The stories we tell

I find myself repeating a single line when people ask me about Iraq, particularly about the security situation: “the Kurdish region is very safe.”  And this is true: living and working in Ankawa and occasionally visiting partners in other cities within the Kurdish region, we are not in danger.  

In this case, our safety is represented in the form of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Please note that Nathan is reaching for one from the rack with his right hand when he already has one in his left hand.

By emphasizing our personal safety, though, I discard an opportunity to share the impact of this violence on the many people who are not safe from its danger.

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You may remember Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian author who gave a TED talk on the danger of a single story in 2009.  Adichie critiques the human tendency to quickly summarize another’s experience through a single story, stereotype, or perspective.  MCC uses Adichie’s lecture in its orientation for new staff as an example of what it tries to do in every place it works: look for and tell the myriad alternative stories that complicate and deepen our (North American) single-story understandings of places, peoples, and problems.

This spring, I heard a speech by EMU student Seth Stauffer in which he turned Adichie’s critique back upon MCC: sometimes MCC combats the danger of a single story with its own alternate single story.  We downplay the violence in locations known for little else in favor of highlighting the complex and beautiful life that is being lived in the midst of—and in spite of—that violence.  Both sides are true; one emphasizes the darkness, the other emphasizes the light breaking through.  But neither is the full story, and both miss the spectrum of stories in between.

Remembering this, I felt convicted.  Two months into an MCC term, and I’m already slipping into dualisms of light-and-dark instead of hanging out in the gray area, which I invariably claim to prefer.  Here is my first attempt at combating my own single story of Iraq.

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You already know the plot of the dominant single story: daily airstrikes that kill forces of the Islamic State as well as Iraqi civilians; terrorism and attacks that kill Iraqi soldiers and more civilians; the escalating conflict in both Iraq and Syria as more players jump in.  Another part of this story chronicles the millions of refugees and internally-displaced people (IDPs) across Iraq and Syria.  It’s a familiar and heart-wrenching tune.

At camps where IDPs are living, a generally-accepted tent size for a family of 6 is about 10 feet by 10 feet, although in reality an area of that same size---tent or no tent, as shown here---often houses twice that many people.  Look at the room you're in right now and do some quick measurements for comparison (Photo credit: Salar Ahmed).
Now remember that in Iraq the summers have an average high of 110-115 F and an overnight low of 85-90 F, and these people lived outside, without electricity, through the worst of it.  Some people fled Ninevah eight weeks ago, and some people fled Mosul almost four months ago.  Others fled Anbar in February, and others fled Syria two or more years ago.

There are over 1.8 million people living like this all across Iraq.  That’s more than the entire population of Philadelphia, and it’s just as diverse: doctors, street sweepers, grandparents, lawyers, pregnant women, electricians, high-schoolers, architects, people with cancer.  Whole towns and cities left their homes and livelihoods behind overnight and have been living in miserable suspension ever since.

Last Wednesday, Nathan and I were approached by three Syrian beggars asking for money—all Muslim women with small children—over the course of 15 minutes.  Hands to our hearts, we said “no, my dear, I am sorry” in Arabic and turned away.  These three, in quick succession, overwhelmed me with the parallel to Peter’s denials before the rooster’s crow.  What can we do differently?  Always give a set amount when asked and then try to disengage?  Avoid the part of town where beggars congregate?  Learn their names and some of their story before going on our way?  The options expose us to varying levels of others' pain, but none of them fix anything.  When we've given change to beggars in the past, they (rightly) insist on more; they need hospital visits, rent, jobs; not five dollars. 

War is awful.  We avert our eyes because it is grotesque and too painful to comprehend, let alone explain.  The numbers are numbing, and the pictures have saturated our capacity to empathize.  What can we do differently?  As I write it I know this rings hollow, but I can’t get away from it: we have to expose ourselves to the pain.  We have to keep showing—to ourselves and to others—the myriad grays instead of combating the story of darkness with one of all light.  

Reckless hate

Over the last two months of ISIS-perpetrated massacres, displacements, and beheadings, a two-line scene from The Two Towers movie has played itself out in my head over and over again.  As hordes of orcs besieging the terrified forces of a battered human community threaten to break into their last mountain stronghold, Aragorn, the up-and-coming Messiah-figure, stands in the middle of the stronghold talking to Theoden, the aged king of Rohan.  When all seems lost, Theoden asks with tired desperation, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”  

I think this confused horror captures the mood of many reading the news about ISIS—not only in Iraqi Kurdistan but also in the West–especially when things seemed to be at their worst a month and a half ago. 

After Theoden’s question, Aragorn pauses for a moment, and then looks up with new light and says to the worn-out king, “Ride out! Ride out and meet them!”  Theoden, freshly inspired, summons his guard and careens down the castle ramp in a glorious charge.  And just when it looks like their senseless courage will cost them their lives, the dawn breaks and Gandalf the wizard arrives with an army of reinforcements who sweep the enemy away.  

Back on August 8, when President Obama announced he had begun targeted airstrikes on ISIS forces threatening Erbil, where we live, and Mount Sinjar, where thousands of Yezidis were besieged, I felt like chiming in with Aragorn.  “Ride out and meet them!”  I was scared.  The evil was stark.  The responsibility to protect was clear.  

Looking southwest from our rooftop on August 9th to see if we could see smoke from US bombing.  We couldn't, but directly after this picture was taken I walked into the metal pipe beside me and gashed my shin, so I'll have a nice scar to remember the day by.  (Note: I wasn't posing.)

No politician has channeled this sentiment better than vice-president Joe Biden who said a few weeks ago that the US would pursue ISIS “to the gates of hell.” Even Obama has climbed on board with his promise to “degrade and destroy” ISIS last week.

I’m not a creative enough pacifist to imagine alternatives to the apparent necessity of US airstrikes.  I do know that ISIS militants aren’t orcs.  I know their fundamentalism is more modern than medieval.  I know that a great deal of the blame for the current conflict can be placed squarely on the legacy of US invasion and occupation.  I know that the longer the US (and now French) bombing campaign against ISIS continues, the more likely  it is to be counterproductive, to put it mildly.  And I also know that Christians, Muslims, and Yezidis alike in Erbil and throughout Kurdistan received news of US airstrikes with the same gratitude with which Tolkien’s imagined refugees regarded Gandalf’s reinforcements.    

Special decorations in Ankawa during the Feast of the Cross.

So what can I say?  After what many Iraqi Christians regard, with alarming frankness, as 1400 years of persecution, “turn the other cheek” is a hard command to hear.   Reminding them of it is not something I feel I can do.  After all, as a US citizen living in Erbil, the airstrikes came explicitly, in part, on my behalf.   
 

I remember going to the English-language mass on the evening of August 8, the start of the US bombing campaign, feeling deeply unsettled.  Not just scared and confused, but completely without answers in a world of senseless violence.  The first reading of the service was Elijah’s encounter with God on the mountain.  Elijah, who had been hiding in a cave from those seeking his life, is told to stand outside and wait for God to “pass by.”  A wind, an earthquake, a fire, and then “the sound of sheer silence” all take their turn on the mountain before God speaks to Elijah, telling him to get on with his vocation as a prophet.  I’d never realized before that evening that the text doesn’t say, as we often infer, that God spoke in the silence.  Each event—silence included—just happens without any explanation.  And then the story continues, and Elijah resumes his work.  This feeling of purposelessness matched my mood, and it wasn’t comforting.  God is here.  But as usual, it’s hard to see where.  

Hope, despair, and the neighborhood

Greetings from Amman!  

Kaitlin and I left Erbil last week for an annual area MCC retreat and meetings in Jordan.  We traveled with Jim and Deb, our predecessors, who have not only done an excellent job of introducing us to partners, church contacts, and friends in towns and cities across the Kurdish region, but have also imparted—we hope—the crucial skills and tricks required to keep a house running in Ankawa.  

This includes everything from constant surveillance and low-grade maintenance of the mubaarida (evaporative coolers), to knowing when the fresh produce arrives at the neighborhood fruit stands (mid-morning), to keeping our rooftop water tanks full, to the diplomacy involved in renegotiating a lease with a landlord’s agent and residency and occupancy with the Kurdish Asayish (internal security) during a time of crisis.

While we will always feel very much like foreigners, having these tools (almost) under our belts and cultivating relationships makes us feel in some ways like we have been in Iraq for much longer than a month.

The road to Suleimaniyyah, one of Iraqi Kurdistan's three largest cities, which we visited in mid-August.

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The ongoing crisis of displacement is no doubt part of why we feel as much familiarity as we do.  Work has kept us busy, and perhaps more importantly, we have gotten in touch very quickly with the pain and trauma of the Christian community in which we are living. 

On the way to Mass two weeks ago we were stopped by an older woman who asked us if we could help her get out of the country.  She had lived in Qaraqosh, a large Christian town of about 40,000, and had evacuated to Ankawa just a few hours ahead of ISIS in the wave of displacement on August 6-7.  She was now staying in Mar Elia church, where we were heading for Mass.  When we explained that we didn't have connections with the American consulate and Jim expressed his hope that she would eventually be able to return home, she shook her head.  “They don’t want us. Our neighbors in Qaraqosh.  We taught in their schools, cared for them in our hospitals, and now they don’t want us.”

This rejection, real and perceived, is the worst part of the crisis in northern Iraq.  Their (mostly Sunni Arab) neighbors, as most of the stories go, did not protect Christians and other minorities in the time of crisis, and after the Christians were gone, some of the remaining residents looted the homes of the displaced.  To flee from your home and live as forced guests in cramped quarters is awful.  To do so while every day hearing new stories of former neighbors robbing your home would be unbearable.  This is a wound that will not heal easily, even if the displaced can return home soon.

Indeed, most displaced people we speak with simply want to leave Iraq altogether.  Speaking with a group of men at Mar Yusef church, the largest Chaldean church in Ankawa, one man from a village on the Nineveh plain said, “no one wants to go home.  After this, no one wants to stay here.” One church leader who has worked tirelessly for years to build church institutions and keep Christians in Iraq said, in an understated summary of the anger and pain of the displaced, “The neighbors are not good neighbors.”

Every time this lesson is reinforced—by real events and by the way those events are remembered—more Christians leave.  Already two Ankawa residents we know and had been planning to rely on as important contacts in the community have left or will soon leave as a result of the events of the last month.   The same church leader, above, said a few weeks ago, “This is almost the end of Christianity in Iraq.”

Petros Khammo, an architect employed by the Chaldean Catholic church, observes progress on MCC-supported construction of showers for IDPs in Ankawa.  Petros, who has also designed schools, seminaries, convents, and other buildings across Ankawa said, “I taught architecture in Baghdad for 34 years, but this, I think, is my masterpiece.”

There are, as always, points of light.  The most hopeful moment for me so far was witnessing the ordination of a young priest from Mosul by Bishop Ameel of Mosul in late July.  In this community, such an event is a cause to celebrate at any time, but seeing new leadership affirmed in exile was especially inspiring.  Both men had lost their homes in June.  At the ordination service Bishop Ameel preached: “It does not matter where we are.  The church is not a building.  They can burn our buildings.  The church is not where we are; it is who we are and what we are.”  A church capable of producing someone who speaks words like those at a time like this is a church that has a future.  I hope part of that future is always in Iraq.  

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Most of the time if this blog isn't depressing, it will probably be pretty mundane (mubaarida updates, etc.). The remaining part, God willing, will be hopeful.  In Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, Stanley Hauerwas and Rom Coles state,

“Peacemaking, light-bringing, and joy are always already springing forth everywhere—in spite of the disasters.  We must retrain ourselves to witness them…. Such hope is the resource necessary to help us see what otherwise might go unnoticed—that other worlds are indeed possible.”  

This kind of hope is what (I hope) this blog points to—without turning away from the inexplicable suffering that disaster always brings, whether in Harrisonburg or Ankawa.