Wow! I’m still walking on air after this morning’s phone call. Dr. John Davids, Chief of Staff at Shriners Hospital in Greenville, called today to let me know that Salee’s little sister, Rusul, has been accepted for treatment! What a dream come true. I was on pins and needles worrying that, after helping to get the care for Salee to be able to walk again, her little sister would be left sitting at home, forever maimed. But, there is now hope for Rusul, too! What a blessing!

Rusul’s right leg was horribly mangled in the same US air strike of November 2006, that took the lives of her little brother and friend, and both legs of her big sister as they were outside of their homes, playing. To imagine children, innocently at play, being hit by missiles paid for by our tax dollars, is heart-wrenching. Can we even imagine how we’d feel (and react) if another nation’s bombs dropped from the sky onto our children? If we ran outside to find them scattered on the ground, blood-soaked and broken? No, we can’t imagine it, yet we’re inflicting this horror on the families of Iraq on a daily basis. The feeling that I, as an American, am somehow responsible for the loss of Salee’s legs, the death of her brother, and the maiming of precious little Rusul brings me such sorrow.
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Cole called tonight and said that Salee and Abu Ali had made it safely home to Fallujah.  There was a welcoming party with a huge feast and a sacrificial lamb.  All was well, and they were happy.

But happiness must be a pretty relative thing in a city that’s been decimated by siege and sanction.  In a city where nobody doesn’t have somebody that they loved who’s been killed as a result of our invasion.

I want to think of Salee happy.  Her smile lit up every room into which she walked (or wheeled).  Her laugh was infectious.  Her joy was pure. (more…)

Our little girl has gone. And my heart with her. I just returned from a week in Los Angeles, Salee’s first stop on her trip home to Iraq.

Sitting in LAX waiting for my flight home, as Salee, Abu Ali and Cole fly on to New York for a three day stop before heading to the Middle East, I think of the past week. Cole’s incredible passion for the cause filled the week with presentations and schedules to meet, but also many memories.

I’ll never forget Abu Ali’s eloquence when speaking about Iraq. I’ll never forget his face when he tells of a family near him, seven members killed in one bombing and a soldier coming to the hospital and saying “Sorry”. “SORRY?” Abu Ali says. “You killed seven people and all we hear is ‘sorry’? But that’s how it always is,” he adds sadly. He talks about Iraq before the invasion, how Shia and Sunni lived together peacefully, without a thought. “Sectarian violence? There wasn’t any,” he says. “We were friends.” (more…)

Cole and I went to a lunchtime presentation today given by Congressman Bob Inglis who has monthly talks with his constituents in area restaurants. Today’s topic was “Accountability in Iraq”. Apparently, although we are the ones who invaded their country, bombed their cities, destroyed their infrastructure and are killing their people, accountability rests entirely on the shoulders of the Iraqis.

The main frustration in the room seemed to be that the new Iraqi government wasn’t getting the situation in Iraq under control. The fact that “control” might be a little difficult when your country had 160,000 armed foreign troops in tanks and airplanes firing upon its citizens, when they hadn’t had a full day’s electricity in four and a half years, clean drinking water was an expensive luxury most cannot afford, and starvation was as big a danger as imminent death from US firepower, seemed to have entirely eluded these people. The fact that a government forced upon you by the very people who had invaded your country might not actually be accepted as legitimate by victims of the invasion, also seemed to be an alien concept. (more…)

Selena Frank and I contacted No More Victims back in 2005 looking for a way for our interfaith youth group to help a war-injured Iraqi child. They were already doing wonderful work with the homeless and hungry in our local area but we wanted them to reach out to a child affected by our actions in Iraq and perhaps, to gain an awareness for civilian casualties. Cole Miller e-mailed me back immediately with the name of a little girl who’d been blinded by a cluster bomb outside of her home. Ayat was beyond medical intervention, but we were able to show our youth photos of her and tell them her story and they were very anxious to help, holding car washes and barbeques, talking to our local school for the blind, and eventually sending a package of things a young blind child might be able to use to brighten her day. (more…)