Letters from Paul Jeffrey
A letter to my supporting congregations
June 2, 2008, Eastern Chad
Dear friends:
I’m writing this from Abeche, a town in eastern Chad that looks like the set of some old film about the French Foreign Legion, yet today the streets are filled with stolen Toyota pickup trucks heavily laden with rocket propelled grenades. Children carry Kalashnikov assault rifles, their desert camouflage head scarves protecting them against the swirling dust. It’s difficult in this land of shifting ethnic and political allegiances to know which is a Chadian soldier and which a Sudanese rebel. The French and other European soldiers here are easier to spot; it’s just not clear whether their job is to protect refugees and humanitarian workers, as they claim, or to make sure the giant old fields operated by ChevronTexaco continue to pump oil to the west.
I’ve come here to photograph the emergency work of Action by Churches Together (ACT) with Chadians displaced by the overlapping wars that plaque the region, and which seem to escalate weekly. I was headed to a place called Koukou Angarana but instead spent the first ten days waiting in N’djamena, the capital, because rebels were moving near where I wanted to go and people feared another assault like that which came close to toppling the Chadian government in February. That in turn provoked a tit-for-tat attack on Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in May, and everyone has been waiting for the next shoe to drop; ACT made me wait in the capital, which drove me absolutely bonkers. The old shade trees that lined the capital’s main street were cut down in February to make it easier to shoot the attackers, so today the decrepit facades of the former French colony seemed even more forlorn and dysfunctional than ever. I quickly finished the two novels I’d brought with me, caught up on some writing, watched lizards in the patio and walked once every day to a Korean-owned internet café with a maddingly slow connection.
Once things seemed calm enough to let me travel, it took me two days on United Nations flights to get to Koukou Angarana, a village near the Sudanese border surrounded by thousands of displaced farmers, people for whom the word “poor” hardly suffices. Driven from their hardscrabble villages in the desert by a storm of ethnic violence, they sought refuge on the edges of the town where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees could set up operations and give them a tarp or a tent. International humanitarian organizations such as ACT joined the UN in keeping them alive, digging wells for safe drinking water and providing a cooking pot and a little bit of food. Mosquito nets. A few seeds. Not much else. Over the last year the families have replaced most of those original tents, which didn’t last long in the desert sun, with small huts of sticks, dried mud and thatch. Similarly to the displaced in Darfur, they cannot go far from the relative safety of the camps lest they be assaulted.
I was in Koukou Angarana when the first real rain of the wet season fell, and the next day the women–in this culture they’re the ones who do all the work, with the exception of making war–were excitedly planting sorghum seeds in the spaces between their huts. When the rain came again they huddled in their huts, and I was invited in out of the rain, ducking into the darkness as children giggled about the kawaja–the local Arabic term for a white person. What struck me about their huts was how they had almost nothing inside. A woven mat sometimes served as both flooring and bedding. A couple of buckets, often branded with the name of the NGO that provided them, served as cupboards for the little food they had. They often had no clothes other than what they wore. If they were slightly better off, there’d be a goat in the corner.
In February I was in the Philippines, and while working on a story about Filipina women who had gone abroad as domestic workers, I visited a family early one morning in Baguio, in the north of Luzon. I wanted to photograph the husband and two sons of a woman working in Hong Kong who had sought refuge in a United Methodist Women-sponsored ministry there after being severely mistreated in her job. The ministry was helping her demand back pay from her employer. Meanwhile, back in Baguio, her family was having a hard time without her remittances. The husband’s earnings as a porter in the market didn’t even pay the monthly rent on their small two-room shack.
I was planning to interview the mother later on in Hong Kong, so I arranged ahead of time to come really early one morning to photograph the father and boys in their normal routine. After breakfast at the hotel, I hiked with my translator up through the shacks that line the mountains on the edge of Baguio. I arrived in time to photograph the boys getting out of bed and getting ready to go to school. I then said it would be good to have images of the three of them eating breakfast before the boys went off. They must do that as part of their normal morning routine, right? But the father looked troubled by my request. He and the translator talked for a minute or so, and then a neighbor, who’d been standing at the doorway observing us, said something to them and then disappeared. The translator finally told me that the family had no food for breakfast, and when I said I’d gladly buy them some, he explained that the neighbor had already volunteered to go get something for them to eat. He came back a few minutes later with some crackers, saying the nearby store was all out of bread. So the father and sons sat down at a rickety table in one room and ate their three small packages of crackers while I photographed them.
My favorite table grace in Central America is a song in Spanish that asks God to grant food to those who hunger, and hunger for justice to those who have food. It’s not an expression of cheap grace that asks God to magically feed the hungry–an ever more challenging task these days as food prices soar around the world. Instead, it recognizes that it’s the task of the larger human community to insure that all have enough, and that ultimately only justice will bring food to all those who hunger.
I give thanks for our communities of faith, which all over the world fight misery while also proactively struggling against the systemic evil that exploits the poor, champions greed, and breaks families and communities apart with violence. Whether it’s where you live or the desert of eastern Chad, as we continue to celebrate Pentecost, we say “Come, Lord Jesus,” knowing he brings us both mercy and justice.
Paul
Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey
A letter to my supporting congregations
18 April 2008
Dear friends:
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks at home, a rare treat for me, and especially delightful in that it coincided with the emergence of spring flowers after the long and gray Oregon winter.
In recent weeks I led a workshop in Toronto on disaster photography for church-based communicators, lectured at the University of Oregon Law School about journalism and conflict, spoke at an annual conference mission gathering in Los Angeles, presented testimony about domestic violence in Central America to the immigration hearings of Honduran women seeking asylum in the U.S., and traveled to Brazil to write about persecution of church workers in the Amazon and the current struggles of street children in Sao Paulo.
I also went to the Philippines, where I documented the church’s work for peace in Mindanao, and interviewed families of some Filipina women who are domestic workers in Hong Kong. Then I went to Hong Kong to interview the women, who are involved with a United Methodist-supported ministry there that helps the women survive financially and emotionally as well as encourage them to fight for their basic human rights, which are routinely violated. I enjoyed connecting the experience of the women with their families’ experience back home; too often we see migrant workers only with a local context, when in fact they embody a larger story that is important to understand if we’re going to discern how to faithfully respond to the demands of a globalized world.
The Amazon, Philippines, Hong Kong . . . what weaves these disparate threads all together, besides my cluttered office, is a church that accompanies people as they struggle in all sorts of ways. I am repeatedly surprised and delighted by the courage and commitment of our faith communities as they make real the Gospel’s offer of abundant life for all.
Right now I’m plodding through the writing and photo editing left from those trips. Next week I’ll head to Fort Worth where I’ll help photograph General Conference. Shortly after I return home from Texas, I’ll head to Africa for three weeks, where I’ll document the struggles of Darfur refugees in eastern Chad.
The Chad trip, which I’m doing as part of my work with Action by Churches Together (ACT), will also yield material for a book of mine on Darfur that will be published a year from now by Seabury Press, the publishing house of the Episcopal Church. Its release will come shortly before the summer mission schools, where the geographical theme for both 2009 and 2020 will be Sudan.
I’ll come home from Africa in June just in time for our daughter Abi’s graduation from high school in California. Many of you know that Abi has gone through some pretty rough times since we moved to the U.S. in 2004, but she has made great progress and is becoming a delightful and responsible young adult. Lyda and Lucas and I will be there to celebrate with her this rite of passage, and we ask that you continue to keep her in your prayers as she faces new choices in the months ahead.
A few weeks after that, Lyda will start an appointment as a mission interpreter for Global Ministries. She’ll be based in New York City. Oregon will continue to be “home” for me, though I’ll spend part of my time in New York as well. Not to worry, although we’ll be based in different places for the next few months, we’re still married and wonderfully in love!
Thanks for the many ways your congregation is involved in mission, both locally and around the world. Thanks for your support for my ministry. Know that God’s spirit of justice, delight, and compassion links our energies in creative outreach to our sisters and brothers who so desperately need peace.
Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey
Kitgum, Uganda
December 18, 2007
Dear friends,
Biseny Akena harvested her sweet potatoes this morning, the first time she has done so in 20 years. I photographed her here in northern Uganda just after sunrise as she dug them out of the ground, her harvest marking the beginning of an end to one of Africa’s longest wars, and an end to Akena’s long wait for peace. Akena fled her village of Amuca in 1987 because of attacks by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. She and her family sought safety in Sudan, but her husband was killed there the following year when they were caught in combat between government and rebel forces in the southern part of the country. When the security situation for refugees there deteriorated even further, Akena returned to Uganda in 1993, joining almost two million others in one of the crowded camps for the internally displaced. Since then she’s been waiting. It hasn’t been easy. One of her four children died of malaria. Another was abducted by the LRA, which regularly kidnaped children, turning the boys into soldiers and the girls into sex slaves. Akena kept waiting, longing for the village where she grew up. When peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government began slowly last year, her hope of returning home quickened. In April, with a few other families from her village, she returned to where Amuca once existed. She hacked away at the brush that had taken over her fields. She gathered the branches and grass to make a thatched hut. She planted some crops. This morning, in these last days of Advent, she cried as she harvested her sweet potatoes.
Advent is about waiting, and Biseny Akena knows better than most of us what it means to wait in a world full of violence and suffering–just like the context into which Jesus was born. And her story reminds us that such waiting isn’t always in vain, that peace can come to the world, that the poor can plant their fields and eat the harvest. You have accompanied Akena in her time of waiting. Action by Churches Together (ACT) has worked for years among the displaced in northern Uganda, and when Akena went home to Amuca this year, the Lutheran World Federation–one of two implementing ACT members in Uganda–drilled a well and provided other critical support for her community. United Methodist support for ACT has fed Akena’s hope and accompanies her today as she begins to enjoy the taste of peace.
I’ve come to Uganda for a couple of weeks to report on the humanitarian situation for ACT, and to write for Response magazine about a UMW-supported women’s organization here that helps freed girls recover their dignity, and advocates for genuine peace as the country wrestles with difficult issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. Because of your support for me as a missionary, I’ve witnessed Akena and her neighbors celebrate the end to two decades of waiting. Thanks for that privilege.
Earlier this fall, I spent two months speaking in churches around the country, sharing some of my adventures over the last three years. I enjoyed that time. The conversation with your congregations helped to focus the questions I continue to probe as a journalist, and I came away with a renewed appreciation for the many forms of critical mission in which you’re involved in your own communities.
My website (www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey) has an online version of the “slide show” that I used during itineration, as well as one version of the sermon that I shared in several of your churches. In November, I traveled to Sri Lanka to prepare material about ACT’s work over the three years since the 2004 tsunami. You can see a short online slide show about that work on my website.
God willing, I’ll be home in Eugene before Christmas in order to celebrate with my family the coming of the one we name the Prince of Peace. I’ll remember Biseny Akena and her sweet potatoes, and pray for peace in Uganda and in so many other lands where people wait.
Paul Jeffrey, pauljeffrey@earthlink.net, www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey
Santa Fe de Bogota, Colombia, 31 May 2007
Dear friends in my supporting congregations:
Henri Aguilar’s entire body was marked by the tattoos he’d acquired while a member of one of Honduras’ notorious street gangs, but inside he was a new man. He’d left the gang that had once claimed his allegiance, come back to the church of his childhood, got a steady job, married and had a baby girl. He named her Genesis as a sign of his new beginnings.
I interviewed Henri in May while in Chamelecón, one of the most violent neighborhoods in Honduras, to prepare an article for Response magazine on church-based work with youth in Latin America. Five days later, as Henri was cleaning up after working all day, three masked men burst into his home and shot him dead. Henri was about to leave for Mass, where he was going to read from the Psalms.
The next morning, while on another assignment in Bolivia, I got word of Henri’s killing in an email, and the news left me depressed for days. Henri’s personal journey had represented scarce good news in an extremely violent and bleak landscape, and his death seemed to represent the powers and principalities of this dark age thumbing their nose at all our best efforts to carve out spaces for peace in the middle of despair. I have no easy words to erase the grief and frustration left behind in the wake of Henri’s killing. If anything, it underscores the critical importance of mission among those at the margins who suffer daily from violence and hunger.
While in Honduras I also photographed and wrote about small rice farmers and how they’ve been affected by free trade (hint: it’s not a happy story, either). From there I went to Bolivia and Argentina, where I documented the work of Church World Service in the remote Chaco region, focusing especially on the resistance of indigenous groups to the invasion of foreign oil and gas companies.
After being back in Oregon for a week, and enjoying a visit home from our daughter (who is doing very well in school in Vermont), I’m now in Colombia where I’m going to report on how churches are involved in grassroots initiatives to create "peace communities" in the middle of seemingly unending conflict. Next week I’ll be in Guatemala, continuing to prepare articles for an issue of Response that will focus on Latin America.
With Action by Churches Together (ACT), I’m negotiating a return trip to the Darfur region of Sudan, possibly in July. Getting a visa and all the necessary permits is a very sensitive political and bureaucratic process, and nothing is certain yet. In addition to Sudan, we’re also looking at some stories for Response on ministries with women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In August I’m hoping to stay home and finish installing the drip irrigation system in my garden (so I can quit complaining to Lyda, when I arrive home from trips, that she hasn’t attended sufficiently to my precious plants). We’re also planning to take some family time for camping and other adventures.
In September and October, I’ll be itinerating in the United States, and all of you should have heard by this coming week from your conference itineration coordinator regarding dates (if you’re current on your support). I look forward to this time with you, to sharing some of what I’ve been doing and to learning more of how your congregation is involved in mission.
Please continue to pray for me and my family, and for the family of Henri. His one-year old daughter Genesis was baptized a few days ago on Pentecost Sunday. No matter the forces of evil, we continue faithfully forward, seeking the light of God in our lives and the lives of our children.
Paul
PS: As you know, in March I was in Indonesia to report, among other things, on the response of churches to the tsunami in Aceh province. In case people ever ask you "What is it that Paul does?" or if you’re just curious about the tsunami, check out this three-minute online slideshow I prepared on the tsunami response:
http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/actphotos/acehnias/flash/index.html
3/31/2007 3:53:16 AM Pacific Daylight Time |
Dear friends in my supporting churches:
Asep walked to the next car, energetically strumming his battered guitar, his entourage of three other kids clapping their hands and not missing a beat as they launched into their next song, all the while looking plaintively through the window at the driver, who eventually rolled down the window just enough to pass out a few coins. Mairioji, the group's banker, reached out for the offering, and the band moved on to the next vehicle stopped at the busy Jakarta intersection.
These children live on the streets of Indonesia's capital city, a sprawling megalopolis of more than 11 million people. You may have seen on television the recent images of flooding-the latest in the archipelago nation's painful litany of disasters. But every day is a disaster for these kids. Having fled or been pushed out of abusive homes, they take refuge under bridges and in abandoned buildings, finding solidarity and safety with each other. They earn money for food-and often for drugs that provide them comfort on lonely and hungry nights-by singing at stop lights or on the city's decrepit buses. Their main songs are about the difficulties of being poor, and a plea to God to show them the pathway to heaven.
Given their vulnerability to all sorts of dangers on the streets of Jakarta, Church World Service sponsors a program that provides the kids with education about HIV/AIDS and a safe place to crash for a few hours or a night. As part of a three-week trip assignment in southeast Asia, I spent a day with the program and its kids, photographing them at work on the streets of Jakarta.
As they periodically counted the coins and few dirty bills they collected from their audiences, the kids decided I made a good member of their team. Drivers and bus passengers are evidently more generous when there's a foreigner pointing a camera at them. The kids said they'd share their take with me if I kept on taking photos of them and their patrons. If I ever need a new job, I'll keep that in mind.
Most of my time in Indonesia was spent in Aceh and Nias, areas affected by the 2004 tsunami (and, in the case of Nias, a devastating earthquake that followed three months later). Despite the huge scale of the tragedy, there's good news in Aceh these days. The tsunami broke through decades of violence and distrust between the central government and Aceh's people, most of whom had long backed a separatist movement. The two sides signed a peace agreement in Helsinki in 2005, and last December Aceh's citizens held their first election, choosing as their new governor a former rebel who was in prison when the tsunami hit, but the giant wave battered down the walls allowing him and all the other prisoners to go free.
Part of what has made peace possible in Aceh is the massive wave of solidarity that followed the well-publicized destruction. Without resources for reconstruction, peace wouldn't have happened in Aceh. Your generous contributions in the wake of the tsunami have really made a positive difference.
Unfortunately, the daily disaster of homelessness, violence, and abuse that plague poor children in Jakarta and so many other cities doesn't get the same attention as the tsunami, and groups like Church World Service struggle for funding to keep open the doors of programs that reach out in Christ's name to those at the margins. CROP Walks need more feet. We all need to take ever more seriously our faith's demand that we stand with the children, be they singing at a stop light in Jakarta or going hungry for food or love just down the street from our churches.
As always, thanks for your support and prayers.
Paul
Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala - 24 November 2006
Dear friends in my supporting churches:
They are digging in Panabaj these days, searching for the dead. Yet unlike so many exhumations that I’ve covered over the years in Guatemala, where the killing was sponsored by the country’s military, the hundreds of people buried in Panabaj were victims of a giant mudslide that in October 2005 swept off the towering Toliman volcano and raged through the Mayan village. It’s an ambitious task, searching a hardened mudflow the size of several
football fields for the bodies of those who perished, yet Guatemalans know how to do this, and have set about the task with backhoes, shovels and a grim resolve to recover the bodies of their loved ones and rebury them with dignity.
I’ve spent the last week here on the shores of Lake Atitlán leading a workshop on disaster communications for 35 people from churches and church agencies in Central America and Mexico. We spent many hours covering the nuts and bolts of what and how to communicate in the midst of emergencies, and then everyone spent a day in several of the villages affected by Hurricane Stan, interviewing and photographing survivors. They then produced
their reports, which were critiqued by the larger group. It was no mere exercise, however. Although the disaster took place over a year ago, the crisis it produced still hangs on. Hundreds of families live in temporary shelters with no clear idea of what their future holds. And in places like Panabaj, they’re just now starting to search for the dead under several meters of hardened mud.
The workshop was sponsored by Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of church-related disaster agencies (including UMCOR). It’s a good example of ACT’s work to build up the capacity of local organizations to respond to the crises that occur often in this region.
That capability is often missed in the way disasters are reported in the north, both by the media and agencies that want our donations. We’re told that people are helpless victims who need rescuing by outsiders. If you’ve been reading what I’ve written about disasters over the last eight years since Hurricane Mitch, you know that I think that’s a grave disservice. People are resilient, especially the poor for whom anguish is often a luxury of class they can’t afford. In Panabaj, they’ve displayed that several times in the five centuries since the Spanish arrived, including in 1990 when the
Guatemalan army massacred 13 of them. They fought back nonviolently, eventually forcing the army to withdraw from the village.
In the wake of the mudslide, the people of Panabaj have fought valiantly to rebuild their lives, often clashing with a government that displays little interest in bettering the quality of life for the rural poor. Crowded into squalid shelters, residents have organized to push for their right to live in less vulnerable conditions, the poor once again refusing to accept the role of victims. And I’m pleased to report that ACT in addition to providing emergency materials has played an important role in strengthening the community’s efforts to organize in order to solve its own problems.
These days have been immensely pleasurable for me. Besides again enjoying what many consider to be the most beautiful lake in the world, I’ve been back among Central Americans with their peculiar histories and sense of humor. After the work is done, a guitar appears and we sing late into the night the songs of struggle and hope which the region’s struggles have produced. These included a song by Nicaraguan composer Carlos Mejía Godoy
which celebrates the birth of Christ in a little village in northern Nicaragua during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza:
Cristo ya nació en Palacaguina, de Chepe Pavón y una tal María Ella va a planchar muy humildemente la ropa que goza la mujer hermosa del terrateniente.
"Christ has been born in Palacaguina of Joe Pavon and a poor woman named Maria who goes to iron the clothing that the landowner’s beautiful woman likes to wear."
In these coming days of Advent, as people in Panabaj and so many other places around the world dig for their loved ones in the rubble of conflict and marginalization, may we know and may we share–the good news that Christ has indeed been born in the poor villages and neighborhoods of our society. With this birth God has taken sides with the underdog, with those who cry out for life. May we hear their cry and in solidarity with the newborn
Christ join their struggle.
Paul
Paul Jeffrey, a United Methodist missionary
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey
paul@kairosphotos.com
Jerusalem: 8 November 2006
Dear friends in my supporting congregations:
One critical issue lacking from much of the recent U.S. electoral debate is
our government's massive and unquestioning support for Israel's brutal
occupation of the Palestinian territories. I've been reminded of that
constantly during the last two weeks as I've traveled throughout the West
Bank and Gaza. Within a minute or two of meeting someone, whether it's a
taxi driver or a priest or an ordinary Palestinian harvesting their olives,
I'm asked where I'm from. So I tell them. If the person doesn't speak any
English they often respond with something like, "America good, Bush bad"-a
sort of shorthand for how they feel about U.S. policy. If they're more
accomplished in English, they explain to me how they love the United States
but can't understand why the U.S. uncritically supports Israel. And
oftentimes they know what they speak of when they say they love the U.S.;
many Palestinians have been there to visit, most have relatives living in
California or Michigan or elsewhere. U.S. culture has many fans here. In the
war-torn Gaza Strip, where Israeli troops yesterday killed 19 civilians when
it fired artillery shells into several houses where people were sleeping,
people told me how they love to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil on television.
They're watching more television these days because they're afraid to go
outside. And many have lost their jobs since the victory of Hamas in
elections earlier this year, a development that provoked a cutoff in
international assistance to the Palestinian Authority (oh, how we love
democracy as long as the people we agree with win the elections). Coupled
with Israel's retention of all customs receipts, it has left the Palestinian
"government" bankrupt and unable to pay the salaries of teachers and other
civil servants. As a result, these days are even more difficult in the
Palestinian territories.
I'm here for 18 days to prepare material for an issue of Response magazine
next spring that will focus on this part of the world. It's a fascinating
place to be. I'm writing this on a cool evening, sitting outside at a
Lutheran guesthouse on the Mt. of Olives. The Biblical narrative is never
very far away here, and walking where Jesus walked and worshiping in
Bethlehem and Jerusalem is a special treat for me. Yet Christianity here is
not about just the old stones that the flocks of tourists swarm over every
day. It's about the vital faith of the "living stones," the Christian
community that suffers everyday from the wall, the checkpoints, the
systematic humiliation of Palestinians-both Christian and Muslim-by the
occupying military. I am filled with great respect for how they steadfastly
resist in so many nonviolent ways, refusing to be victims, and warmly
welcoming strangers like me who come from the country that bankrolls their
oppression. It is a gift for which I'm thankful to the God who is worshiped
in so many ways in this tiny land. And thankful to you who make possible my
fascinating job.
Since my last letter from Pakistan in July, I've traveled to Bosnia to
photograph landmine survivors, and to Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan to
document the work of UMCOR in the Caucuses. I wrote and photographed stories
for Response on themes ranging from homeless women in Seattle to a feisty
United Methodist congregation in Chicago that has declared itself a
sanctuary for a Mexican-American woman member who faces deportation. I spoke
in several fora ranging from the conference school of mission in Oregon to
the California-Nevada United Methodist Women's annual gathering, and I
escaped with Lyda for a quick 30th anniversary trip to the Amazon region of
Bolivia, where we swam with pink river dolphins and fished for piranhas. I
also spent some time in my back yard in Eugene, turning what used to be a
large lawn into what will soon become a jungle of native plants and trees.
Next week I return home from this trip for just four days, then I'm off to
Guatemala to lead a workshop on communication in emergencies for church
agencies and their partners from throughout Central America. I'll then be
back home for a couple of weeks before heading to Indonesia to report on how
church-sponsored reconstruction is faring two years after the tsunami. While
in Indonesia I'll also photograph and interview families involved in rice
production as part of an educational campaign about food and global trade to
be conducted next year by the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, a group related
to the World Council of Churches.
I'll be done with all that travel by mid December, when I have to have some
minor surgery that will keep me from traveling for several weeks. I'll enjoy
some quiet time at home with my family while writing the articles and
editing the photos generated from this trip.
Next year brings more adventures, including a time set aside for itineration
in September and October. That's when I'll come visit you, share some images
and stories, and we'll talk about how we're involved in mission together. As
always, thanks for your generous support for my mission, and for the many
ways you are involved in mission in your local community.
This weekend I'll be staying in the small West Bank village of Aboud. Many
of you have heard me speak about Aboud before, and the ways in which Muslims
and Christians there have gotten along fine for centuries. That community
spirit is under threat in these troubled days, however. The Israeli "wall"
runs right through the village, stealing thousands of olive trees from
village families, making life harder and encouraging people to emigrate.
Fundamentalism-a direct product of the occupation and the confusion of
Christianity with western political policy-is tugging at ancient
friendships. So I'm going back to Aboud to photograph and interview people,
but also to pray with folks who've been suffering for far too long. I will
pray with them for justice, which the scriptures tell us is the precursor to
peace. Pray with us this weekend for peace in this holy land.
Shalom. Salaam.
Paul
Mansehra, Pakistan, 8 July 2006
Dear friends,
The old man seemed barely able to walk as he ambled across the
cracked floor of the what passes for a restaurant in the earthquake-ravaged
village of Paras, high in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. The
hundreds of flies that buzzed over our table swarmed around him as he sat
slowly down beside me. "Salaam alaikum" - peace be with you - I said to him,
and he smiled an almost toothless grin at the sweaty foreigner and responded
"Wa alaikum salaam" - and peace be with you. He shook my hand with both his
hands, savoring the contact, and then slowly removed his sandals. He spent a
minute scratching the skin on his arms, then climbed ever so slowly up onto
a raised platform beside our table. He then slowly unfolded a dirty old
piece of cloth that had obviously been a simple but beautiful work of
embroidery at one time. He laid it carefully on the platform and then stood
and prepared himself. To pray.
In the next few minutes, I watched with fascination as the old man,
who had seemed barely able to move across the uneven floor, now repeatedly
knelt and stood as he went through the prayers that devout Muslims offer
five times each day. What must have been the many aches of growing old in
the harsh mountain environment disappeared as he steadily sought to listen
to the divine.
I had come to the village to visit a clinic run by Church World
Service for earthquake survivors, and after photographing their work and
interviewing some local residents about their experience since last
October's quake, the CWS staff took me to lunch in the restaurant, one of
the few buildings to survive the quake, though its cracked walls, collapsed
roof and buckled floor testified to the earthquake's intensity.
I was also accompanied by four members of the special forces branch
of Pakistan's police. This is a very conservative region of Pakistan, and
several fundamentalist preachers in the area have criticized some relief
groups for seeking to assure that women are respected and their needs
addressed in the recovery and reconstruction phase. The fundamentalist
groups - which got their first funding from the billions of dollars that the
CIA gave the Pakistani secret police for anti-Soviet insurgents in
Afghanistan - have carried out their own relief and reconstruction projects,
making an important contribution to helping people survive in the quake's
aftermath. Because of their political agenda, several have been banned by
Pakistan's government, but here in the mountains they operate openly.
Their mounting criticism of foreign NGOs (Oxfam and CWS have been
particularly singled out in recent weeks in the area around Balakot) led the
government to assign protection for foreign aid workers entering the most
remote zones of the Northwest Frontier Province. So the four soldiers and
their AK-47s stayed beside me as I hiked in the mountains and tried to do my
work. They took their jobs seriously. When we stayed in a hotel in the
rugged Kaghan Valley, high up in the Himalayas, they checked my bed in the
evening to make sure no one had placed a bomb there. I felt well protected,
but also well-watched.
The food finally came, spicy chicken korai with roti, and we swished
away the flies to eat heartily as the old man finished his prayers,
carefully folded up his threadbare prayer rug, climbed down and put on his
shoes before walking slowly out the door.
Many days I find myself too busy to pray. I get so caught up in work
and worries about my teenagers and the world in general that I forget to
return to the source, to listen in the quiet for God's voice. Or when I do
pray it's one more thing on my "to do" list, something to be got through
quickly so I can cross it off and tackle another chore.
It's impossible to escape from religion here. This is an Islamic
republic, and from well before sunrise when the first prayers are sung over
the speakers atop the mosques, religion is part of the air. I see men
praying publicly all day long (women are supposed to pray privately in the
home, where they spend all their time in this part of the country). But the
image of that old man, who could barely walk, being transformed as he moved
his body through the ritual of prayer has stayed with me these last few
days. Does prayer feel that liberating for me? Is prayer woven so seamlessly
into the fabric of my daily life?
I commend to you that old man and his prayerful faith. As we stumble
through the uneven places of our lives, may we also find moments when we can
feel calm and steady, when our many disabilities disappear into God's deep
care, and we can rise refreshed and empowered to be instruments of God's
peace. Salaam alaikum.
Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com