Ceylon Mooney with the Wheels of Justice Van just after a new message was painted on the side.

Ceylon Mooney, co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness and the Wheels of Justice Tour, traveled recently in the Middle East with three friends; Joel G, Jacob Flowers, and Kyle Kordsmeier.

Having recently returned to the U.S. with firsthand stories from occupied Palestine they are all eager to talk and relate what the occupation means. Compiled below are all 4 journals in one place for easier printing and reading.

By Dahr Jamail

The thundering blast rocks me awake at 7:05am. The first thing my eyes see are the curtains of my room flowing in, as if a strong wind is blowing into my room.

‘Holy shit, they hit the embassy,’ I think to myself, ‘the blast was so close.’

I leave my windows cracked and curtains drawn for just this reason-while my door was blasted open, splintering the frame where it was locked shut, none of my windows shattered. Aside from small chunks from the ceiling of my room strewn about the floor, I am alright.

By Peggy Gish

“I saw my friend get ready to take some cocaine,” Nassim told Maxine and me as we sat in the CPT apartment in Central Baghdad. “So I asked him, ‘Why do you do that?’ He told me, ‘To forget.’ ‘To forget what?’ I asked. “He told me that he loved a woman, who now found another man. ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘You are young. You have your life ahead of you. You have a good home and family. You have everything you need!”

Nassim continued: “Then I began to tell him my story. I told him about my first girl that I loved, who died from an illness, about being tortured in prison, having my ear cut and called a traitor because, in the army, I refused to kill my fellow Kurdish Iraqis. I told him about losing my father and then my stepmother selling our home and disappearing, about having no family, no home. Twice last summer I was almost killed. Now I am sad and confused because a woman I loved, just left for Amman. I smoke cigarettes, but I don’t take drugs or drink alcohol.”

By Omar Khan

Thursday, January 13, 2005: a photo colors the upper left corner of the front page of the New York Times. The photo’s apparent subject is a second image embedded within it. This second image is also a photograph. It is of a man’s hand, which appears from the right edge, holding a miniature red, white, and black striped likeness of the Iraqi flag. The Arabic writing above the hand (”In order to give our children a better country”) provides context: the blue backdrop of what now appears to be poster is the curtain of a voting booth, inside of which the hand drops a ballot into a ballot box. A vote is cast.