Damascus, Syria - 14 October 2008

Dear friends:

Milad plays his violin every day in the dingy apartment he shares with his parents and three sisters here in Damascus. He was a concert violinist back home in Iraq, but since the family fled to Syria last year, the 24-year-old only plays inside their cramped apartment, except for the one time a week he plays during mass at the nearby Chaldean Catholic Church. His father told me Milad only plays sad songs these days.

Throughout the Damascus neighborhood of Jeramana where Milad and his family live, tens of thousands of families live with the same deep sadness. Forced to flee Iraq’s warring madness to save their lives, many would like to be resettled abroad. That’s how Milad’s girlfriend ended up in Tennessee, and he and his family are hoping they can be resettled in Detroit. He asks me how many hours it would take to get from Detroit to Tennessee. He chats with her every day over the internet, and the strain of distance nurtures the poignancy of his music.

Yet resettlement quotas will allow only a small number of the refugees here and in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere to be relocated to safety. As violence currently escalates in Mosul, the city in northern Iraq where Milad’s family lived, they certainly won’t go home any time soon. They laugh when I ask them about an ambitious repatriation scheme launched last week by the Iraqi embassy here. As hard as life is here in Damascus, where they aren’t officially allowed to work, life back in Iraq remains even worse.

It wasn’t always that way, and they recall life before the U.S. invasion with a certain nostalgia, despite the problems then with international sanctions, the Kuwait war and the bloody conflict with Iran. Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug, but they and other religious minorities enjoyed certain protection during his regime. The gangsterism with a religious face produced by the U.S. occupation has made any semblance of normal life for Christians impossible in most of Iraq. While some Christians have found sanctuary in the Kurdish north, many have been forced to flee, along with their Muslim neighbors, to foreign places like Jeramana. Somewhere around 2.5 million Iraqis currently live as refugees outside their homeland; an equal number are internally displaced within Iraq. Many are well educated, the middle class professionals that Iraq needs if it can ever start rebuilding. Yet most, like Milad and his family, are simply waiting, in limbo.

I’m wrapping up three weeks in the middle east. I’ve interviewed and photographed refugees in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. It’s been a difficult experience, listening to dozens of families tell me their stories, how they were threatened and beaten, their loved ones kidnaped and murdered. I’m emotionally drained.

One family I visited in Lebanon was formed by a widow, Rana Ramzi, and her three children. Rana’s husband was killed in February. He was an assistant to the Chaldean Catholic archbishop in Mosul, who was killed after he encouraged residents not to pay protection money to the gangsters who control the city. Rana’s husband was killed in the attack on the archbishop, and she and the kids fled to Beirut in May. I went to interview her, and while my translator and I were talking in the main room of her apartment, she came out of the bedroom with her two-year-old daughter Faris, who was staring at me with wide eyes. Rana explained that when Faris had heard my masculine voice in the next room, she had looked hopefully at her mother and said, “Daddy?”

There are many themes that overlay the refugees’ plight. One is the slow but steady shrinkage of the Christian population throughout the middle east, something that worries church leaders. If current trends continue, in a few more decades Christianity here will be reduced to nothing but churches serving as museums. The living stones of Christian faith will have all fled. That means that in the case of Iraqi refugees, for example, the church is forced to encourage people to linger longer in limbo in the hope that someday they can return home. Otherwise, there will be no one left: families who return to Iraq may be killed, and families that resettle abroad won’t return. So they counsel patience, a frustrating message to hear for someone who has education and talents that go to waste in fruitless exile.

There are other themes that repeat in every family’s story. There’s a almost universal frustration with the U.S. government’s unquestioning support for Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories–a conflict which remains the linchpin of resolving tensions throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. And there’s a often-voiced frustration that U.S. policy in the region is inconsistent at best, ignorant at its worst. As one priest in a small village in Egypt told me, “In the United States you didn’t care about us until 9-11 happened, but now all of a sudden we exist for you.”

That’s true on many levels, but not when we look at the many ways the church is involved in mission, insufficient as our efforts may be. Ministry with poor people at the margins of the world’s economies has been the center of church life since the beginning, and telling their stories across arbitrary borders of class and nation and race has been a critical element of being the church ever since St. Paul set off from this city to spread the Gospel abroad while crafting epistles that reported, chastised, and encouraged. For us who proclaim Jesus as our savior, the poor must be the focus of our mission, regardless of the arbitrary and violent policies of our governments. We don’t wait for our governments or their media allies to tell us where to go; we go where God leads us.

The refugees I’ve spent these days with may have been driven from their homeland by a war our government started, but they’ve been met in their host countries by efforts of compassion organized by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. I visited church-run programs that provide emergency housing and food to people who fall through the cracks of the United Nations’ refugee programs. I personally witnessed how the church reaches out in a variety of ways, doing everything from training women in marketable hairstyling skills, to providing legal aid to migrants held in underground detention facilities, to providing safe shelter to victims of human trafficking.

Unless there’s a dramatic shift in my government’s policies in the region, I am not optimistic that things will get better. And even with new, intelligent approaches, it will take decades to even begin to recover from the frenetic destruction of lives and cultures in recent years. But I’m also cautiously hopeful, or at least encouraged, by the dedicated witness of people of faith who insist that there are no borders to compassion and solidarity. In a landscape of terror, there just may be hope that Milad may once again play joyful music.

Paul

Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey