Is it Safe?

“Did you feel safe?”

This is the first question I get asked as I finally touch down on US soil, after a grueling 21 hours of travel getting from my bed in Iraq to one in Washington D.C. I say grueling, but this same distance would have been traveled by my grandmother over land and sea in about 6 months. She would no doubt have gotten sea sick several times along the way, and paid dearly for food the Jordanian Airlines stewardess slipped under my comatose head. (Her trip from Kansas to Walla Walla in a covered wagon was tough enough for her, so I doubt she had aspirations of a trip to Iraq. But still, you get the point).

In the airport, I picked up the Washington Post (yes, they still print the thing, its not just on-line, Dan!), and find out that 14 people recently died in a car bomb attack in one of the small Iraqi cities in which we work. Another car bomb killed 30 people weeks before in Baghdad. But this is not my experience there.

My experience is going to a local park in Iraq where a large group of high school students we work with are highlighting International Peace Day. Thousands are in this park, strolling with their babies, and laughing at the riddles posed by the students who hand out candy prizes for the right answers, and tell us about the world-wide movement to promote peace.

My experience is walking around the corner after dark in search of a little dinner, and finding an elderly Iraqi fruit vendor. His shop is no larger than my bedroom, with fruit boxes cascading outside on the street. My colleague and I buy enough for dinner, and because I speak no Arabic and he speaks no English, we hand-signal the fruit we want. After we weigh out what we want, he slowly keeps adding pieces of fruit, a pomegranate here, a bag of dates here into the plastic sack, then hands it to me. When I give him $7, he quietly but insistently refuses. It’s his gift to me. Natalie tells me it is his way of welcoming me to his country.

And I would bet serious money that there are more guns in the households surrounding my hotel here in Washington DC than in any neighborhood in Iraq I walked through. Feeling safe, and being safe. Who knows where the truth lies.

The second question I was asked as I rode in the Super Shuttle to my hotel here was, “Did you feel hopeful by what you saw in the Middle East?”

I met with students in Iraq and Gaza working to promote female rights, Lebanese students in Hezbollah neighborhoods cleaning up parks and soon will be working on creating more open meetings of governing bodies. I met students working on access to clean water issues. At the same time, I met with students taken in by the police for questioning because they were planting trees and taking photos to share on-line, but it was a group of both male and female students and the fundamentalists don’t like that too much.

Yesterday, I had the honor to meet with Landrum Bolling, author of “Search for Peace in the Middle East”, a war correspondent for many years, and long-time Mercy Corps advisor. He sadly told me that for the first time he feels pessimistic about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Yet in the next breath, said this work with young people, connecting them in cooperative actions across borders is absolutely necessary and is what can help make a difference.

The young people I met with throughout the Middle East face such tough odds. Some are imprisoned by a wall surrounding their land from which they cannot get out, living in cities where car bombs can explode without warning, or living under governments where a meeting open to the public is as rare as a banjo. Thomas Friedman once said "Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.” He must have run into some of these folks.

Growing up in my neighborhood, what my dad called "Poverty Flats", I loved to daydream about “what heaven is like’. My mom said heaven was exactly what you wanted it to be. So I developed a very clear picture of it; me sitting on top of an endless series of sunlight-tipped, brilliant white clouds, with nothing else. Except a big refrigerator sitting in the clouds, all by itself, filled with watermelon and ice cream and the other building blocks of a well-rounded diet.

Flying into Lebanon Sunday felt like I had finally found that place We flew just over the tops of these brilliant clouds, then broke below them to find a deep blue sea, with the light chocolate hills of Jordan cascading down to meet the Mediterranean. We landed right next to the water, ensuring that all new arrivals got million dollar views of the waterfront.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as we drove through Beirut, a city of 2 million people. I remember when we were remodeling our kitchen years ago, and describing the scene in my Christmas letter as “feeling like we are living in the war-torn streets of Beirut”. Well, you can forget that image now. What I have experienced so far is a modern, robust city, filled with small shops, a top-notch university, and friendly people. While in Israel, I felt a continual tenseness in the air, and sharp divisions among the various religious and cultural sects, here it feels more at-ease and fluid.

Yesterday I participated in a fascinating meeting of people interested in what is referred to a “civil society”. This is short-hand for folks who work to create more open, democratic, responsive public systems of governing.

It was a meeting of around 30 people, roughly divided between men and women, with ages ranging from early twenties to early 60’s. Five men sat at the head table and made a presentation on key reforms the group wanted to make: lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, ensuring that there was a “woman’s quota’ of at least 30% elected to office, giving the vote to those detained (in jail), promoting open meetings, changing terms from 6 years to 4 years, and most importantly, instituting Parliamentary Representation. (PR for short). Most seemed to favor the PR, French –style of representation, seemed to fit their culture better, with the multiple sects that all feel they need a voice so as to not be run over by others. This is a very real consideration, given the quite recent and very bloody civil war, in the late 70’s, early 80’s, and factional fighting in the past decade.

Lebanon currently is in its infancy of democracy, very fragile. It is described as a country that is half Christian, half-Muslim, but each of these halves are divided into many more sharp divisions of Sunni, Shiite, Palestinians, Armenians, and then further divided by families that lead sects within those. Most municipal meetings are not open to the public, but if you are lucky, they will post the results of the deliberations on the door when they finish.

So while things feel pretty good on the surface, underneath, we got problems…

As they talked, I marveled out how familiar this felt. This is how I imagined it was with John Adams, Ben Franklin, John Hancock and them sitting around for months trying to hammer out the US constitution. At least that is how Mrs. Elias explained it to us in 8th grade. But while I imagined America’s Founding Fathers as a very analytical, well-reasoned deliberation, the conversation I was in felt really ‘seat of the pants”. Everyone saying “we are late, this should have all been done yesterday. Let’s just draft something, anything, we can change it later, and get it in front of Parliament next week so we don’t lose momentum”.

Maybe that is how John and Ben felt too.

First day in Gaza

My morning begins when, in the space of 100 yards, I go through no less than eight reinforced steel security gates and have my passport closely scrutinized at two separate guard posts. I lose count of the number of security cameras watching me before I am able to cross into Gaza.

One and a half million people live inside this 30 foot high, miles long, concrete wall. Few are allowed to leave. They are all Palestinians, guarded by Israelis, and today, we are driven to a small youth center, where I am meeting with Palestinian students preparing their own photo-exhibit, entitled "Recognizing our Common Humanity". (photo of young girls pictured above is from the exhibit)

I meet with 30 of the more than 1000 students who come here each week. All part of Mercy Corps' Global Citizen Corps program we operate in 6 countries. They tell me about the local action projects they are leading; going to a local orphanage to play with the kids there, going last week to 9 homes of families who have been found by the students to be living in dire poverty and so they have brought food and comfort, going to a field and planting seedlings for new trees, since so many were killed in the war last January. I do a presentation to about 20 of the students on how to use on-line communities like Facebook, Twitter, Diggs and others to mobilize others for the causes they care about. They show me a crazy on-line game they use with friends called Barn Buddy and get me to join. Its Ramadan, so they are all fasting each day from 4am to 4pm for 12 days. We are sitting around a table talking, I am drinking from a very large bottle of water trying to hydrate in this desert heat when I remember. "Uh, sorry, I forgot it is no food AND no water". They laugh. Say its fine, no matter.

In the afternoon, I sat in on one of several classes being held that day in their youth center, and found the teacher presenting Steven Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people, for the leadership class. 25 students were piled into a 10 x 10 room, hotter than the blazes, sharing seats because it was so crowded. Everyone seemed very attentive and engaged, while I sat there wiping beads of sweat off my forehead.

I leave at the end of the day, shaking my head in wonder. Here is a group of students, majoring in things like Business Administration, Pharmacy, and Engineering, living in a community with 60% unemployment, and not able to leave. Held there by another country. And rather than raging in frustration, they are instead volunteering to sit in a crowded classroom, learning about becoming a good citizen, a good leader, carrying out community service projects and putting on a photo exhibit about "our common humanity?". I wonder how I would do in the same circumstances.

I leave after spending 6 hours with them, get driven to within a quarter mile of the wall, show my passport to two different sets of Hamas agents, then go through the gauntlet of 8 gates, multiple guards (they double checked my banjo and chapstick I was packing to be sure everything was on the up and up), get in the car, and soon fall asleep in mental exhaustion. Andy, the Country Director for Mercy Corps, drives us back to Jerusalem.