Amman, Jordan
November 25, 2007
Recent media reports depict large numbers of Iraqis returning to their country. “Thousands of Iraqis living in Syria have headed back home in the past weeks.” (Jordan Times, Feb. 23,2007) Some reports attribute this to improved security in Iraq. While the death rate and incidence of suicide bombs has decreased in recent weeks and months—most welcomed news—it seems that necessity is what is driving Iraqis home. As has long been the case in Jordan, visas for Iraqis in Syria are not being renewed and their money has run out. Returning Iraqis have also said they would prefer to die with dignity in their own country, rather than face the contempt and humiliation they feel in Jordan and Syria.
I spoke with an Iraqi family last night on the phone. If they were agreeable, I wanted to take a Jesuit priest, from Detroit but living in Nicaragua for many years, to visit them. The father could not mask his despair over the phone, nor his reluctance to see us. “Will your visit have any result on our situation?” he asked me. “Cathy” he said “You are like our sister. Our door is always open to you. But what good does it do to tell our story to people from the states? I feel, I feel”…he struggled for the words in English…. “Like we are….in the circus [on show].” He explained that just a half hour before I telephoned he was speaking with his wife about returning to Baghdad to find work. “Our money has run out” he said “and I cannot beg. I just cannot beg.”
Kathy Kelly had gone earlier in the evening to the airport to meet this friend, the Jesuit. As it happened, they missed one another. Returning to the city bus, she sat next to an Iraqi businessman who had just come from Baghdad. He related to her that his wife and children had gone to Syria but returned to Baghdad because life there was too expensive. He told her how in Baghdad there are at least five different groups ready to kill you if you step out of your house. “Everything shuts down at 2pm.”
You might have read the article I shared recently about the famous pet market (Al Ghazi) in Baghdad; how people flock to the market on Fridays to purchase a bird or pet to keep them company as they are home-bound and lonely. Just four days after sending out the letter, a bomb hidden in a box of pigeons exploded in the same market killing 15 people. A local store owner about 150 yards from the blast sight said “Today the view of many young men coming with pets, colorful fish in aquariums and dogs was very encouraging and cheerful. There were teenagers selling sandwiches and tea in wheeled carts giving the impression that life is back to normal again.” The shopkeeper described the scene as one “of chaos with birds flying through smoke as the bodies of young men who had been killed and wounded lay on the ground.” (ASP, Bushra Juhi, Feb. 23,07) How unspeakably sad it was to see those same images here on TV.
In about a week I will be returning to the states. “It’s always too soon to go home.” These words are in a little book called “Hope in the Dark” by Rebecca Solnit that Kathy Kelly passed on to me the other day. Today I hope to visit the family I had wanted to take our Jesuit friend to. I will go alone. I will take the last of the money given to me by so many friends in the states. It will perhaps pay the family’s rent, but I know they will feel the humiliation of receiving “charity.” There are so many families and groups in the states who would be eager to assist Iraqis on an ongoing basis so they would not have to return to Baghdad. But how to connect them? I try to tell myself that we do what we can. But somehow our efforts seem so insignificant in light of the needs.
Rebecca Solnit writes that tragedy is seductive. She speaks of the nature of adversarial activism where “the only story many radicals know how to tell is the one that is the underside of the dominant culture’s story…They [the radicals] conceive of the truth as pure bad news, appoint themselves deliverers of it, and keep telling it over and over.” This can lead, she points out, to obsession with the enemy. How well I know this. But she also writes that “doors demand passage,” and that “hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible.”
If you don’t hear from me again before my return to the states, I want to thank you for reading my letters, the stories I have told over and over. I want to thank you for making this trip possible. I have passed through many doors this time around; you have all gone through them with me. I am very grateful.
Cathy Breen
