by Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

We planned to spend the evening and night with a renowned writer, Halla,* and her family and friends. Three CPT women would sleep with her on the roof of her Baghdad home and see her off early the next morning to her birth country, Syria, where she would reunite with her sister, daughter and their families.

It would be Halla’s first time to see her three grandchildren. Because she had married an Iraqi of Palestinian origin, she had not been able to travel outside Iraq for over twenty years. Her son, who had been imprisoned for eleven months in Iraq under US forces, had been released, and she was finally recovering from the cloud of grief and worry this caused her. Her family and friends were here to share in her joy and hope for new possibilities in her life.

This occasion gave us the opportunity to also talk to Samia,* Halla’s close friend. She proceeded to tell us her own family story. Her father had been a well-loved, top official in the transportation and construction ministries under Saddam’s regime. The family never found out why in 1983 Saddam’s government arrested and imprisoned him and confiscated the family home. They visited their father at Abu Ghraib prison weekly, supplying him with his food and other necessities. Samia never got to continue her education at the university because she had to help her mother support the family by preparing and selling foods in a shop and doing fancy beadwork and sewing. When her father was finally released three years later, he was “very tired” and not able to support his family.

When Samia married, she still continued her sewing and beadwork, working late every night after the children went to bed, in order to provide a better standard of living for her family. “I am tired,” she said, and we could see the accumulation of pain in her eyes. Since the invasion of Iraq, she helped her sister’s family when the US military imprisoned her brother-in-law. It took the family several months to simply find where he was and to arrange to visit him.

“When the Americans came, they said they would close Abu Ghraib prison,” Samia told us. “I never thought I would say this, but now it’s worse here for prisoners and their families and for life in general than under Saddam,” “Every family has at least one member who has been killed, injured, or imprisoned in this war. We are tired.”

For the past two years both women have been working with a local women’s organization which brings women from all backgrounds together to oppose the occupation. Things have not been improving in their society. It is hard to bring about change. They are determined, however, to keep working together to maintain a space of hope, even if it simply keeps them from being broken by the tiredness that more and more Iraqis feel.

* Not their real names

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Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical violence-reduction program with roots in the historic peace churches. Teams of trained peace workers live in areas of lethal conflict around the world. CPT has been present in Iraq since October, 2002. To learn more about CPT, please visit www.cpt.org. Photos of CPT projects may be viewed at www.cpt.org/gallery