Category: Travels Near and Far

We drove up a narrow street in Qaraqosh, Iraq, practically an alley, and our driver stopped the van when he could go no further. A large group of soldiers stood at the entrance to the church, as if on the lookout for something, and they eyed up our vehicle. They held their weapons nonchalantly, the way men might hold briefcases or umbrellas. Just as we came to a stop, a motorcade of cars strung their way through the alley. The also stopped beside the church. A group of people got out, and one of the men was dressed in the black garments of a priest or a bishop.

He shook the hands of every soldier, of every person who approached him. He entered the church and was followed by a small crowd. We got out of the van. Walking in the street felt exposed, vulnerable. I glanced along the roof line of the surrounding buildings, but they were nothing more than rubble. There was no lone sniper, no incoming mortar. We followed the man and the crowd into the dark church.

There were no lights, and the sky outside was gray, so everything was in shadow, but it was impossible to miss the blackened granite walls. ISIS had coated those walls in some kind of fuel, something that would burn for hours. The columns were not as charred but were covered in ISIS graffiti. The altar had been desecrated. Anything holy or symbolic had been shot to pieces.

We walked through the church and into the courtyard where, again, anything beautiful had been smashed. ISIS had turned the courtyard into a firing range. There were reports of ISIS crucifying Christians in that part of Iraq, beheading children. The church building itself felt like it was in mourning, weeping for what had been lost.

We wandered around, stunned, feeling lost. A light drizzle fell from the sky, and something in me wanted it to pour, wanted the heavens to open and for a rain, no, a flood, to sweep it all away. All the burned things, all the disgusting symbols, all the bullet casings, all the memories of what had happened there. But no heavy rain fell. Only a light drizzle that blurred my glasses and sent us into one of the wings of the church.

There, we found a priest and a nun rummaging knee deep in debris. The room they were in had been destroyed. Bunk beds lined the walls. I thought they must be looking for something valuable – they seemed so desperate to find whatever it was they were looking for. They moved rubble and ceiling tiles and plaster. Parts of the walls that had fallen in. All the closets had held was strewn on the floor. We asked them what they were looking for. The priest held up half of a flannel board.

“We need the other half to this flannel board,” he told us through a translator. “We need to find it so that we can tell Bible stories to the orphans when they return.”

I walked out. Someone else in our group followed me, began to walk up the stairs.

“Don’t go up there!” someone told them urgently. “That floor hasn’t yet been cleared for landmines and IEDs.”

We went back in the room and we helped the priest and the nun look for their flannel board. There are still so many good people in Iraq, people looking for all the lost things. So many good people.

We didn’t find the flannel board. We said we would send them one.

Back in the courtyard, one of the soldiers asked to have his photo taken with us. We gathered together and tried to smile. The rain came down again. We walked out into the street, through the blackened church. the priest was leading the people in a church service, and they took communion.

The street was lined with broken houses, destroyed buildings. The church’s steeple was nearly falling down. We got back in the bus, and they drove us out of that broken city.

* * * * *

I sit on the floor again, another night in Lancaster. The boys are nearly asleep. The light outside is gone. I think back on my time in Iraq and it seems like a dream, or something I did twenty years ago, though it was only last month. I think of the people I met, and they are like characters in a book. But while I sit here in the quiet, the fan humming, over there they must live with their blackened churches, their bullet-strewn courtyards. Their nightmares. They must go on rebuilding, being good people, praying for peace.

I pray for peace. I pray for peace. I pray for peace.

God, where are you?

But I know where God is. He is in Iraq. I saw him there, in the blackened church, handing out the Body and the Blood. I saw him there, in the wing of the church, searching for a lost flannel board. I saw him in the faces of the people filing in to attend the service.

As we drove away, he waved good-bye, the hand of a small child in the street.

I sat on a small stool in between two hospital beds. There were maybe twelve beds in the boys’ hospital ward, which was actually a sturdy, huge, permanent tent. The tent was in the middle of an open-air trauma hospital surrounded by 12-foot-high cement blast walls topped with razor wire. Beyond that? More layers of blast walls and fences and trenches, the makings of a high security prison, only this place was trying to keep people out, not in. Just beyond the fence were the suburbs outside of east Mosul. The air was cool, with a slight breeze, and the sky was slate gray.

Later, I spoke with one of the directors of the hospital, set up and installed by Samaritan’s Purse at the beginning of 2017. She said that a few weeks before we arrived, there had been a suicide car bomb along with a few other incidents in Mosul, all in the same night. Dozens of casualties had arrived at the hospital, so many that the entire staff, even those supposed to be sleeping, were called in. Still, there were not enough people, so non-medical staff were called in to help. Their job?

To sit with the dying.

She said she sat there in the midst of all those beds, each bed holding a person who could not be saved, and she sang and she prayed and she waited while each and every person took their last breath.

This is what some people on this planet are doing. While I worry about where my next paycheck will come from or complain about the temperature of my latte, there are people in northern Iraq, accomplished, talented, dedicated people who could have high-paying corporate jobs but instead choose to go to the ends of the Earth and sit with strangers while they die.

This is the ministry of presence. This is what I learned about during our trip to northern Iraq.

* * * * *

I’ll be honest: I felt very out of place there in the hospital. The doctors and nurses scurried here and there, from tent to tent, all with such purpose. We tried to stay out of the way. There were three, state-of-the-art operating rooms, a women and children’s area, an entire section where the staff lived and ate (no one left the hospital unless it was to travel back to Erbil), and a men’s section completely cordoned off with its own blast walls – any male between the ages of 15 and 50 who came to the hospital without ID was placed in that section until they could be positively ID’d as anyone other than ISIS.

And there I sat. Quiet. Not speaking the same language as the children I hoped to comfort. Feeling very inadequate. Learning about the ministry of presence.

Beside me, the boy began to moan. He pulled the blanket up over his head, arched his back, and let out a long, low groaning that seemed to emanate from his soul and have no end. I looked around urgently – why wasn’t someone helping him? He seemed to be in a lot of pain. An older man came over to the bed and scolded him, shushed him. I looked over at the nurse.

“He’s autistic,” she explained. “That’s the boy’s uncle. His father is in the men’s ward until he can be ID’d.”

One of the girls who worked in the hospital grabbed Murray’s guitar and sat down beside the autistic boy. She started strumming chords, three or four different ones, creating a simple, steady melody. The other boys in the room, most of whom had broken arms or bandaged fingers, clapped their hands together gingerly and smiled. The boy beside me, the boy who had been moaning, peeked out from under the blanket. His dark eyes unblinking. His mouth closed and silent. She kept playing. He watched her fingers.

Then he started to sing.

His voice was mystical, magical, in the way Arabic singing is. It was like the sound of a different era. It was like his voice was coming to us from a thousand years ago, through narrow city streets and over boulder-covered mountains. And, remarkably, his singing was in perfect pitch, perfect rhythm. Our friend kept strumming, and he kept singing, the words wavering out to us like an apology, or the offer of friendship.

Someone asked the interpreter what he was singing. She smiled a sad smile.

“He is singing a lullaby to his mother,” she said softly. “His mother who is now dead.”

I traveled to Northern Iraq with a group called Reload Love. They take spent bullet casings, melt them down, and turn them into jewelry to raise awareness and money to support children impacted by terror. They send aid to in-country partners that have expertise in rescuing children from harm’s way and provide much needed assistance, including relief supplies, children’s programs, and safe spaces such as playgrounds. Reload Love is doing incredible work. You can find out more about them, as well as check out their beautiful line of jewelry, here.

There was an Iraqi man sitting next to me on the plane as we approached Erbil. He motioned towards the window.

“I love seeing Erbil at night,” he said, looking down on the lights. He sounded like a man talking about a woman or his childhood home. He looked at me, alarmed, as if suddenly abashed by some lack of manners.

“Have you been here before?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Come, come over here!” he insisted, unbuckling his seatbelt. “You have to see! Take my seat.”

“No, no,” I said, smiling. “That’s okay. Really.” But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He stood and pushed passed me into the aisle so that I could slide over into his chair and watch our descent into Iraq. It really was a beautiful site. Erbil spread itself out in shining white lights, hemmed in by the pitch black mountains. It looked like any other city I had flown into before – serene, busy, like an outpost surrounded by darkness.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” And he smiled, looking rather pleased with himself.

“Do you need a ride from the airport?” he asked. “I can give you a ride if you need one.” I explained that our group had someone picking us up. Need I remind you that it was 4am? Never in all of my travels has anyone ever offered to give me a ride from the airport, much less at that kind of hour.

No, I had to go to Iraq and hang out with Muslims to receive that kind of radical hospitality.

* * * * *

We arrived at our hotel around 5am. We slept until 7am. Had breakfast. Glided into a day-long security training session at 8:30am. Had to prop eyelids open with toothpicks. What I caught from the lesson was this.

The road from Erbil to Mosul, along with the abandoned buildings in Mosul, were lined with thousands of old mines and IEDs that had yet to be disarmed. Our plan was to travel to the outskirts of Mosul two days later.

ISIS will sometimes put toys in the middle of the road for children. These toys are attached to explosives.

Do not leave the road. Do not walk into abandoned buildings. Do not step on rocks that are out of place.

Photos of people who have stepped on landmines and experienced traumatic amputations are images that will stay in your mind for a long time.

* * * * *

I slept well that night. I woke up early the next morning. My body had no idea what time it was – too many late nights in a row, too many long days, too many time zones crossed. I had to believe the clock, and the sun, knew what they were doing.

We ate breakfast on the sixth floor of the hotel. The entire wall was glass, and we looked out over Erbil. Again, I was surprised at how normal the city appeared. There weren’t car bombs going off every day; there weren’t mortar rounds falling from the sky. There was traffic, and people opening their shops for the day, and a bell hop who insisted on helping us out the door to our waiting van.

So began our first day in Iraq. We planned on driving two to three hours north, into the mountains, to a remove valley lined with eight Christian villages. It would be many miles on the road, and many checkpoints. I felt a little bit anxious, leaving the safety of Erbil. We climbed in the van, and off we went.

* * * * *

I traveled to Northern Iraq with a group called Reload Love. They take spent bullet casings, melt them down, and turn them into jewelry to raise awareness and money to support children impacted by terror. They send aid to in-country partners that have expertise in rescuing children from harm’s way and provide much needed assistance, including relief supplies, children’s programs, and safe spaces such as playgrounds. Reload Love is doing incredible work. You can find out more about them, as well as check out their beautiful line of jewelry, here.