Smoke from a car bomb (Photo: Joe Carr)

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams

The air was heavy today. Cloudy, oppressive, humid in a way that Baghdad almost never is. I feel the heaviness added to the weight of the recent explosions across the country. Yesterday, Wednesday, 71 people dead in car bombs in at least three cities.

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Lately I feel so tired. There’s always a part of me that wants to just sleep; sleep and make all of THIS - the war, my government’s policies and actions, the counter-violence of the insurgency, all the greed and sin in the world - just go away for awhile. I can identify with the apathy of citizens who give in to violence: yes, just make the evil go away, press the button, fire the missile, send the young ones off to war. Take any way out.

This article contains recent photos from inside Fallujah taken by CPT

With little option for a second sight, girls in Fallujah have to attend class in a building damaged in the U.S. lead raid on Fallujah. Fallujah, Iraq (photo: CPT)

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams
March 21, 2005

As we approached the cluster of tents in the Gebeil section of Fallujah on March 14, we didn’t know what to expect. We had been amazed that we even got inside the city through the tight security of three U.S. military checkpoints. We were also warned that if the word got around that there were Americans in the city, our lives could be in danger.

We had seen sections of Fallujah where the buildings were destroyed but still standing. But now our group of five CPTers and six Iraqis, several of them Shia, witnessed a vast area of the predominantly Sunni city where it looked like an earthquake had struck. There were piles of rubble where there had once been homes. Members of one of the displaced families greeted us warmly and invited us into their tent.

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.

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Being in Iraq is so different from reading about it or watching TV. In Amman the week before I left, I felt scared and uncertain. All of my friends, understandably, warned me about going back to Baghdad: It is too dangerous, people kidnapped on the roads, foreigners could put Iraqi lives in danger.

But in Iraq­-even hearing occasional distant “booms” or gunfire a neighborhood away­-this place is most basically Home, home to millions of people. In my neighborhood, the same kids run down the street to shake my hand, my shopkeeper friends test out my new Arabic and give me a thumbs-up. My host family, once threatened, wants me to sleep over again. Iraqi human-rights colleagues are glad that CPT is still here, and they want us to stay even if there is risk.

Last week, I found out one of the reasons why. Horrible things are happening, and too many people feel that there is no one left to tell the story. In the last week, I have seen the outskirts of Fallujah, talked with refugees, and heard several first-person testimonies of countless civilian deaths. The stories are hard to read and to hear.

I also have been reading more about PTSD and returning soldiers who cannot adapt to regular life again after they have killed other human beings in Iraq and/or seen their friends killed.

The following reflection is longer than usual. I am sorry, there was no other way to convey what happened.

Peace and blessings to you…
Sheila