heading home

Dear Friends,

A few summary comments as I get ready to take the 9 hour flight over the pole straight from Amsterdam to Seattle, non-stop. Surprisingly, Iraq turns out to be the easiest, quickest country to get your passport approved of, one minute in and out, and Amsterdam, heart of liberalism and carefree-ness, the most difficult (next to the Israeli crossings)..almost didn't let me through...something about not liking the Iraq, Israeli travel itinerary and all....imagine if I hadn't been of the White American persuasion...

(By the way, all the comments made on this blog are my personal reactions, opinions and commentary, and mine alone. They do not represent the position of MercyCorps or any other organization).

Gaza: Worse than expected. Gaza felt like the near-perfect breeding ground for cultivating and growing hatred. Not a good strategy for peace. Israel seems to me to be in a position where it has enormous power, doesn't have to do anything, but to create some kind of positive change will need to make a magnanimous move. But they may not do it unless Palestinians go into a big non-violent civil disobedience campaign to force the moral issue, like Gandhi did with Britain. Things felt to me to have gotten worse here instead of better, since I was in this part of world 30 years ago. If only because of what Israel has created here with its settlements in the West Bank, erected walls and guard crossings nearly everywhere that have been created out of fears (very real), and an abundance of power. It has been said that power tends to corrupt. I hope Martin Luther King was right when he said “the arc of truth bends toward justice”….it better start bending here, and soon. What happens here continues to deeply affect the political situations in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere. Yes it's complex here with the myriad of cultures and deep histories of mutual hurt, but I know we can do better than this.

Iraq: Way better than I expected. More patriotic toward US than I expected, even if it is Northern, Kurdish Iraq). Felt much safer than expected (although the breath of paranoia rustles the hairs on the back of your neck at times due to the possible unknowns). Taking photos is tough when you have one eye on the item of focus and one out for some underground security personnel who might not approve. Young people I met in both places (over a hundred I talked with) seemed generally optimistic, had a good dose of hope, and good and unique senses of humor. Mohammed and I, (he is local teacher, Arabic, that I got to know) we were joking around and grandly fantasizing one day in the car, planning how we could fix things right up in the world.

“You organize the Arabs, Mohammed, I will organize the Christians, but we need someone to organize the Hindu’s”…
To which Mohammed replies, “Go find a Cowboy”.
“What?”, I say.
“A Cowboy. You know how the Hindu's revere cows”…..

Jordan. Feels quite rich, relatively speaking. And is westernizing at breakneck speed. McDonalds, Burger Kings, KFC’s, western clothes, jewelery everywhere. Hard to find indigenous stuff. (Also hard to find it in Iraq too, and they have few of the chain stores anywhere.

Food. Great food in Iraq and Jordan! Lots of vegetables, superb spices. Could eat the same stuff for weeks in a row… Come to think of it, I did.

OK, internet access here in airport is going kaput now….got to throw in another 6 g’s if I want to keep it up, and my wallet is drained as usual. By the by, there are no ATM’s in Iraq, so bring cash when you come! Even in small African and Guatemalan towns you could find an ATM. I nearly had to beg on the street, and I didn't even bring my backpack banjo this time to draw a sympathetic crowd!

OK, see you all soon!

Last night in Iraq

Last night I had a live video conference with my daughters, Erica and Jenny. Iraq to Seattle, my bedroom to theirs, easier than a phone call, and it’s free. This is the new world of today. Electricity goes off from time to time each day here, there are worries of terrorist attacks in the markets and there are virtually no Americans in the two small towns we visit. One hundred percent Kurds. American, or any other non-Arab/Kurdish face is hard to find anywhere around here. (Military personnel are farther south). But every Kurdish /Iraqi teen worth his salt has a cell phone, peppering each meeting I attend with cell phones going off, and texting going on non-stop. And if you have a computer and internet (common) and a $50 webcam, you’ve got some potentially serious global legs.

The most disconcerting part of being here is the tight security leash we must be on.
‘When you leave here at the MercyCorps offices you must text message the Director to let him know you are leaving”, I tell my daughters on our call. “And then you have to text message him again when you arrive at your destination just a few minutes away to let him know you have arrived safely”.

“Wow, it sounds just like when we lived at home in high school”, Erica exclaims.

Despite the heavy security that can be a real downer, I leave tomorrow with an enormous dose of optimism. The young people I have met in Gaza and Iraq, two of the most war-torn areas of the world in recent years, are filled not with hopelessness and grinding despair, but with hope and enormous energy. They are painting and repairing schools neglected by their governments, doing teach-in’s on democracy, and educating children and teachers about how to dispose of unexploded bombs that still lay about the community. They want to really connect with Americans, and see it as a beacon of hope, of freedom and potential allies to discuss problems they face that are similar. Sometimes it is an unrealistic picture (no poverty, no garbage, no political corruption in America), and sometimes they think “why should Americans even care about them?” I will give you one reason, we could all learn a thing or two from them about hope.

“When we open our eyes, we first smell catastrophe”, Nazim, a local teacher tells me at the end of our training session today. He is twenty five years old and has lived through three wars/invasions. “Our last escape involved my family piling into one car with five other families and racing to the border. I still don’t understand how we all fit.” Yet, despite this, Nazim is daily teaching students the critical importance of talking directly with people from other cultures so they are exposed to new ideas and to take positive, effective local action. “It’s the only way we are going to make this world better for all of us”. And now, for the first time in his history, his students are doing just that.

The internet is a great thing. It can connect families like mine when some member is half-way around the world in a war-zone, to ease any fears and joke about being held hostage as a teen in high school. And it can connect Kurds with Americans with Palestinians with Jews to get to know one another as human beings. That alone won’t solve the nasty problems we now face. But it’s a heck of a start.

Today four of us hop in an SUV driven by a MercyCorps driver, and take a 2 hour drive to Kalar, a small town near the disputed border between the Kurdish territory in Iraq, and the rest of Iraq, run by the Shiite-led government. As we move out of the town of Sulaymaniyah,, my main base camp, the mountains surrounding us grow, until we begin to pass through a valley that has the look and feel of parts of Central Washington, with small jagged cliffs. It’s the start of the New Year here, 2071, and the valley is dotted with families who have pulled their cars off to the side of the road, quite randomly it seems to me, and are dancing, building fires and sitting on the ground chatting away. There are few national or local parks anywhere to be found, so people seem to just go into the countryside and hang. We drive through a series of checkpoints run by the Kurdish police. They all know our driver who lives in this valley, and wave him through at each point, while other cars are stopped, despite having two gringos in the car, who stick out like sore thumbs in an area that is virtually 100% Kurdish.

“This is the last place on earth where you can find people who just love George Bush”, I am told by the Director of a local humanitarian organization stationed in Kalar, the town we settle in tonight. The sentiment echoes what I have been hearing from others in northern Iraq, Kurdish-country, the past few days.

“I was utterly hopeless before. Now I have hope”, Mohammed states, a bright, engaging man who lives here and shares a dinner with me.

“Yes, its true Bush invaded Iraq, and may have done so for oil or other reasons that were not right, but now we can live a life, and before we could not.” Bush as a beacon of hope. It is a hard pill for me to swallow, yet here it is, clear and true.

The younger Iraqi students we meet with today, 13-15 year olds, uniformly say how much they value freedom, and a good life. “Here people throw garbage in the street, children are not in school and need to get back in. In America, this does not happen, and people can do what they want”. We suggest they discuss this with their American counterparts when they go on-line this week. “You may be surprised by what you learn,” I say. They stare back with a look of skepticism in their eyes...

First Impressions

"Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists. " — Thomas L. Friedman ...

"So, what are your first impressions of Gaza?", Reem asked me excitedly as I settled in to my chair with a room full of her 14 fellow Palestinian students at the MercyCorps Youth Center in Gaza.

Just four hours earlier, we had left beautiful Jerusalem for a 45 minute drive to one of just three entrances to the Gaza strip. A 30 foot wall surrounded this 26 square miles of land pressed up against the sea. 1.4 million Palestinians reside within, a virtual prison camp in which no Palestinians are allowed to leave, but visitors with the proper credentials can sometimes be allowed in by the Israelis.

I assumed I fit that category of the properly credentialed.

Along with 4 other MercyCorps staff, we were allowed in after a 2 hour wait , despite having been approved for entry days before by submitting our passports to the Israeli authorities. After showing our passports twice, walking past multiple machine-gun toting young men in khakis, entering through at least 6 locked gates, and down a deserted 800 yard tunnel, we entered into Gaza. As we walked further still to catch a taxi that awaited us about a quarter mile away, you could look in any direction and see bombed out buildings. We later toured Gaza and saw more devastation on every block, with dozens of makeshift tents set up by the UN to house the now-homeless. We later stopped at the site of recently bombed "American International University", a prestigious university that previously had attracted 230 local Palestinians, attracted to its more liberal university education. As one of the board members, Sharhabeel Al Za'aem, explained to us as he stood in front of the devastated university, it is hard to comprehend why it was targeted. It had been hit twice before by Israel, by accident, so they knew where it was located. He had met just weeks before with Senator Kerry and Congressman Baird from Washington State to talk about the destruction of Gaza, and told them, as he told us, "all we want is a chance. Just treat us as half a citizen with just half the rights others are afforded so we can at least show we can contribute".

As we drove up to the MercyCorps office in Gaza, the sky opened up and we all were afforded a panoramic view of the sparkling Mediterranean Sea just a few hundred yards away. I love the ocean and wanted to go dip my toes in it after a very hot, dusty ride. "Yes, it is beautiful, but it's very cold right now and you wouldn't want to go swimming in it, you could be shot. It's heavily patrolled to blockade any entrance to Gaza by the sea". I looked up and saw the drone flying over all our heads, a Goodyear-like looking silent machine, with the watchful eye flying several thousand feet above Gaza, filming everything as it moved slowly across the sky.

We then walked inside the office, where we sat down in a roomful of excited high school and university students, so happy to see us, welcome us to their community, feed us great falafal and hummus and wanting to know more about Ryan and Catherine and Raisa and everyone else they were talking with on-line and wondering what these US students REALLY thought about them...

"So, Greg, what are your first impressions of Gaza?", she said........

Getting ready to leave...