Women, war, and the need for home

Yesterday was ‘Thanksgiving Day’ here in the US. Our home was a heady mix of great cooking smells and multiple conversations as we reveled in the fellowship of guests from Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Inida, France, Sri Lanka, Germany and (did I leave anyone out?) I felt truly blessed to be with all these wonderful people and to start to hear some of their stories. My own kids were off with their respective significant others, but will all be here for Christmas with the s.o.’s. For me, filling the house with bonds of affection, food, and good fellowship is what it means to have and to build a home.
So this morning, some poignant reminders of the disastrous “home-breaking” effects of war and violence, and the consequences these have for women who seek to build secure, nurturing homes for their families.
First up: Faiza’s heart-breaking accounts— now posted on her blog in English– of the short visit she made earlier this month back to her family’s former home in Baghdad from her temporary exile in Jordan:
* This post, dated Nov. 12, is mainly a paen of her love and longing for her home city, and tells of her first thoughts on returning:

When the plane started descending and the features of Baghdad appeared, I burst into tears…
For two years now I have been away from Baghdad, I was forced not to return because of the miserable security conditions, the kidnappings, and the free killings, without justifications.
But I have grown tired of the separation, and my heart broke of sadness, I cry every day. And whenever I travel to other cities and capitals to forget my sadness, my longing for Baghdad grows, with my sadness about her, and I burst into tears.
…[F]rom the plane, I burst into tears when I saw her features… as if I heard her moaning, her complains of what has befallen her of destruction, devastation and neglect, of killings and violence, and the bloodshed on her streets. I looked on from the plane and saw her pale, her greenery has lessened, and her deserts have grown.
I felt my heart wring, I chocked, and cried bitterly…
What have they done to you?
What have the dogs done to you?
I kept repeating, and crying….
I remembered the wars, the embargo, and the last war, and how disasters, sorrows and calamities piled up upon her… and she lost her sons and daughters, who were killed or emigrated…
I love Baghdad like I loved my father and mother, may God bless their souls.
I see that Baghdad is in a dilemma…
Do we abandon those whom we love, while they are in a dilemma?

* This takes you to the photos she took on the trip.
* This tells about her return to her home neighborhood, her actual home, and the friend with whom she was staying. She writes there about her broader family:

I was happy I was tasting the food of my beloved Baghdad, that I was at my friend’s house; my studying colleague since the days of the Collage of Engineering, Baghdad University. She loves me and treats me like my kin.
Where are my kin?
We were eight brothers and sisters, before the war.
I now have one sister and one brother, and the rest left Iraq after the war.
I called my sister; she lives in Al-Saydiyah District. We exchanged greetings and questions warmly. Then she invited me to have dinner at her house on Saturday, but my relative who was accompanying me refused, saying that was a dangerous area, and my friend, whom I was staying with, warned me also…
Then my sister called on Saturday, and told me not to come, the situation there was dangerous…
I cancelled the visit, and didn’t go to see her. We kept talking by phone……
What life is this?
People cannot move from one district to another inside Baghdad?

* This Nov. 14 post tells about, among other things, the terrible increase in the prices of necessary everyday goods in Baghdad:

The gas bottle of the cooker was empty. There were no gas vendors today. How much does changing the gas bottle cost? I asked with curiosity…
She said: 17,000 Iraqi Dinaars. I gasped…
It was 500 I.D. Two years ago.
My friend laughed and said: Oh, that was long ago, now is something else.
Very well, and the gasoline?
Now, a can of 20 liters is sold for 10,000 I.D. on the street (commercial sales, not governmental). I told her; we used to buy it for 2000 I.D. on the street two years ago.
Well, what about the salaries, have they changed? You are an employee of the state; did your salary change since two years?
She said: of course not…
I kept staring at her…
So, how do people live?
… She shook her head, and smiled bitterly…
I smiled with her and said: Oh yes, this is the new Iraq that Bush created….

And this:

This friend of mine; the companion of my childhood and studying days, I never knew before whether she was a Sunnie or a Shia’at, ever.
I swear by Allah the Mighty that we lived long years together, until each of us got married and life separated us, then I traveled to live outside Iraq, and all the while I had no idea whatsoever of her sect.
Now, a short while ago I learned that her son’s name is Omar, a Sunnie name. She fears very much for him, so she issued a second identity card for him, bearing another name, to protect him from the death gangs on roadblocks, those who kill people according to identity cards.
And that is what we reaped out of the occupation policies, and its new constitution, which is full of poison.
I am supposed to be a Shia’at, and this is my enemy- a Sunnie, according to what Bush publishes about the civil war.
Where is the hatred in my heart against her?
Where is the hatred in her heart against me?
The whole house; her husband, her son and his wife, and her daughter, all run to supply my requests, putting the best food in front of me, and they don’t eat with me, shyly. They left their master bedroom to me, while she and her husband slept in another room.
I was so embarrassed by their generosity, and felt very sad for the conditions in which they live, for they do not deserve what is happening to them- the daily killings, violence, and terror.

Actually, you should all go and read all of that important post, which includes many details about how women and families have been coping with the “sectarian cleansing” of vast swathes of Baghdad by the increasingly numerous militias. The way these people have been able to keep up relations across sectarian boundaires would probably come as a big surprise to anyone who believes this “Shia-Sunni” division and hatred is something eternal and inevitable.
* This post from Nov. 17 tells of more heartbreak as she tries to live in and move around Baghdad during the following days. It includes this:

One of [her son] Majid’s friends’ name is Omar (a Sunnie), and the other’s name is Hayder (a Shia’at), they both study at medical collage. And now each of them carries two identity cards in his pocket; one a Sunnie and the other a Shia’at. While they go to collage, the mothers remain terrified all day long, waiting for their sons to return safely.
What kind of a life is this?
************************
The eldest daughter of my friend achieved a high mark at the high school exams this year, God bless her, and she was admitted to the medical collage. I was so happy for her, and thought to myself: Are there intelligent and patient people like the Iraqis? In spite of all the ordeals they study, excel, and have smiling, laughing faces?
I respect the Iraqis, and I am proud of being one of them. I see them as strong, renitent [resistant?] people, in spite of catastrophes, people who are proud of themselves and their civilization, even though Bush disfigured their image in front of the world, making them look like barbarian tribes who fight among themselves.
The truth is- the role of the intellectuals, the nationalists, and the wise ones in Iraq was deliberately marginalized. The shiny, beautiful picture of the Iraqi people in the media was blotted… and the authority was put into the hands of leaderships that are foreign from the people, that used to live as opposition abroad; those who planned the war on Iraq with Bush, then we discovered that they are worst than Saddam Hussein, as they brought along their militias that kill and terrorize the Iraqis, they turned the land of Iraq into a blood-shedding field, and the occupier watches, and feels happy, because this is exactly what he wants to justify remaining in Iraq for indefinite years.
But I found that the Iraqis understand exactly what is happening. I found no sectarian hatred in their hearts against each other.
I found that Hayder and Omar are friends who loved each other since childhood days, and each fears for the other from being kidnapped by the criminal sectarian death gangs, of which the Iraqis are innocent- innocent from its presence, its notion, and from those who finance it…
I found that Hayder and Omar are a model of the Iraqi young people and their sufferings now…

* In this Nov. 19 post, Faiza writes about the reactions in Baghdad (including her own) to the death sentence that was delivered to Saddam Hussein while she was there:

the real disaster was the Prime Minister’s (Al-Maliqiee) speech, for it was a disgusting, sectarian, anger-provoking speech, for those wise ones who seek to calm things down and pull the country out of its dilemma.
And for some others, the sectarian, narrow minded like him, they found it a great speech.
And still for some others, those who were angry with the other sect, their anger and indignation increased.
The disasters increased when the Iraqi Police opened fire on demonstrators who denounced the verdict against Saddam, while fire wasn’t opened on those who supported it…
There was a sub-title on Iraqi TV stations, that some militias were attacking some areas in Baghdad, or attacking people’s houses and kidnapping them. It was supposed to be a curfew, how do these militias move around and attack houses?
Where is the government, the Police, and the Army?
We called many friends to ask what is happening in their areas, and each area had its own terror…
Here, there are militias, and there, mortar shells are falling…
At that moment precisely, I saw the fact that this is a losing sectarian government which [pours] oil over fire, increasing the blaze in Iraq.
I was amazed at the government’s stupidity, and its dumb, backwards political speech. I felt it has revealed to everyone its idiocy and incapability to handle Iraq’s problems wisely, and intelligently.
The Prime Minister said in his speech: the execution of Saddam isn’t equal to one drop of blood from Al-Sadder the martyr, or Al-Hakeem, or the Al-Da’awa Party martyrs…
This is a catastrophic speech!
This is a speech that can ignite a civil war…
All those whom he mentioned in his speech of Saddam’s victims are only the Shia’ats. This is a speech provoking violence, opening wounds, and strengthening the wish of revenge in the victim’s kin.
As if he is saying: Saddam is a Sunnie, and his victims were all Shia’ats. Now, we avenged them.
If he had one iota of brains, an iota of understanding, an iota of patriotism, of love to Iraq and the people of Iraq, he should have said: The execution of Saddam isn’t equal to one drop of blood from any Iraqi who was the victim of Saddam’s injustice.
That would have been enough.
This would have been a speech of a patriotic man, of the head of a national unity government which really wants to save the country from what it is in.
But he rather proved he is the head of a sectarian, spiteful, disjointed government, with a losing speech, far removed from the pulse of the street, caring nothing for it, caring nothing of the bloodshed, and doesn’t want to put an end to it….
… At the peak of my sadness and frustration, while I was at my friend’s house, Bush appeared on TV in the evening, and said: The world became a better place without Saddam Hussein…
I fell into laughter… I said to my friend: listen, everything is perfect, everything is better than it was, but we- the Iraqis- do not comprehend, and do not appreciate the miracles that Bush brought to Iraq…

Faiza gives us such an amazing gift as she describes what it is like for Iraqi people of the professional class as they struggle to keep their lives and society intact in these horrible days. Imagine how much harder it likely is for the millions of Iraqis who have far fewer means of financial support than her family has.
Next up after Faiza is Leana Nishimura, a sargeant in the Maryland National Guard and one of the 16,000 single mothers from the U.S. who have been deployed into war-zones (mainly, Iraq) as part of the Bushites’ plans for global militarism.
In this story in today’s WaPo, Donna St. George writes poignantly of the trials Nishimura has faced during and since the end of her 12-month deployment into Iraq, which ended just about a year ago.
Once she got her deployment orders in fall 2004 Nishimura arranged to ship her three kids– Cheyenne, 3, Dylan, 6, and ‘TJ’, 7– to her mother’s home in Hawaii, almost half a world away from where she’d been raising her kids in Elkton, Maryland.
When she came from Iraq, she no longer had the job she’d previously had at a Christian school in Maryland, but she got offered another job, to work full-time for the National Guard somewhere else in the state. Neither her old job nor her new job pays well. By the time Nishimura had paid the deposit on a small apartment near her new job she had no cash left to ship her kids back to the new home she hoped to create for them there.
And no, apparently the US government– which had been happy to tear this single mother away from her young children, place her quite directly in harm’s way for a year, and rely on the goodwill of her mother to do the all-important job of raising and nurturing the three kids for all that time– did not have any provision for bringing her kids back to her. It was only five or six weeks after she got back to Maryland last year that some people in local churches contributed money so the kids and their grandmother could fly back to the new family home. St. George wrote that at that point Nishimura “felt the worst was behind them.”
But then, the post-traumatic stress symptoms set in:

the experience of war did not easily fade. She had been based in Tikrit, amid mortars that shook the earth, near roads where bombs were often hidden.
Now she found herself seized by sudden tears, insomnia and nightmares.
In one dream, she saw herself doing a military crawl, with her middle child on her back, as bombs exploded around them.
In another, she hunted everywhere for her children, but they were gone. “Either I’m separated and I can’t find them,” she said, “or I am with them and we are in danger. ”
She eventually saw a counselor, who told her she had post-traumatic stress disorder and gave her medication .
The stress of war came on top of the stress of life.
Her closest friends lived far away. There were new schools, new neighbors. Her job paid well and she still got child support, but it was hard to make ends meet. Over time, her family settled in: her sons joining baseball teams, her daughter signing up for gymnastics. The family bought one pet bird and rescued another. “I feel like it’s finally coming together,” she said one spring morning.
Then her oldest son cried at the sight of her packing a suitcase for a short business trip. And after a veterans celebration at school, he refused to open his books.
Finally, she said he told her: “I don’t want you to go again.”
Experts say that emotional fallout for children can come and go after war. “Kids, at some level, must feel a sense of abandonment,” said [Steven] Mintz, the Houston professor…

16,000 single parents deployed overseas??? I find this outrageous. So long as there is to be a military apparatus– and pray God that all the world’s peoples can turn away from this path within the next few years– then I suppose at some level I “support” the idea of equal opportunity for females, in general, within the military.
But mothers, and especially single mothers, is another matter completely.
I know in my own life as a journalist and writer, I have voluntarily entered situations that many other people would have judged to be too risky for themselves. But so long as I was still a mother of emotionally needy children, I really limited the degree of risk I would take on… This, though all my kids have fathers and other family members whom I could certainly rely on to give them good continuing care should anything happen to me. (The father of Nishimura’s kids apparently wasn’t in the care-giving equation there, though he did contribute financially for the kids. Maybe he, too, was in the military, and therefore unavailable for care-giving?)
Donna St. George writes,

In the military, parental status is not a barrier to serving in a war. All deploy when the call comes — single mothers, single fathers, married couples — relying on a “family-care plan” that designates a caregiver for children when parents are gone.
The thinking is that a soldier is a soldier. “Everyone trains to a standard of readiness and must be able to be mobilized,” said Lt. Col. Mike Milord of the National Guard Bureau.

The vast majority of people who join the National Guard do so for primarily financial reasons. And surely, this has to be particularly the case for Guard members who are single moms? You could argue, I suppose, that Nishimura and the 15,999 other single parents who have been deployed to war-zones knew what they were doing when they first signed on with the Guard. Well, maybe. But what on earth has their decision to “serve” in this way and the US government’s exploitation of this willingness done to their children, who had no choice in the matter at all?
Shouldn’t children be better protected against the recklessness of their parents and the government in this regard?
Don’t get me wrong. I deeply, deeply sympathize with Nishimura and the tragic situation that she and her family find themselves in. But you have to wish that that young single mom had not found herself in a situation prior to her deployment where she figured that only joining the National Guard would allow her to get by financially. St. George writes that even with her salary from the Christian school, the child support paid by her ex-husband, and the money she got from the National Guard, Nishimura still needed public assistance in that period. But shouldn’t the level of public assistance– to a working single parent of three young children– have been high enough to let her build a decent home for them even without taking on the horrendous, potentially lethal obligations of joining the National Guard? Yes, it absolutely should have been, in a financially rich (but ethically poor) country like the United States.
Anyway, at this point, my good thoughts definitely go to Leana and her kids as they struggle to deal with the continuing fallout from George Bush’s disastrous war.
War, as we know, is disastrous for women and children (and men.) But I am filled with admiration for all the millions of women in war-affected societies around the world who continue to struggle against horrendous odds to build homes that nurture and protect their families.
Build families, not bombs!
(Talking of “home”, I see that as of yesterday, Laila el-Haddad was still waiting, waiting at the border between Egypt and Gaza, in her continuing attempt– along with her son and her parents– to return to their family’s home in Gaza City. Israel continues to bar thousands of Palestinians with Gaza IDs from returning to their homes. At the same time, of course, that it continues its decades-long policies of breaking up Palestinian families inside Israel, in the West Bank, and all around the region…)