With penetrating eyes, Doña Miriam* asks me if I cry easily.  She has been telling me about her participation in a forum of campesina women, during which they shared painful experiences of displacement, threats, and other abuses perpetrated by different armed actors.  The forum was part of a series of events organized by civil society groups to commemorate 200 years of Colombians’ struggle for true independence.

PRAYERS FOR PEACEMAKERS, Sep. 29, 2010

Pray for Ahmed* who contacted the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq recently. He was a high-ranking officer in an armed Kurdish resistance group who had killed Iranians. Now he encourages the youth to practise nonviolence.

Doug Pritchard

Christian Peacemaker Teams

Toronto, Canada

*pseudonym for security purposes

She did not realize that, through her pearl eyes, I saw grief and pain.  When I called her for a chat to tell me the reason why she did not play or dance or laugh with the other children in the room, she suddenly came into my arms and cried.  "My mother died, she's gone away and left me behind; my mother loved me very much.  She was sick; her kidneys stopped functioning.  My father sold both the house and the car to buy a kidney for her, but she did not recover.  They had shaved her head and in surgery, they installed a tube, but soon after the surgery, she turned yellow and could hardly breath.

On the morning of 20 September 2010, the Abdul Rahman Sharif Sultan family of the Al Bweireh neighborhood awoke to find that Israeli settlers had cut down six dunams (1 dunam= ¼ acre) of their mature grape vines during the night.  

 A member of the family told CPTers, said “I have tended these trees since I have been very young and they have killed them…We raise these trees like children; they grow up and then (the settlers) kill them when they are all grown just so they can have our land.”  

Did you participate in a recent Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) delegation that whetted your appetite for embodied peace work, partnering with others working nonviolently for justice, and confronting the injustice that leads to war?  Does CPT's style of peacemaking, confronting injustice, undoing oppressions work fit with yours? Is now the time to take the next step and join the Peacemaker Corps?

A life-changing thought came to mind this past week while I was serving in the village of at-Tuwani.  I was out with Palestinian shepherds, watching the Jewish settlers of Ma'on construct another large chicken barn on stolen Palestinian land.  As I watched, all of a sudden, the armed Jewish settlers and their bulldozers vanished from sight, only to be replaced by other white settlers—persons of European origin, carrying Bibles, guns, and Christian civilization.  Then the Palestinian shepherds next to me, a couple of young Muslim teenagers, also disappeared, and in their place stood two men of First Nations origin.  And before I knew it, the desert land beneath my feet began to tremble, and thousands of huge Douglas Firs erupted from the hillsides, while a raging river full of salmon and steelhead burst forth from the rocky valley below.

 “And the shops of the city will clap their hands!”

     That’s what those radical biblical prophets would be singing if they were here in occupied Hebron, tramping through the streets of the Old City, seeing the overwhelming number of Palestinian shops that have been shut down by the Israeli forces.  A long time ago, courageous truth-telling Jews like Isaiah and Jeremiah went around proclaiming to the oppressed that God was coming to bring justice to all things.  Not only people, but everything would receive God's peace, so that, according to the prophetic imagination, even “the trees will clap their hands” (Is. 55:12).  And if trees clap, why not Palestinian shops?

PRAYERS FOR PEACEMAKERS, Sep. 22, 2010

A recent report commissioned by The Body Shop has confirmed that its palm oil supplier in Colombia has damaged the environment and displaced the community of Las Pavas. Pray that The Body Shop will act to protect human rights and the planet.

Doug Pritchard

Christian Peacemaker Teams

Toronto, Canada

The regular Saturday movement, "Open Shuhada Street," changed tactics on 21 August 2010. Since the police had threatened two of the organizers with large fines and a possible ten-year imprisonment if the demonstrations continued, the organizing group felt it better to use a new approach during the remainder of Ramadan.

Yes, the members of the Las Pavas community are making progress in the effort return to their land!  Your efforts have helped.  But Las Pavas continues to need your intervention.  The Body Shop—in response to the ongoing campaign— recently completed an investigation of palm oil supplier Daabon’s activities in Las Pavas, which found serious problems with Daabon’s operations.  Even so, The Body Shop has yet to publicly state that it will stop buying palm oil from Daabon unless Daabon returns the land to the displaced community of Las Pavas, pays reparations for damage done, and works to correct damage to the environment there.

 Take Action:  Send a letter—or please re-send if you sent one before— to The Body Shop encouraging it to take action to correct the situation.  Go to http://www.cpt.org/urgent-action/LasPavas for reference.