By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Friday, March 11, 2005

We sat over coffee in a little courtyard, an Iraqi friend and I. I will call him Emad.

He asked me “What’s the best thing to do when a raging bull is coming towards your house?” Smiling, I answered “Get out of the way!” He paused to recapture the seriousness of the moment, then said “You open the door and let the bull run through. If you keep the door closed, everything will be destroyed.”

He continued “When the army [U.S. troops] came to Iraq, it was in my mind ‘How to rule the country peacefully.’ I was so afraid they wouldn’t do what I was thinking about. They [the U.S.] took the wrong way to administrate Iraq.

It is not a matter of how to form the government. When you have empty stomachs, each government has to think how to fill the empty stomachs.

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams

March 7, 2005

Our new 23-year-old, Metallica-T-Shirt-wearing translator is fun to be around. I tease him by saying that he is more American than me, since he knows so much of the pop culture. But he possesses a seriousness beneath the pop-culture exterior: a year ago, he spent 11 months in Bucca prison camp in southern Iraq. After all that time he still does not know what his charges were.

He told me about his experience: “Sometimes, we became friends with the soldiers. They were more like friends than guards. They would tell us, ‘You know, it’s like we’re in prison too.’ They didn’t want to be there. They would come into our tent and play cards.