By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Last night a dear Iraqi friend and I were visiting and just enjoying one another’s company. She was teaching me a new card game. The three children were off watching cartoons. She and her children go back and forth from Baghdad to Amman, risking the dangerous highway that connects these two cities. They are searching for a safe place to live. We know each other from pre and post-invasion times. I was a frequent guest in her home in Baghdad, always welcomed. Since she was little, my friend tells me, she has always wanted to visit the United States.

The children have lost a year of school. In a rare moment alone with my friend’s 12 year old daughter the other day—she was helping me with my Arabic study—I asked her “What do you dream?” I remembered back to when she was 10 years old; at that time she wanted to be a ballerina. Now two years later, unprompted she answers “I wish the soldiers would go home. I want Baghdad to be like New York….When American soldiers see people out at night, they kill them.” She told me that her 13 year old cousin, a girl, saw a woman shot in the head. “The insides of her head [she was struggling to find the words], was on the street! When an American soldier saw the dead people, he was drinking Pepsi, it was like he was happy.” I miss my school, she said.

Last night before I visited with the family, I walked up one of the many hills in Amman to an internet center. There was a message from the young friend I recently wrote about, telling me he had returned safely to Baghdad after our visit in Amman. He related how he arrived home to find his mother crying. “They [his family] told me she hadn’t stopped crying since the night before. They heard someone shouting outside their home. My brothers went to help him. The man was blindfolded and had been beaten. He was on his way to Jordan as he is working in a restaurant in Amman. Somebody had kidnapped him, stolen his money and dropped him in front of my home. It was a gang. He spent the night and went home the next day.

My mother thought of me, and compared him to me. We are the same age, and both of us going to Jordan. So I will be in trouble she thought.

Baghdad is worse than before [less than a week ago], especially in my area where a lot of violence happened after I left for Jordan…. Life is hard here in Baghdad.”

During my stay in Amman, I have had frequent opportunity to visit an area of the city where there are many Iraqis. In a tiny dingy little restaurant, I have been able to meet several young Iraqi men who work there serving rice and beans, kabab or Iraqi tea. That is the extent of the menu. The welcoming atmosphere overrides the dismal surroundings of the place. Unable to work legally in Jordan, they are constantly on the alert for police wagons. I have been in the restaurant when, in a moment’s time, the place has emptied out. Any of the young men there could easily have been the one that my friend in Baghdad described—blindfolded, robbed and beaten.

I long to hear their stories and their dreams, so that I can pass them on to you. I long to put a picture of their young faces with their words, to make them real to my own people. But even this I cannot do. To take their photograph, to write their names, would put them at too great a risk.

I also long to tell them that there are people in the U.S. who oppose the war, the continued violence and carnage. I will continue to do this on behalf of all of you.

As I write this to you, I am aware that many people in my country will take to the streets this week as we remember the invasion of Iraq 2 years ago. Know that I am very present with you, just as you are very present here with me.

Cathy Breen, with Voices in the Wilderness, is currently in Amman, Jordan. Cathy has been talking to many Iraqi friends that have made there way to Amman, Jordon. She has also had conversations with Iraqi refugees in Jordon and in Syria.