Donna Mulhearn has spent the last week in the Palestinian West Bank “sleepy farming town” of Saida under curfew and military occupation with its people. The following are her last three letters and photos describing the effects of this military occupation of a small village.

27 January - 1 February 2005

House arrest in Palestine

By Donna Mulhearn
27 January

Dear friends,

I am writing this by candlelight in a family living room in the Palestinian West Bank town of Saida where I am currently under military-enforced house arrest, along with 3,500 others. The living room of my adopted home is packed full of people. Grandma with the white scarf and wise face and several of her 13 children: four cheerful sisters with their various tribes of children, three younger brothers and several cousins.

They have no choice but to stay inside. If they open their front door they will be confronted by the machine gun of one of the hundreds of heavily armed Israeli soldiers who invaded and occupied this sleepy farming town three days ago.

By Maxine Nash
29 January 2005

Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) recently conducted a five-day training for Muslim peacemakers at the request of a human rights organization in Kerbala. The training was held in Kerbala at the office of the human rights organization from January 22-26, 2005. Four CPTers, Peggy Gish, Cliff Kindy, Maxine Nash, and Allan Slater conducted the highly participatory training.

Each day of the training had a different focus. These included: stories of non-violent peacemaking, the power of non-violence, the spirituality of non-violence, planning for public actions, and on the last day various smaller topics were covered including trauma and self-care, working with media and human rights documentation.

By Peggy Gish
30 January 2005

Ninety-year-old Keleje smiled widely as she walked out of the voting station in a school on the edge of Kerbala, where she voted for the first time in her life. Over the doorway of the school a sign in Arabic read, “Today is the real Iraq wedding.”

Ahmed Mohammed Hussein, an elderly man near a polling station in central Kerbalay other Iraqis in Kerbala, echoed this hopeful spirit as he said, “We voted in a democratic atmosphere. We are happy and hope this will give us a better life.”

By Cliff Kindy
27 January 2005

The thirteen people in the circle were activists, committed to human rights. On this day Peggy Gish invited the circle to examine the topic of trauma as part of the five-day training that CPT Iraq brought to the group in Kerbala.

The nine Iraqis hemmed and hawed after Nadia, the facilitator for the day, held up a red paper heart and asked them to tell a story of trauma and then tear out a piece of the heart to indicate symbolically how each was wounded by the trauma. “The heart isn’t big enough to show all the pain we each have experienced.” “Every Iraqi could tell stories without end.” Finally two of the CPTers told an example of trauma in their lives.

The floodgate opened.

David Smith-Ferri, of Voices in the Wilderness, discusses the US administration’s plea for Americans’ patience over the increasingly bloody and intensified war and occupation of Iraq, while their own lack of compassion rings through in their decisions to not attend over 1400 hundred American soildier’s funerals, and the administrations “pattern of failures”. He has also shared his powerful poem Comes a Cleansing War.

By David Smith-Ferri

The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And — but it is the long-term objective that is vital…
George Bush, 1/26/05, referring to the deaths of 36 US soldiers in Iraq.

On June 19th, 1999, author Stephen King was walking on Route 5 near his home in western Maine. A man in a van on the same road that fateful morning chose to turn around while driving, to feed his dog, sitting in the back seat. Not surprisingly, with his eyes on and off the road, he was unable to control the van, which swerved in and out of his lane for nearly a half mile. Coming around the bend where King was walking, the vehicle veered onto the shoulder and struck King, hurling his body over the van and leaving him in a crumpled heap in a ditch on the side of the road, narrowly missing a rocky ledge. King was badly hurt and fortunate to survive. The van driver brought his vehicle over to King, got out, and sat down next to him with his cane across his legs, as though the encounter had been planned, and he was waiting for King to wake from a nap. He simply sat there, in actuality waiting for the police to arrive. At one point, in what was characteristic of both his laconic manner and his conviction that this was merely an accident, an inconvenience, he offered words to this effect: “You and I are having a bad day, aren’t we?” (Interview with Stephen King, NPR, 11/21/03)

On Wednesday last week, “the American people” also had a bad day.