By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan

He seems older to me than his 58 years, but then when I met him it was in a damp and dark little room which is home for him. And Mehdi’s spirit that day seemed so sad, as sad as the room was dismal. The room is at the top of a long flight of stone steps, especially treacherous at night. The only furniture in the room was a makeshift cot onto which the three of us (Mehdi, a trusted Iraqi translator, and myself) lowered ourselves cautiously. I too was damp when we later stood up to take our leave. Medhi agreed to have his picture taken that day, but unfortunately the camera batteries did not oblige.

From Kerbala, Medhi has been in Jordan since he fled Iraq in the year 2000. Two of his brothers were assassinated under Saddam Hussein. His nephew was also imprisoned, but managed to escape, and the family sought Medhi’s help. After taking them to the north of Iraq, he then went to Jordan to find refuge.

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
March 18, 2005

Some six months into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, an Iraqi friend said to me in Baghdad as we were sitting at the kitchen table of the Voices apartment “The United States took the cotton out of our mouths that Saddam Hussein had put there. But they put it in their ears.” Now on the eve of the 2nd anniversary of “Shock and Awe,” I wonder if there is still hope that we might remove the cotton.

Two evenings ago, I found myself once again sitting at a table with 2 Iraqi friends and a woman from Lebanon-all working in human rights. Our conversation, which lasted for over 4 hours, would begin with accounts of current atrocities facing Iraqis, and later turn to stories of past horrors under Saddam’s regime. I returned home exhausted, acutely aware that I’ve never really grasped the extent of the suffering people endured under Saddam. Until that evening.

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.

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Tuesday, March 15, 2005

I just read Sheila Provencher’s March 9th account from Baghdad “It Happens to Iraqis All the Time.” In it she relates how an Iraqi friend told her “You are very brave to be with us through all this. I feel that you are family.”

In the early morning hours as I try to become still and gather my thoughts, I too think that this is what it is all about. We are family.

About two weeks ago I had occasion to visit here in Amman with Maxine, who works full-time with CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team) and was just returning from Baghdad after several months there. And later with Michele upon her return from Iraq as part of a CPT delegation that went for a two-week period. They both told me the same thing, that they could no longer look into people’s eyes as they walked through the streets. “We have to keep our eyes down, and do not even have eye contact anymore” said Michele. “So many people have lost trust.” Upon hearing their words, I felt that I had been dealt a severe blow. We dare not allow the bonds of human friendship to break!, I thought. How fragile they have become.

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.