by Kathleen O'Malley

[The author was a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team delegation to Northern Iraq, 7-21 November 2009.]

The poet Rilke wrote, "Ultimately it is upon our vulnerability that we depend."  When I travel to areas of conflict I know that at some time, some place, in some interaction, my heart will be broken.  I can choose to shut down or let the heart respond.

In the Kurdish region of Iraq, we visited a former prison used by Saddam Hussein to incarcerate and torture Kurdish men, women, and children.  We saw large, cold, windowless, stone-walled rooms, with nothing but threadbare blankets on the floor and a hole in a corner that served as a toilet. Bloodstains and the odors of urine and excrement were gone, but we could imagine them.

In the room for women and children, mothers gave birth to their babies on that floor and often watched them die there.  The torture rooms displayed various devices, or their replicas, and mannequins to demonstrate how the devices were used.

In one of these cells, an older woman dressed in black approached a mannequin—electrical wires attached to various parts of its body—that was hanging by wrists bound behind its back.  She began to weep, then screamed in Kurdish, shaking her fist.  Parween, our translator, whispered that she was calling out a poem she had written to her sixteen-year-old son who was tortured and subsequently died in that prison.  I later learned that all she had been given of her son were the two torn garments he wore at the end.

My heart's armor was shattered.  The brokenheartedness that I both dread and welcome had come.  I left the prison weeping, and as I looked back I saw her behind me weeping as well. She walked up and hugged me and for that moment, she and I shared our common humanity.  In that shared space there is no hatred, war, or greed—none of the things that lead us to hurt and damage one another.  In our shared vulnerabilities, we transcended our differences.

Saddam Hussein was not the only despot to perpetrate such horror.  My heart wasn't broken simply by that mother's pain, but more generally by the human capacity to devise and inflict such cruelty. History offers numerous examples: Hitler, Somoza, the state-sponsored violence of Argentina's generals.  And the violence continues: Mugabe in Zimbabwe and our own soldiers in military prisons like Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and guards in many of our overcrowded prisons—all supported by higher authorities.

And we all commit injustice in often unnoticed ways: avoiding eye contact with the beggar on the street, yelling at our kids, not listening to a friend.  Or we enable injustice in major ways, e.g., not taking a stand against a corrupt government.  Those of us living outside of war zones, prisons, or violent neighborhoods can easily shield ourselves from the suffering of those who live within places of despair.

We can choose to shut out the world or open to it and let the heart respond.  Our openness and responsiveness can lead us to each other.