to pay for our rebuilding, and we
have the knowledge to rebuild our country. So what we _don’t_ need is for
the US to come in as a middleman, profiting from both ends.”

The upsurge in new political parties, independent newpapers, human rights
organizations and social welfare/charitable organizations are all a very
good sign that Iraqis know best how to address their own needs. They’re
not waiting for this US-hand-crafted government to be handed to them, in
fact, they’re pretty much ignoring what they know will be a puppet
government and building their own civil society without any help from our
military. Nobody I met yet has any enthusiasm about the US-appointed
Governing Council. No one even talks about Ahmed Chaluby.

But that's enough politics for today. Otherwise in life, our little team
is doing well. Many people in Baghdad have bought personal water filters,
much to my relief because I've ended up drinking all those proffered
glasses of water I swore I wouldn't before I came here. My younger
teammate, Matthew, admits, "I just say a prayer before every glass." So
far, I have not been seriously ill but have had a two-day respiratory
issue, one heat-exhaustion headache, and one stomach threatening, but not
carrying through with all sorts of evils.

If you want to know what the weather is like right now, I suggest setting
your oven on to bake cookies and then opening it and getting your face
near the racks. Not on the racks, just near. That's exactly what it
feels like when we open the main door to our building. A dry, hot blast
of air. The sweat evaporates immediately. Otherwise, when I go out, I
often am duded up in a polyester suit. This is great for keeping the
sweat next to the skin and cooling me down and getting less dehydrated.
Often I can tell I'm sweating but don't feel warm at all. Strange, but
good.

My Palestinian Arabic is a source of amusement for all who hear it, since
all the colloquialisms I know do not exactly translate into Iraqi Arabic.
People say they understand me just fine, but it's weird. They don't know
the Khalili (Hebron Southerner) jokes here, but think the accent is funny
all the same. I'm finally beginning to catch on to the localisms here.
We don't say Ilhamdulallah, we say Zaen, when you ask how we're doing. We
also ask, 'Shlonich,' or 'what's your color?' instead of 'kief halek' for
'how are you?' And if I want to say okay, (tayeb) I am saying the word
they only use here to describe delicious food.

Tomorrow we are going to the holy (Shi'a) city of Kerbala to meet with
religious authorities and human rights groups there. This weekend we'll
be going to Fallujah to meet with community and tribal leaders after quite
a bit of violence there these past few weeks. We're doing the same amount
of work the Hebron team does, I figure, only there's just half as many of
us doing it. Two more teammates arriving next week will be wonderful.

I am sitting here and chatting with a computer programmer who was tortured
by the security service under Saddam's regime. His elbow is permanently
dislocated. He was using the internet secretly, he says, and now returned
after fleeing to Dubai for three years. He is writing now to a friend he
made from the US military, but is also upset about the bombing and
detainees. I guess he met our team a few weeks ago and wondered why we
are always talking to him about Palestine. I explained that we have a
team there too.

I could write so much more, but it will be dark soon. Security here for
us has not been as much an issue as I thought. The teammates here before
us did a good job of making friends in the neighborhood and we have lots
of people looking out for us. Technically, the building we live in has
security guards, but they are unarmed and live in the building and sit on
the steps and know everyone in the building and their neighborhood. They
also are in charge of starting the generator when the city power goes out.
They're good friends, and I think far better 'security.' Our landlord is
Armenian and studied at al Hakima University which I think was run by
Americans a few decades ago here. He comes to visit often. We went to
St. Raphael's Catholic church last night which has an international
congregation and will probably be our home church here. It's only two
blocks away.

Enough already! Will write more soon.

Peace,

Le Anne

My new life in Baghdad

Greetings from Baghdad!

(This letter is coming to you ten days after I wrote it, due to internet
troubles). I have arrived safely and in good health, but after a pretty
exhausting trek. We have a suprisingly nice team apartment about the size
of our office in Hebron and fully furnished. We’re just off Abu Nawwas
St, about a mile from the Palestine Hotel which makes the news often, and
on the last block before a large park and the banks of the Tigris.

We have power about 1/3rd of the day, and are blessed with air
conditioning during those times. Otherwise it gets humid in the
apartment, and the air can be oppressive in mid-afternoon, but the summer
heat has broken. I was surprised even still at the climate change from
Jordan and the cool of the desert border crossing, where I wrapped up
double in my shawl not to let the almost-icy winds blow through.

On my way here, I had a stopover in Amsterdam which was fantastic. After
accidentally dozing through half my 13-hour wait, I joined a cheesy
minibus tour, and we visited a Gouda cheese-and-wooden shoe-making shop
(free samples and try-ons!); toured the canals; a windmill, all the
downtown historic architecture, and saw but didn’t have time to enter Anne
Frank’s hiding house and museum. The whole city was much more beautiful
and well-preserved than I’d heard or imagined. The air was incredibly
clean, and the people were friendly. I definitely plan to return.
Curiously, those years of studying German paid off once again and I didn’t
have any problems reading street signs or how to use the telephone. The
Dutch don’t seem to translate much.

[An American on our tour looked at the canals and said, “Wow. This looks
just like Holland….” I just hope comments like that are the result of
jetlag only].

I thought I might get lucky on the second stretch of the trip by having no
one else in my row of seats on the plane. Five minutes after I lay down,
though, an indignant Jordanian grandmother was nudging me. She wanted to
sit in my row because her grandchildren were in the row ahead of her. So
much for the nap. But I impressed her with my little Arabic and she
became a very pleasant seatmate. At one point after supper, she grabbed
my wrist and sprayed me with some expensive looking perfume, then doused
herself. Not bad, probably an improvement over my day-and-a half old
clothes. In the meantime, we were treated to a full-color-spectrum sunset
over the Alps and through southeastern Europe. Spectacular.

We spent the night in Amman, and headed out the next night at 2 am. We
crossed the border at sunrise. There were Iraqis working the border
again, some of whom I recognized from before the war, and two US soldiers
who were awfully chipper for standing around looking soldierly at sunrise.
The road to Baghdad was uneventful, but difficult to witness the
destruction. The first was gingerly negotiating the truck around a
missile crater which removed ¾ of the four-lane highway bridge. Debris
was scattered several hundred meters. Other highway overpasses were
removed after having been hit by missiles earlier. I also noticed many
rusty overturned auto and bus wrecks along the highway, which had likely
burned. I wondered, if they also had been hit by shelling, or if they
were rollovers like we’d had, only no government existed to remove them
from the roadsides anymore. And with every one of the hundreds of
disintegrated tire remains I saw littering the highway, I thought about
George.

I am surprised by how much is now open and that the main road, Saadoun
St., is quite active, though interrupted at regular intervals by US tanks
and Humvees. It reminds me of Nablus, where curfew is lifted but Israeli
military vehicles patrol the streets, and the Palestinians try their best
to maintain a normal routine despite their presence. We hear the tanks
rolling by our apartment throughout the day and night, just like in
Hebron. I am surprised by how much bigger US tanks seem than Israeli
tanks, which I had thought were pretty big themselves. They made our
Suburban feel pretty small by comparison. Occasionally we hear bursts of
gunfire at night somewhere in our neighborhood. Many buildings are
destroyed, or occupied by US forces. The building across from us is burnt
and pockmarked with shelling, and no windows remain; after the military
assault on it it was looted; now squatters (refugees likely from destroyed
other parts of town) are making a home of it. I see quite a bit of food
for sale here, though not necessarily staples, for those who can buy it; I
understand half the population who were employed before the invasion now
find themselves not. Someone has organized the young men into a sort of
civil conservation corps who I see cleaning the streets and moving debris,
which I understand fell to the wayside during the invasion. I’ve only
been around the neighborhood on foot here today, tomorrow I’ll venture
further. A few of the cities we passed through on the way from Amman had
little left untouched and many demolished buildings.

Our apartment comfortably holds six people. I’m in charge of
re-organizing to see if we can squeeze any more in, plus create a
serviceable office and reception/living area in the main room.

I went with Jerry Stein to Chaldean mass today. Later I learned I
couldn’t understand the liturgy because they were speaking in Chaldean.
Before that, I was quite worried. Someone gently reprimanded me about
crossing my legs while sitting in church, but I soon discovered it is much
cooler not to, anyway. Chaldean worship is a bodily and sensory
experience, much like Sufi worship (which I had the opportunity to try out
in Toronto, incidentally). The chanting by the men of the congregation
started before we arrived, a continual influx of sound that made the
moments of silence even more profound. Chaldeans genuflect (cross
themselves) multiple times throughout the worship, as well as bow on one
knee when entering and leaving the pew and bowing to the reading of
Scriptures and the transubstantiation. I kept looking out the corner of
my eye to keep up with the others. (Also like the Sufi worship). I
missed only one genuflection, I am proud to say (pretty good for a
Lutheran), but the lady next to me let me know it, too. I placated her in
Arabic by admitting it was my first time in a Chaldean church. It’s good
to know Arabic here.

I designed a curriculum for teaching new teammates Arabic today. We’ve
found a potential teacher who is actually trained as an engineer but is
willing to try. She lives a few doors down. The newbies can look forward
to at least two hours of instruction every day for at least two months.
Sure wish we could have gotten that worked out for Hebron.

It’s really exciting to be working on a new project. My enthusiasm is
growing hourly, and I think this is why I’m still up at 2 am writing right
now. It certainly couldn’t have been the three hour nap this afternoon!

We will be primarily working with detainees and the disappeared, helping
families find out if they are still alive, their health, where they’re
being held, and pressing for the release of those who were picked up at
random and have not been charged, etc., much like the situation in
Palestine. We’ve had a few successes so far. We’ll also be working with
and encouraging the dozens of local human rights and social welfare
societies which are springing up to fill in the void left by the
destruction of the government and the lack of an interim civil
infrastructure under the Occupation. I hear I’ll be spending a lot of
time with women and hearing about the changes in their situation here.
Much the rest of the work will be very similar to what we’ve been doing in
Hebron all along—listening to peoples’ stories and telling them to people
back home who need to hear them; being present in the streets;
accompanying those working for nonviolent solutions to the crisis. I will
write more in detail about all of these.

My own emails may not be frequent, but you are all able to access the
team’s reports either by going to the website, www.cpt.org and reading the
latest as they appear, or by asking via website to be subscribed to our
team’s own listserve (about as frequent postings as the Hebron team’s),
which you’ll receive as soon as we write them.

I should get on towards bed while it is cool and I can still rest enough
before morning. It’s good to get up early and finish our appointments
before the heat of the day overwhelms. Though, if we stay on past noon,
my teammates warn me that we get fed really well by our local partner
organizations and families we meet. We’ll see what the week brings and
when I’ll be able to write next.

Peace,

Le Anne