This morning I woke up and thought about how much I loved daylight. Bleary eyed and sleep deprived from days on the road, I still appreciate the sun streaming through the curtains. I am after all a morning person.
But as we got on the bus and headed towards Lalesh I began to feel the glumness sink in. Soon after leaving the hotel some kids knocked at our windows at trafic lights. They were selling tissues and water and as they called to us I felt my heart sink. I was so sadened by these kids who could be playing instead of working in the hot morning traffick. I have done different campaigns over child labour but in the end what do you expect people to do when they need to feed themselves and their families. I questioned whether my sorrow was actually a luxury I didn't have the right to indulge. For I wasn't buying the things they were offering and I wasn't setting up altenatives. So in the afternoon when we met the young Azidi who has started an awesome volunteer run organisation it felt like a reminder from God. This is your job at the moment, being a witness and hearing peoples stories. This amazing NGO is called Sunrise (they are on facebook, look them up). They were started by a group of friends in a camp for Azidi IDP's in Duhok province who saw the child labor around them in the camps and decided to find a way to do something about it. Nayf, the group's founder, said that they see child labor as a sort of violence, an abuse. They wanted to give these kids back their childhood. They couldn't stop parents from making children work so they began providing alternative activities. The group now has about 20 volunteers and they are working with young people from ages 6 to 18. The volunteers themselves are only 19-25 years old. Lalesh is a beautiful ancient place, the most holy place of the Azidi, who say it is the birthplace of all creation. There are ancient doorways and trees and everyone must take their shoes off to walk around the streets and temple. The young people from Sunrise were very proud to be showing us around. A gazzillion children and others adults joined in the tour for bits and pieces, asking to take photos of these strangers. However it just made me so happy when I heard about the work Sunrise does and all the beauty and holiness of Lalesh paled in comparison. Those young people are amazing, volunteering their time in camps to run art, music, English and physical education classes for children who have survived ISIS. They talked about the rage and violence some of those children have wrapped up in them and how they need therapy because children are like blank slates, and all these ones have has written on them is terror and violence. They are not trained in anything special ..... but they see a need and they are doing what they can with limited funds and experience. We met with 9 villages 200 km from the Turkish boarder who have been bombed by the Turkish government Since 1994.
Nothing makes sense. Kashkawa, Dupre and all the others are farming villages. We saw their rice fields, their goats and fig trees. We ate their fish and cucumber. We played in their river with their children. They live without knowing when the next bombing will hit. Earlier this year they were bombed 40 times from 3am to 5am. That is two hours worth of fear, where children are crying and fields are burning and windows are being thrown open so that they do not get broken by the blasts. For the past 22 years worth of bombing they have had no casualties but the village's on the other side of the mountains are now empty and people are slowly leaving these ones too. The blasts are getting closer and more regular and they make no sense. They create fear and displacement among innocent people. The official Turkish line is that they are attacking PKK strongholds. But no PKK live in these villages and if they pass through it is in small numbers and they do not stay and chat. We were taken to a seated area by a scenic river with farmers representing the villages, representing the power of cross-cultural cooperation (8 of the villages are Christian one is Muslim). And these men and women asked us over and over again, tell the Turkish government to stop bombing us. Our livelihood are our fields and they are burning. Our children are our future and their teachers are too scared to come and teach them. We used to have 23 families in this village, now we have 9. The refugees that fled ISIS, we welcomed, sheltered and fed, but they were too scared to stay. They laid a feast for us under a shelter of branches and vine leaves, by a sparkling river. Children laughed and hugged us and splashed in the water. Beautiful women smiled and tried to talk with us through the barriers of language. The sun shone on a golden afternoon. But this picture needs to be reconciled with the women showing us the scars from flying shrapnel. With the smoke of burning fields in our nostrils. With pieces of metal too heavy to lift lying on a hillside next to deep craters made from unnatural blasts and grazing calves. These people told us they needed nothing in their villages, no charity, no projects they just want a safe place to live. Tell Turkey to stop bombing us. I don't know how to do that, we have a plan to visit the consulate and pray some message crosses the boarders of diplomacy, state and the everyday person. I really just ask your prayers for these villages and to spread the word about what is happening. |
The BeginingThis started when a friend began speaking to me about his experience with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Palestine. So far, a couple of years later, it has got me to this point where I am sitting at a chair in Iraqi Kurdistan, beginning my own delegation with that group. Archives
November 2016
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