How we would want Afghan children to play or cry
January 31, 2010 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Please watch how Afghan children ski and play ‘marbles’ with stones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w97Be_hMzjo
playing ‘marbles’, with stones
Transcript of Video
Modern Warfare 2 is a video war game that raked in US$550 million in the first 5 days of its sales
Call to Duty ; Modern Warfare 2 video game
Afghan children playing ‘marbles’, with stones
Play may involve fears and risks
Afghan children skiing with sneakers, shoes & sticks
We need to ask all those hard questions from the very beginning
What do we want children to grow up playing & learning?
‘Cos when the children fight let them know it ain’t right’
‘When the children pray let them know the way’
What can we say when the children cry in the wars which adults wage?
Afghan ski group
Background Music “When the children cry”
Little child, dry your crying eyes
How can I explain the fear you feel inside
Cos you were born into this evil world, where men has killed young men, and no one knows just why
What have we begun, just look what we have done
All that we destroyed, you must build again
When the children cry, let them know we tried
Cos when the children fight, let them know it ain’t right
When the children pray let them know the way
Cos when the children sing, then the new world begins
We Afghans shall live in peace someday ; connecting with Witness Against Torture
January 20, 2010 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Please watch how Afghan youth fasted & asked which other human we humans would torture next
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDloKITlBJM
Zekerullah with a poster for Witness Against Torture
On Martin Luther King’s Day this 18th of Jan, after fasting for 2 short days, in solidarity with Witness Against Torture’s 12 day fast for the prompt closing of Guantanamo Bay Prison, a few Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers gathered in a mud house on an Afghan winter night, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with members of the Witness Against Torture and later, with friends from Landmark Education Olympia facilitated by Dr Dennis Mills of Capella University.
We asked each other the questions of our times and our hearts.
Friends of Witness Against Torture led by Frida Berrigan and Bob Cooke encouraged the Afghan youth with their kind words, their tears and their singing. The conversation ended with them singing ‘We shall overcome’ and a sense of the ‘change in consciousness’ and the friendships which all human beings long for.
We remembered the words of Martin Luther King, in the everyday Dari of Afghanistan.
The Afghan Youth recall Martin Luther King’s words
Text of Video
A few Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers fasted for 2 days, then gathered in the mountains…
Which human will we humans torture next?
They tele-conversed with Witness Against Torture?, remembering M. L. King’s words
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
A lie cannot live.
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Why do we respond to fear, hate and anger by hurting one another?
Which human will we humans torture next?
Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture : They first become wealthy professionals but they don’t want to. They want to lower their income because they don’t want to pay for war
Dr Dennis Mills of Capella University : Dr King talked about 3 major demons, 3 problems.
The 3 ( demons ) are racism, materialism & militarism.
Those are very prophetic words because we who are making this call are still working to change ourselves for generations.
Which human will we humans torture next?
Pause in empathy or perish in estrangement
We shall live in peace some day
We shall overcome some day
Now is the time to pause in empathy or perish in estrangement
Our Afghan winter night connection with
Witness Against Torture and other friends
Cross posted from
http://www.witnesstorture.org/fast-day-8
Compiled by Kate Cowley
January 18, 2010
Dear Friends,
This morning, on Day Eight of our fast, we gathered together for a conference call with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a group of young people working for peace and justice in Afghanistan (http://ourjourneytosmile.com/blog/). They have been fasting for two days in solidarity with all of us.
It is difficult to try to encapsulate the richness of the dialogue we exchanged with this group of young people so dedicated to the struggle for peace and justice, and so entrenched in the sorrow and pain of war. The dialogue and connections across such a distance was very inspiring to all of us.
At one point in the conversation, Jerica mentioned to them that we’ve been singing a lot lately, and asked if they sing songs together. They in turn asked us to sing for them, and so Kathy led us in another round of “Hold on, keep your eyes on the prize.” They returned the favor by singing a song for us in Arabic that translates into English as: “Mountains cannot reach mountains, only men can reach men.”
Carmen brought up that it was Martin Luther King Day and asked if they were aware of the significance of this day in the history of the U.S. They responded to this by reading to us MLK quotes in Arabic that they had learned together. It was quite a fitting close to our conversation and a beautiful homage to Martin Luther King Jr. We will keep these young Afghan Peace Volunteers in our hearts and be with them in their struggle!
At end the day, we joined with survivors of torture from TASSC International at St. Stephen’s. In sharing their stories with us, they expressed the difficulty of starting life over again after being tortured and re-assimilating to life again in a different place. They focused on the importance of prayer for them, and shared their gratitude at learning that there was a group of people praying with and for them. We listened as they spoke about the effects of certain methods of torture, particularly solitary confinement, and the de-humanizing effect it can have. They also discussed the way violence of torture perpetuates itself, how often the tortured can become the torturer.
They told us that one of the most difficult things about being a survivor of torture is the loneliness. We have talked as a group before about this feeling of loneliness, and how it is one thing that all human beings share. Again and again we come back to this idea of community, of being able to reach out to one another, as a way of rebuilding our humanity.
Thank you for all you are doing.
Peace with Justice,
Witness Against Torture
www.witnesstorture.org
Fasters from Witness Against Torture at
the Museum of American History on MLK day (observed).
Post Traumatic Stress is an ORDER of conscience that can save humanity
January 14, 2010 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Please listen to Faiz’s heart of sorrow and humanity in remembering death and war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yufP1iRr0z4
Faiz and post traumatic stress
I can tell the story of a war in which I lost my brother…
in front of me, before my eyes.. they shot him, with a Kalashnikov.
.. a massacre… a cave on our way, in which we saw 60 corpses with our own eyes
We were very frightened but we did not have any choice.
What could we have done?
I remember how people were unjustly beaten up,
how arms were dismembered,
how eyes were gouged out…
Sometimes, I don’t know how to feel & I wonder who & where I am.
The memories of war affect me very negatively.
What do you request of those who are harsh, the war-mongers, those who have become habitually violent?
I request them not to murder anyone ;
come live in a humane society, to stop these cruel and inhumane acts.
Faiz Ahmad, you and I, or any human being who has witnessed these dismembering and eye-gouging horrors of war, cannot be the same again.
As a medical practitioner, I’m certain that we would all qualify as sufferers of post-traumatic stress, according to the DSM Criteria, and experience the painful symptoms not just for the one month period required for diagnosis.
If we didn’t suffer such stresses on our conscience, we would be the disordered ones, unlike the war veterans who respond humanely with a pain they carry for the rest of their lives, some of whom eventually take to suicide in hope of a kinder world beyond.
13th Jan 2010 The United States Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki noted that of the more than 30,000 suicides each year in America, about 20 percent are committed by veterans. Why do we know so much about suicides but still know so little about how to prevent them?” Shinseki said. “Simple question, but we continue to be challenged.”
Post-traumatic stress should be cared for optimally and with love, because it is an order of our conscience that can save humanity.
It puts an onus on us to prevent such in-humane experiences by the eradication of war.
Those who have witnessed others killed with the maximal violence humans can muster should not have to suffer alone. They do not deserve the derision of those who erroneously consider them weak and as having a dis-order.
Our cold, clinical medical ‘intelligence’ will never match their saving conscience.
It reminds me that as we cope with the harsh Afghan winter cold in a medieval system of poor heating, it is the difficult elements of nature that point us to the salvation of community warmth.
Faiz invites us to come live in a humane society
Post Traumatic Stress is an ORDER of human conscience that can save humanity
Why I, a family physician, consider Post Traumatic Stress from war a natural order of human conscience, and NOT a disorder.
1. It is a natural order that should be managed holistically and with love, because it is an order that arises out of an intact CONSCIENCE.
Our medical diagnostic label has inadvertently mis-represented what is a natural and expected human response to extreme violence as an un-natural disease.
Which of us would NOT be stressed witnessing a brutal killing?
If we believe that it is a courageous man who watches slaughter calmly, we have lost something essential about being human. For that logic to stand scrutiny, we would have to condone holding a ‘bravest man competition’ in which contestants watch as many ‘live’ killings as he can tolerate without feeling sick, or sad.
If we believe that it’s patriotic to kill any suspicious ‘enemy’, grievous would be the day the ‘enemy’ was your own child and unconscionable the act that puts a country above a fellow human being.
2. It is a natural order because it is our passionate response to in-humanity.
Yes, we must help the post-traumatic stress sufferer, BUT, we mustn’t call it a DIS-ORDER.
It’s inaccurate to call it a disorder
It is in essence a natural human ORDER that when we have witnessed horrible violence or personally experienced terrible trauma, we become stressed, often very stressed. It is Man’s inherent way of coping with events which are entirely in-congruous with how a good, peaceful life should be.
We label something as disordered when it mal-functions and behaves abnormally. Feeling scared, sorrowful and repulsed by killings is not a malfunction and is not abnormal. It is how our bodies, together with our hearts, minds and conscience, NORMALLY FUNCTIONS.
It’s a PARADOX to call it a disorder. The person who doesn’t feel remorseful or traumatized, who forces himself into ‘courageously’ accepting that the violent killing was normal or even kind and who convinces himself to perpetuate the violence, is THE disordered one.
So, sufferers should be helped to cope with their stress by acknowledging that their feelings are normal, while we should worry about the truly disordered response of a numbed conscience which allows continued mass killings.
It is not a disease to hate or be angry and sad over the scenes of bodies and blood splattering everywhere or to detest the violent manner in which a loved one or a fellow human died.
3. It is a natural order whose onus on humanity is to work towards the eradication of war. It can save humanity.
The current crisis of increasing suicides among war veterans points us to an urgent need to prevent this suffering by abstaining from and preventing acts of war and violence.
It is the onus and responsibility of the medical, civil and military communities to heal and save humanity definitively.
Irish Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire
“Killing goes against everything we’re taught from childhood about love and compassion.
It goes against every religious doctrine and moral code.
It’s small wonder that so many come back from war sick at heart.
We have to start to disarm our own minds and look at the fact that there are always alternatives to violence.
We must create the idea that to even think of war is horrific. “
Kevin O hill was a 23 year old American soldier killed in Afghanistan
http://thebrooklynink.com/2009/10/kevin-hill/
Kevin seemed “kind of distant” to his friend Darryl. “Like he had a lot of stuff on his mind, like his mind was racing,” Darryl said. “He told me he had seen a dead body in front of him.”
Olsen Hill, Kevin’s father, picked it up to hear his wife, Mahalia Hill, screaming on the other end.
“Having to tell her on the phone, and not being able to hold her. And to hear them scream, without being able to hold them. That just made it even worse. Nine hours, driving and crying, driving and crying,” he said. “I don’t know whether he suffered or not, and that’s what kills me. In terms of details, him being shot before or after. I just try not to think about it because it’s too much, too much,” his father said, his voice breaking. “None of us wanted him to go into the military. Well not in the Army anyway because I was in the Army in the first Gulf War, and I knew what war was like. And so I didn’t want my son experiencing combat like I did,” said Olsen Hill. He told his son about the constant fear, of not knowing where the next bullet, mine, or sniper was hidden.
309.81 DSM-IV Criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
A. The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following have been present:
(1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others (2) the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Note: In children, this may be expressed instead by disorganized or agitated behavior.
B. The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in one (or more) of the following ways:
(1) recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions. Note: In young children, repetitive play may occur in which themes or aspects of the trauma are expressed.
(2) recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Note: In children, there may be frightening dreams without recognizable content.
(3) acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur upon awakening or when intoxicated). Note: In young children, trauma-specific reenactment may occur.
(4) intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
(5) physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma), as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
(1) efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma
(2) efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma
(3) inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma
(4) markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities
(5) feeling of detachment or estrangement from others
(6) restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings)
(7) sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)
D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before the trauma), as indicated by two (or more) of the following:
(1) difficulty falling or staying asleep
(2) irritability or outbursts of anger
(3) difficulty concentrating
(4) hyper-vigilance
(5) exaggerated startle response
E. Duration of the disturbance (symptoms in Criteria B, C, and D) is more than one month.
F. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Specify if:
Acute: if duration of symptoms is less than 3 months
Chronic: if duration of symptoms is 3 months or more
Specify if:
With Delayed Onset: if onset of symptoms is at least 6 months after the stressor
Afghan youth believe that war cannot end terrorism
January 7, 2010 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Please watch Afghan youth speak to the world’s ‘intellectuals’ about their strategy against terrorism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzcNWj9iLsU
How can war end the greed for power, the greed for money, poverty, the lack of work,
the telling of lies, fear, injustice, ignorance, misunderstandings,
self-interest, pride, violence, anger and hate?
The intellectuals of the world have analyzed & justified the war against terrorism.
We, the youth of Afg, are sorry that their analysis is not correct.
In fact, the people of the world know that war cannot end the roots of terrorism.
Abdulai
A root of terrorism is greed for power & war can’t end the greed for power.
Rahman
A root of terrorism is greed for money & war can’t end the greed for money.
Shir Ali
A root of terrorism is poverty & war cannot end poverty.
Raziq
A root of terrorism is lack of work & war cannot end the lack of work.
Najib
A root of terrorism is the telling of lies & war can’t end the telling of lies.
Immaduddin
A root of terrorism is fear & war cannot end fear.
Nasrullah
A root of terrorism is injustice & war cannot end injustice.
Yasir
A root of terrorism is ignorance & war cannot end ignorance.
Samiullah
A root of terrorism is misunderstandings & war can’t end misunderstandings.
Mohd Hussein
A root of terrorism is self-interest & war cannot end self-interest.
Mohd Jan
A root of terrorism is pride & war cannot end pride.
Shir Agha
A root of terrorism is violence & war cannot end violence.
Zekerullah and brothers
A root of terrorism is anger & war cannot end anger.
Aziz
A root of terrorism is hate & war cannot end hate.
The intellectuals of the world have analyzed & justified the war against terrorism.
We, the youth of Afg, are sorry that their analysis is not correct.
In fact, the people of the world know that war cannot end the roots of terrorism.
Gaza Freedom March in Afghanistan ; Love is how the kites in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world will fly
January 3, 2010 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Please watch Afghan youth fly kites for Gaza Freedom March and converse about revenge and love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWRqqoNESCc
love is how the kites will fly in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world
At about 1pm Afghanistan time ( 10.30 am Gaza time when the planned Gaza Freedom March was supposed to begin ) on the 31st of December 2009, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers had a tele-conference with these friends ( the conversation with Baseem and Yaniv was short but priceless ).
Palestine Baseem
Israel Yaniv
Iraq Skala
USA Douglas, Jody, Cindy Corrie, Josh Steiber, Margo, Andrea Le Blanc, Al
In the telephone conversation, we encountered the human souls in each other through our voices and we encouraged each other towards peace and those beautiful and important things in the hearts of all humanity. Thanks to all!
11 Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers then flew kites at Bamiyan Peace Park, to let our Palestinian friends in Gaza and peacemakers of Gaza Freedom March now standing in Cairo Egypt know that Love is how the kites in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world will fly!
The freedom which we youth, the future of the world, urgently desire is a freedom
from those built-up grievances heaped upon us or within ourselves,
grievances that separate us constantly,
a freedom from hate and un-kindness.
Love is how the kites in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world will fly!
Love is how we’ll ask for peace!
The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers flying kites for Gaza Freedom March
Transcript of video
2010 was coming through over the Afghan horizon
The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers flew kites for the Gaza Freedom March
They had a tele-conference with friends from Palestine, Israel, Iraq & the US
We wish for the youth of Gaza a freedom from the oppression & threat of war & violence
The people of Israel & Palestine should stop war & make peace.
Today, we want to converse with them, to become close to one another.
Abdulai, the Taliban killed your father. Do you want to take revenge?
No, we should make peace & not take revenge. If we take revenge, war will increase.
Faiz, your brother was killed by others. Do you bear a grudge in your heart?
No, we’ve made peace with them.
But, in the world today, everyone who has a family member will usually take revenge.
How do we end the thought of revenge?
We can’t go on killing one other in revenge. If we do, the world will end one day.
Blood cannot wash away blood. We should practice love, so such horrors can be forgotten.
Afghans conversing with a Palestinian,a Jew, an Iraqi and Americans
My name is Bassam, Bassam from Palestine.
Douglas : “Bassam, I know I speak for everyone, calling in solidarity…”
I know that the Corries would like to speak to you.
Cindy Corrie : Hello, Bassam, it’s good to hear your voice. And I hope that we have …good things happen for all of us.
I notice that we also have someone from Israel. Can you go ahead?
Hi everybody, my name is Yaniv. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too!
And then from Washington D.C. Go ahead!
This is Josh Steiber.
Afghan hopes for peace
We’ll fly kites.
Our hope for freedom!
We have to fly the kites of freedom!
We want freedom from the wounds of our hearts!
We want freedom from hate!
Let the kite fly! Let the string go, let the string go!
Run………!
Love is how the kites will fly in Gaza, Afg & the world!
Run………!
Freedom, freedom……!
The freedom which we youth, the future of the world, urgently desire is a freedom from those built-up grievances heaped upon us or within ourselves that separate us constantly, a freedom from hate and un-kindness.
Love is how the kites in Gaza, Afg & the world will fly
Love is how we’ll ask for peace!
run with and fly the kites of true freedom