CPT and our family

Friends, today I'd like to reflect a little on our family's history with Christian Peacemaker Teams, and our experience with the CPT delegation to Israel and Palestine this past month.
Our history with CPT goes back before CPT began, during my "first" Sabbatical to Europe in 1984. During that summer Sabbatical, our family attended the Mennonite World Conference in Strassbourg, France. One of the speakers at the conference was Ron Sider. He spoke about the need for a deeper committment to peace on the part of the global Mennonite family. He called in his sermon for a cadre of peacemakers who are dedicated to peacemaking and as willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of peace a soldiers are to sacrifice their lives for their countries. Sider's sermon had a deep impression on all of us, including our then 13 year old daughter Joanne.
Ron Sider's sermon at the 1984 Mennonite World Conference is often seen as the inspiration for the subsequent formation of Christian Peacemaker Teams. As CPT developed in the 1980's and 1990's, I was pastoring in Illinois, not far from the CPT headquarters in Chicago. Occasionally we would see and visit with Gene Stoltzfus, the first director of CPT (also a friend of Gordon Brockmueller). In the mid 1990's our family together attended several CPT Peace Congresses in Chicago with our then mostly teenage daughters. On one such occasion we took part in an action protesting war toys at a toy store in Chicago.
Our daughter Joanne, partly because of hearing Ron Sider's sermon, chose to volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams after her graduation from college and a term with Mennonite Voluntary Service in Colorado. She spent time in Haiti, in Hebron, Palestine, and at Pierre, South Dakota. During that time, Loretta and I followed the work of CPT closely, of course. Since 2000, we have received regular internet postings from the CPT web service. (I currently have an article on this website on our experience in Palestine--go to www.CPT.org, to the March 22 posting.)
All this is to explain our decision to make a CPT delegation to Israel/Palestine a part of my Sabbatical experience. It is something Loretta and I had often talked about doing at some time.
At the same time, from Joanne's experiences, we knew that such a delgation would be very demanding and very difficult. We wondered whether Loretta in particular would have the physical stamina to do this delegation. Yet we did step out in faith to sign up, even when the CPT delegation administator in Chicago seemed to discourage us a little.
So on March 5 we met our other delegation members in Jerusalem. We were 12 in all, with our leader, Sarah McDonald, a full-time CPT volunteer from First Mennonite Church in Iowa City. (She is a friend of Noreen Gingerich.) There were four couples in this delegation and we were together for 12 days. Two couples were Catholic neighbors from rural Minnesota interested in peace issues, and they were all a little older than Loretta and I. The other couple was young, newly married. He is a Mennonite from Ohio, a graduate of Hesston's aviation program. Serving in Africa he met a Finnish young woman there also in service and they married not too long ago. Then there were four single people, an Episcopalian man from Chicago, a young Mennonite woman from Kansas City, another man from California, and our leader.
Our time together was intense. We almost always lived in dormitory type settings, men in one place and women in the other. There were often Turkish toilets. When we were in the CPT house in Hebron, there was no hot water, and indeed water itself was very scarce and we were advised to be as sparing as possible. We slept often on mats on the floors. We often cooked for ourselves, usually always vegetarian fare and very simple, taking turns with meal preparation and clean up. All of this is in keeping with the CPT program philosophy. So as you can imagine it was hardly a vacation environment.
Ours was primarily a learning tour, so our days were filled with visiting Israeli and Palestinian partners of CPT's work in this country. In 12 days we had 30 more or less formal activities or presentations as a group. Again you can see that we were kept very busy. Some of the Israeli organizations we visited were: Rabbis for Human Rights, B'tsleem (an Israeli human rights organization), and Breaking the Silence (an organization of former Israeli soldiers who tell the stories of what they did in enforcing the Palestinian occupation and how this has affected them). Palestinian organizations included: Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, the Hebron Rehbilitation Committee, The Wi'am Reconciliation Center and the Badil Refugee Center in Bethlehem, and the Sabeel Liberation Theology Center.
We visited both an Israeli settlement, Efrat, and a Palestinian Refugee Camp, as well as Israeli and Palestinian homes. We went to the Yad Vashem Memorial to the Holocaust in West Jerusalem, and we had a tour of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem for the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICHAD). We heard from Israeli and a Palestinian fathers who had each lost a child in the wars, through an organization called Parents Bereaved. We participated with CPT team members in school patrols and in the Palm Sunday action I previously wrote about. And we attended a silent vigil for peace of Israeli women in West Jerusalem at noon, a group called Women in Black.
This is only a smattering of our activity during the twelve days of the tour. In addition to the group living and the hectic schedule, we often heard in these settings and visits very painful stories of pain and loss by both Israelis and Palestinians. It was this, perhaps more than the physical demands, that made this a very tiring experience for us.
Loretta and I are only now processing all these experiences. While the time was very difficult and hard, it was extremely rewarding. I feel in particular that so many of the things we heard are relevant to the theme of my Sabbatical--the renewal of a vision for rural ministry. On a number of occasions we were with very rural people stuggling to survive in very adverse situations, and this made the time so valuable for us.
So much for now. Roy

A Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem

Friends:
We've finally come to a breathing place in our travels abroad--the Orthodox Academy of Crete, on the island of Crete. We arrived here on Monday evening after spending the weekend with old friends in north central Greece (more about that on another blog). We had rented a car on arrival from Israel in Athens and drove up to Trikala, Greece, last Friday.
Now we are finally at a place where we can unpack our suitcases and feel like we can catch our breath. The Orthodox Academy of Crete is a conference/retreat center of the Greek Orthodox Church of Crete. They are giving us a 3 bedroom apartment (very simply furnished) so that when our girls come later in April, they too can stay with us. So yesterday Loretta and I were able to unwind and unpack and settle in a little. It was the Greek national holiday of indepence from the Turks dating back to March 25, 1821, and of course March 25 is also the religious feast of the Annunciation of Christ's birth to Mary. So we attended the church liturgy yesterday morning, and then the parades and speechs following that, here in the village of Kolymbari.
For several blogs, I want to go back and pick up some of our experiences in Israel/Palestine that I didn't have time to write about when we were there. Today the subject is our visit to the Palestinian Refugee Camp at Bethlehem on Wednesday, March 12. Our CPT delegation was privileged to visit this camp on the south edge of Bethlehem and to be guests in the camp for the night.
The Duheisha Refugee Camp was established in 1948 for Palestinian refugees from the villages of East Jerusalem, driven out by the newly established state of Israel. Originally, there were 3,000 refugees in this camp, who lived in tents. Today the camp houses 12,000 refugees on the same piece of land that housed the 3,000 placed there 60 years ago! Now the people live in houses and apartments that look much like the rest of the city of Bethlehem, but since there is so little room, they can only add another floor where this is possible on this rough terrain.
Our host at the camp was a young man in his 30's with a wife and two children. He works at the Badil Refugee Center in Bethlehem. Their family lives with his large extended family in a jumble of apartments. We were served a delicious supper of chicken, rice, cauliflower, and salad, sitting around the room on mats spread out on the floor. Then our host took us on a walking tour of the camp, up and down the very narrow lanes, many of them far too narrow to accomodate vehicles.
When we came back to our lodging, our host told us his story in good English. His father was born the night his grandparents fled their ancestral village some 20 miles north of the camp, outside Jerusalem. His grandparents were driven from their village by an Israeli artillery attack, and his father was born to his grandmother "on the run." For 60 years, this family has lived in this camp. One of his brothers was killed in March, 2002, by the Israeli military, and a younger brother was deported to Gaza by the Israelis at the age of 18 at about the same time. This brother still has to live in Gaza. His mother went once to visit this son in the past 6 years. She had to travel for 45 days through 3 or 4 countries in order to see her son.
We had a long conversation with our host. He and all of these refugees are of course Muslim. He stressed how close knit their community is, and how important education is to maintain their culture and their identity as a people. I asked whether the children and youth, exposed to TV and the internet as they are, do not want to leave the difficult life of this refugee camp and immigrate somewhere else, as young people in our rural communities leave for life in the city. He said that on the contrary, children have a stronger sense of identity than ever. When asked where they are from, they will tell you they are from their native village in East Jerusalem, not from this refugee camp!
Our host told us his family used to visit the site of his ancestral village, a rural farming community, demolished and abandoned by the Israelis after his family fled. He told how once as a child he was feeling sick before a visit to this demolished village, but as they came to the place he became well again. Now it is impossible for anyone from this camp to enter Israel proper or visit the place they came from, though it is only a few miles away. The people in this camp are virtually prisoners in this small, highly populated place. They stay because if they leave, they lose all claim to the place from which they were taken.
These are a beautiful, peaceful, hospitable people. They live in large, close, extended family units. (The apartments we stayed in were new apartments designed for family members soon to be married. We were men in one apartment and women in the other.) In the evening, a young woman who works for a handicraft cooperative came and showed us the handwork of the women in the camp and offered items for us to buy. And there are children everywhere! It seems to me that having children is one of the acts of resistance by an oppressed people. It is their statement that they are not going away, and that they will outlast the oppression. The world, and the Israeli government, will need to find a place for these people, now refugees for 60 long years! They surely have a place in my heart!!
Roy