From Afghans to Gazans, ‘Why can’t we touch your face?’
June 26, 2011 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Dear friends,
The approximately 1000 ordinary people sailing with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla II ought to stop us in our ordinary tracks at least for a moment.
Why are ordinary people doing this for others not related to them?
Why are ordinary people supporting these freedom sailors?
Why are a few governments against this non-violent human solidarity?
Why?
If we don’t even ask, we miss out on those things which make us human.
Dedicated to the people of Gaza and those reaching out to them through Freedom Flotilla II :
From Afghans to Gazans, ‘Why can’t we touch your face?’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkiMOPoU1qA
Love,
Hakim and the AYPVs
http://globaldaysoflistening.org
http://friendswithoutborders.org , http://friendswithoutborders.net ( newly launched )
PS In the New Year of 2010, we had also expressed solidarity with Gaza Freedom March, a small clip of which was included in our latest video above
Love is how kites in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world will fly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWRqqoNESCc
Why can’t we touch your face?
From Afghans to Gazans, ‘Why can’t we touch your face?’
‘We have slogan here. ‘From river to the sea, everyone should be free.’’
Nabeel Raee, teacher of Jenin Freedom Theatre
traveling on the West Bank hills
We in Afghanistan sense your loneliness.
It is hard to be born human, and not be regarded as one.
It is hard to be a mother who can’t cook enough for meals and laugh enough with her children.
It is hard to be a youth, and not feel young at all.
It’s hard to lose the human capacity for happiness.
We share your anger too.
But let’s not be angry for too long. Hasn’t war taught us that love is needed to guide anger, the same way we’ve seen mothers shaking with grief but standing with grace?
Don’t be angry with your family and loved ones because they had snapped at you after the usual hard day. We should forgive, and try to stay as human as life allows.
Please stay together, and not submit to human laws which pull humans apart.
We can’t expect people in the rest of the world to worry about us in Gaza or Afghanistan. It hurts more than we’re willing to utter, but we’ll find sufficient strength to accept that people are normally too busy to wonder if we’re really such ‘terrible’ human beings.
It’s irritating that politicians are universally well-dressed while making our world so socially distant and emotionally intolerable. We know that peace, equality and freedom will come when the politicians step aside and let the people converse. But they aren’t going to step aside unless we persuade them with our dignity, like many people across the world are doing now.
In adversity, we share with you the occasional burden of being ‘no-bodies’, But surely, we must cling on to some meaning, cling on to the hope that God doesn’t intend for us to be discarded ( like trash ), that there are such qualities as compassion, that human company exists.
To the people of Gaza and Israel, we are reaching out to you, as President Obama and world leaders keep extending their violence on their own people, and on us whom they don’t see.
They believe in force. ‘What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures – one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists….( ‘permanent base ‘)…..When threatened, we must respond with force.’ Obama in his Afghanistan ‘withdrawal war speech’.
We the people believe in love.
We send you our love through our friends on the US Boat to Gaza sailing with the Freedom Flotilla 2.
A fortnight ago, there appeared a remote possibility that two of us would be considered for travel on the Mavi Marmara. It gripped us that we may have been able to share each other’s pain at a closer distance, for a little while.
The people of Mavi Marmara and the other flotilla boats have opened up the seas of our hearts.
Afghanistan needs a flotilla too, but you would know that Afghanistan has no sea.
We imagine the blue seas.
Imagination helps friends not to worry about whether they’re available for each other ALL the time, or whether they will ever see each other face-to-face.
20-year-old Skye Miller was our friend for a brief moment, introduced to us by Kathy Kelly, one of our dear activist friends on the US Boat to Gaza. Skye was dying from cancer in a hospice and Kathy had passed her a blue scarf from our silent, peace walk in Kabul this spring.
We sent a message to Skye, ‘Mohammad Jan, Abdulai and I are typing this email feeling a sadness, and feeling that life must be more than just what we see. It is meaningful for us to give you our small ‘salams’ through Kathy and through the visions of peace colored in blue. Thank you Skye! ’
She passed away with her family by her side, a few days after her reply, ‘Dearest Kathy, I cannot tell you the happiness that I felt after receiving the e-mail from Mohammad Jan, Abdulai and Hakim and to know that I am in their thoughts. I am enjoying the weather and hope that you are too. Enjoy your weekend. Be well, Skye.’
Here, sometimes, the sky is so peacefully and enjoyably blue we can almost touch it.
What antagonism has poisoned Man, and who on earth and in heaven has determined, that we can’t touch your face?
Love is how the kites will fly in Gaza, Afghanistan and the world
From Afghanistan, we need you to know
June 14, 2011 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Dear friends,
Peace from Afghanistan, specially to those with the Caravan of Solace far-away in Mexico, who strengthen us with their poetic struggle.
From Afghanistan, we need you to know : Walking together is not a weakness. It is our everything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxmbNFNQJ4E
We thank you for walking differently.
Julian LeBaron, a Caravan of Solace leader whose brother was kidnapped, tortured and killed last year, reminded the crowd that fear isn’t the only thing keeping people home — it’s apathy: ‘There should be 100 million people here, holding hands to mourn the death of 40,000 of us.”
If you have a few minutes this Sunday 19th of June, let’s connect on the Global Days of Listening ( email to the cc-ed address globaldaysoflistening@gmail.com )
Love,
Hakim and the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers
http://globaldaysoflistening.org/
walking together is not a weakness
From Afghanistan, we need you to know
Javier Sicilia, Julian Lebaron and all with the Caravan of Solace, like you and the families of 40,000 Mexican victims, we need you to know that we’ve also been crying.
There are no expectations in our crying.
There’s only grief, and ignored anger, the ignored anger of the mundane masses.
To all fellow humans alive today, we need you to know that many people are hurting badly because we will not do more than what is normally required to preserve our conventional ways of life.
We need you to know that the many who are hurting are real people.
Sadly, every day that we defend our lives as usual, we demean other lives as usual, and therefore we all become less dignified, less human.
We in Afghanistan have been learning that being alive is not just about busily earning our keep, or more ridiculous, about getting good grades in ‘empty’ schools.
We have also been learning what it means to be alive.
Here, the other Friday, we felt alive when we walked together to the river, listening to everything.
We felt alive caring for one another despite our utter despair.
Unfortunately.
Our systems have been structured to rule us out, to corner our humanity. Our systems despise our hope.
The doorways of our governments are tunnels for theft.
To conform with Power, we’re ‘told’ that we must remain helpless, friendless.
Our poverty is ‘graced’ by bullets, bombs and blood.
Our struggle is ‘condemned’ by religious and political dogma.
We detest these from way deep down. We detest these so much. Every soul does.
But today, self-protection at the expense of the distant ‘other’ justifies a strategy of ‘Man killing Man for Greed’s sake.’
How can that be?
How can it be that ‘the common good’ is no longer ‘good’, that it has become an impractical ideal divorced from human society?
How can it be that asking for economic fairness is considered being anti-government, that speaking against corruption gets us into trouble?
How can it be that when we tell our leaders to stop killing, we are the ones deemed naïve and dangerous?
We detest this violent antagonism infecting the world.
We detest the decay of our values.
We’re creating so few lifetime opportunities for genuine education, decent livelihoods, and grief.
Not enough space, except by the rivers.
We need to talk differently, walk differently, serve ( lead ) differently and relate differently, and if we so earnestly and painstakingly act in love, ‘Y’ not?
Who has dictated to the ‘Y’ generation that,’ You can never change this unequal, unkind global system of governance.’?
‘Y’ not , when the majority of humanity and the majority of 30 million Afghan citizens manage to get along without killing one another?
‘Y’ not step towards the rivers where human solidarity runs?
How can we live without crying? How can we suggest what could be done when we ourselves are hardly coping?
We need you to know that your journey is our journey too, and that yes, ‘No estas solo’.
We need you to know that crying is our friend, and not a weakness.
We need you to know that walking together is not a weakness. It is our everything.
Y Not?
Crying is not a weakness
Caravan of Solace
Javier Sicilia after his 24 year-old son’s death,
“The world is no longer dignified enough for words.
This is my last poem, I cannot write more poetry.
Poetry no longer exists inside me.”
‘Violence begins with shouted insults? Is that what you want? We are trying to change the hearts of the political class and you are feeding off hatred! That is not how we walk.’ Javier Sicilia
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2063696,00.html#ixzz1P8O1TcZ3
“The United States Imposed This War on Us, It Should Change the Strategy” Javier Sicilia
US Congressional Report says that ‘US guns fuel Mexico violence’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13758499
Javier Sicilia in silence
Caravan of Solace