Dispatches from Iraq: excerpts from the journal of a member of Christian peacemaker teams Baghdad.

Sheila Provencher is a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who lived and worked in Baghdad for two years. A Catholic lay minister, she traveled to Iraq for the first time in 2002 with an independent delegation of Catholic leaders and returned to stay as a full-time member of CPT in 2003. Now a CPT reservist, she writes, speaks, and gives workshops on nonviolent peacebuilding. CPT is an ecumenical organization that places teams of trained peacemakers in areas of lethal conflict around the world, including Iraq. On Nov. 26, 2005, four members of CPT--Tom Fox, Norman Kember, Jim Loney, and Harmeet Singh Sooden--were kidnapped in Baghdad by a group demanding the release of Iraqi prisoners. Despite intervention by many Muslim groups on CPT's behalf, at press time the status and whereabouts of the four were still unknown.

In these journals, the names of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers have been changed to protect their privacy.

January 4, 2004

Aida knocked on the first-floor window of CPT's apartment in Baghdad, her face framed by a green and white hijab, smile strained, and eyes wide with worry. Her two brothers and their driver were seized on the road from Tikrit to Baghdad almost two months ago. They were craftsmen, traveling to collect money from a customer. The charges against them are unclear, and the family has been turned away each time they tried to visit the prison. They are among more than 13,000 people detained by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Aida told her story with trust and desperation. Her brothers' wives have lost their homes and all are now living with Aida. She alone must provide for the entire household of six adults and six children age 6 or below.

Her face stays with me as I lay down to sleep that night to the rumble of the generator, the roar of tanks driving by, and the distant sound of explosions. How would I feel if my brother was imprisoned? Could I sleep if I did not know if my brother were dead or alive?

But my brother is imprisoned. And my brother sits in the tank roaring past. My sister is the little Iraqi girl next door who sleeps on rags. My sister is that young African-American soldier I saw sitting, tired, cradling her automatic rifle and maybe thinking of home. My brother is an Iraqi man killed by a terrorist bomb two blocks away. My brother sits in the White House. My brother is a former dictator, humiliated before the world.

February 12, 2004

Mousa told us a story about what happened to his daughter last spring during the early days of the occupation. "My daughter was very sick. I needed to take her to the hospital, but there was a curfew. I decided to risk it anyway, and I put her in the car and tried to drive to the hospital," he said.

"But I came to a checkpoint. At first the American soldiers were very suspicious, ordering me out of the car and pointing their guns. But then, when they saw my daughter, they changed very suddenly. They wanted to save her. I saw that it was almost as if she was their own daughter."

March 2, 2004

This is the first time in 35 years that the Shi'a have been able to celebrate the anniversary of the martyrdom of Ali Hussein, the fifth-century imam considered by Shi'a to be the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Seyyid Ali, the cleric in charge of the Kadhimiya Shrine here in Baghdad, invited us to the pilgrimage as guests and observers. Tonight we went to his home to join the women in their ritual mourning. We were all packed together in one room, some took off their hijabs, dancing in a circle and slapping their faces, all rhythmic and beautiful. You could feel it was joyous even though they were mourning.

All last night the people were doing the dance-like mourning rituals. It all reminds me of a Passion play on Good Friday--the same mix of suffering and joy.

But at 10 a.m., I awoke to a BOOM! and the shattering of glass from the window. As I scrambled to get dressed, two more explosions shook the building. When I ran to the roof, I saw something I still cannot fully grasp: a swath of blood two stories high above a door to the shrine, crowds screaming and running, a man grabbing the limp body of a child into his arms and running. The men on the roof with us--tough guards with guns--began crying. A voice echoed from the minaret, Bism Allah a rachman a rahim ("In the Name of God the Merciful and Compassionate") and Allah akbar ("God is greater").

June 20, 2004

Walking home with my teammates Stewart, Anita, and Greg, we stopped to talk with a young soldier standing guard from his Humvee. He was from New York, a reservist. He told us about the fighting in Sadr City. Three of his company died last week, and they are all terrified when they go out on patrol.

Then, while we were walking along our street, we were suddenly ambushed by a spray of water from the squirt guns wielded by young neighbors. We continued home innocently enough but returned with water balloons for an all-out ruckus. The boys ran into their houses and returned with their sisters to throw pans of water at us. They want to do the same again tonight.

July 16, 2004

"If you want, we will send security guards to protect you. Or, if you need weapons, we are happy to give you some weapons." Haider, our friend who directs an Iraqi humanitarian NGO, speaks with complete earnestness. He, like many of our Iraqi friends, warns us that we are prime targets for kidnappers. Often they suggest the "protection" of guns. Our landlord even offered us his Kalishnikov.

Walking me home after a neighbor's birthday party, my young friends Omar, 7, and Ala', 9, brandish their toy guns and promise to shoot anyone who tries to hurt me!

Streets, homes, and businesses bristle with guns. But does their presence bring comfort or security? On the contrary: a 26-year-old Iraqi woman tells me that she is afraid to cross the city to her university. Omar and Ala' are so afraid of explosions they will not walk to the end of the street.

Young soldiers share the same combination of weaponry and fear. They sit atop tanks in the blistering sun, behind automatic weapons with incredible firepower but useless against roadside bombs that could claim their lives at any moment. Security contractors drive around in armored SUVs that Iraqis jokingly call "shoot me" cars because they actually increase one's chance of getting attacked.

I try to tell Haider that CPTers feel safer without guns. If we carry guns out of suspicion that someone will hurt us, we invite the worst. But if we are unarmed and open, there exists the possibility for human encounter, conversation, and transformation.

October 30, 2004

I returned to Baghdad yesterday after a few months in the U.S. on a speaking tour. Um Yousif and her husband, both Iraqi Christians who have lived here their entire lives, gave me a chocolate cake with white-flowered frosting blobs and green lettering: "Wellcom to Baghdad."

But things are far from well. Um Yousif does not leave her house, not even to buy groceries. Fear of violence or kidnapping reigns. "I do not think it will get better, even after our elections," she said. "It will only change when the Americans leave." She paused. "But my heart feels for the American soldiers and their families. They are human beings. We are all human beings."

December 18, 2004

The small office is freezing cold--no gas heater, no electricity. Hana is the founder of Women's Will, an Iraqi women's organization that works for justice and human rights. Sixty-something, gray-haired, and blue-eyed ("I do not look Iraqi," she says, smiling), wearing an old blue windbreaker and dark-blue pants, she chain-smokes as she talks. She stands only about 5 feet 3 inches, but her energy envelops the room full of people.

She speaks about their latest project: to unite Iraqi mothers across religious lines and to reach out to mothers in the U.S. and around the world to work for peace. "We all suffer from the war," she says. "Here in Iraq, when the Coalition forces detain a young man, they are imprisoning his mother, too. She and the family suffer with him. When the U.S. sends soldiers to Iraq, they are sending the soldiers' mothers, too."

March 25, 2005: Good Friday 

The late afternoon sun slanted through the church. I thought I got there early, but the pews were full. Usually the Mass in English is sparse. But on Good Friday, there is only one service, in English and Arabic, and so everyone attends.

The altar was bare, the people silent. Here was a whole people crucified. Hardly anyone left to be with them in their sufferings, but they came to stand at the foot of Christ's cross, also seeking the strength to bear their own.

Outside, helicopters roared overhead. And as I looked out the still-open church door before the service began, I could see into a hospital room in the building across the street. A single small head peeped over the windowsill, an Iraqi child standing between curtains and glass. Here was the one, the littlest, the forgotten, for whom Christ lived and loved and died.

The church is small but the singing voices echoed in the nave. Toward the end of the service, Emad and Faris gently lifted the Christ figure down from the cross and laid it in a makeshift coffin. Four girls bore the coffin on their shoulders down the aisle, while parishioners reached out to touch the body, to kiss the feet.

Think of all the coffins these people have borne in the last several years--100,000 killed since April 2003, thousands killed by Saddam's regime, countless more dead in the first Gulf War and at least half a million in Iran. Imagine if we in distant lands felt the same grief for them that the Iraqi parishioners showed for the crucified Christ.

April 24, 2005

Lately I feel tired, so tired. There's always a part of me that wants to just sleep, sleep and make all of this just go away for awhile. I can identify with the apathy of citizens who give in to violence: Yes, just make the evil go away, if violence is the quickest way, just do it, press the button, fire the missile, send the young ones off to war.

I feel the weight of recent explosions across the country. Yesterday 71 people died in car bombs in at least three cities. Can you imagine what it is like, every time you set out in a car across the city, to wonder if you will return?

October 19, 2005

CPT has accompanied a group of Palestinian Iraqis, who are fleeing persecution, to the Syrian border in an effort to be accepted there as refugees. The people are Palestinian in ethnicity, but born in Iraq. To Americans this may be confusing since a person born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen. Not so in many other countries. Palestinians born in Iraq are Palestinian. They are not Iraqi citizens and so have none of the rights or protections of citizenship.

Saddam Hussein made a public show of supporting Palestinians in Iraq, and as a result public opinion turned against them, especially after the fall of Saddam. Thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of their apartments when the war began, and recently the new Iraqi security forces have been raiding Palestinian homes, detaining and torturing Palestinian men, and threatening the lives of the community.

At the Syrian border, the reception was cold. The immigration officer banished us all back to Iraq, but we went outside and camped on the sidewalk, in no-man's-land between the two borders.

The next day, a Syrian immigration officer approached. Now they know we did not go back to Iraq. What now? But by some miracle, the Syrian officials did not deport us back to Iraq. Instead they moved us into a small stone hut at the border's gate and later into three tents provided by the U.N. It may take a miracle for them to get refugee status.

Editor's note: On November 26 four CPT workers were kidnapped in Baghdad.

December 3, 2005

I am still here in Syria in the Palestinian refugee camp. I am far away from the Internet, e-mail, TV, and phones, so I have no access to news. Right now those in the U.S. probably know more than I do about the kidnapping. For me, it feels like a bad dream from which I cannot wake, and all I can do is try to unite the daily difficulties at the refugee camp--not enough food or water--with my dear teammates who are held hostage, and of course their families.

As I always believed would happen, all of our friends in Iraq, Palestine, and many other places have come together to help us and ask for the hostages' release. I wish there was more we could do. I want to return to Iraq right now to help my teammates on the ground, but they tell me it's best for me to stay where I am and for all of us to concentrate on prayer for the hostages and the hostage-takers--also beloved creations of God.

December 23, 2005

I'm back in the States now with a mixed heart--so grateful to be with my family and yet more aware than ever that so many are separated from theirs.

Still no word on the four. Every day we wait for news. I find myself imagining the moment I long for: my beloved CPT teammates Tom Fox, Jim Loney, Harmeet Sooden, and Norman Kember, on TV walking through throngs of journalists and well-wishers. But every day passes, and we wait.

Last summer, CPT met an elderly couple looking for their son, whom Iraqi security forces detained in the spring of 2005. The father went to the morgue, hospitals, army bases, police stations. Everywhere he carries with him a plastic bag containing his son's photograph and remaining identity documents. He is still waiting.

Detainees wait in overcrowded cells. Iraq's new commando units maintain many facilities where prisoners sit for months without charges and usually without enough food, clothes, water, toilets, or bedding.

The Iraq-born Palestinians who fled torture and intimidation are still waiting.

Families of soldiers wait for news. Each e-mail is a reprieve, each phone call a continuation of anxious hope that their loved ones will return alive.

And so we are all together now: U.S. families, Iraqi families, detainees, refugees, soldiers, peace activists. But why is CPT sharing this experience?

Our Palestinian-Iraqi friends, after two weeks with Tom, said, "We love Tom. He does not talk much, but he is always listening." Tom's daughter, too, said that the most important thing he did in Iraq was to listen to people who had no one else to hear their stories.

The same is true of Jim Loney. My memories are of him standing, notebook in hand, and listening, listening, writing down the voices. He listened in the village of Abu Sifa, where U.S. tanks destroyed two homes. He listened outside Abu Ghraib prison, where families desperate for news of their loved ones swarmed around him.

They believed that it was worth risking everything to come close enough to listen, to come close enough to experience the other's pain and joy as their own, to simply be with them. This is what Tom, Jim, Norman, and Harmeet were doing in Iraq. Now all of us who love them share in their work and witness, by being with them and all others in the waiting, in the fear, and in the hope.

By being with, by listening, and feeling, we touch the heart of nonviolent love. For if we come close enough to listen, and truly realize we are all brothers and sisters, how could we ever hurt one another again?