Looking for God in all the Wrong Places
On Good Friday, I ventured into the Christian city of Ankawa to find a Stations of the Cross service. The service usually happens around 3p.m. in the States to commemorate when Jesus died on the cross. I dragged a bunch of friends with me to church hop, to no avail. At St. George’s Church, we were greeted by a guard with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov that I have almost become desensitized to. The first thing he asked was if all of us were Christians. Only Christians were allowed inside the main building. In fact, one of my friends was Shiite, so we side stepped the issue and lied by omission. Next he told us we could not enter the church as it was closed, but we were welcome to pray outside at a fountain/statue area resplendent with a collection box. Finally, he informed us that services began at 4:30p.m., but we would need advanced special permission from the head priest to attend.
I was very saddened by this turn of events. I realize safety precautions are necessary, especially in sectarian Iraq, and that places of worship are popular targets, but that is what makes me sad!!! Can you imagine being excluded from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Blue Mosque, The Wailing Wall, or the Borobudur Temple? Places of worship used to be sanctuaries. When did they become formidable targets? (Atrocities committed in them seem so much worse than those committed in secular arenas). How are communities going to bridge cultural divides when they exclude each other from limited participation in each other’s celebrations? Participation breeds familiarity, which is the first step in viewing “other” as “us”. It is more difficult to attack one of your own than it is to attack an outsider. When I worked for an education ngo in the West Bank, an unofficial tenant of the program was to introduce Palestinians to American culture and to an American they could forge a positive relationship with in order to dissuade them from committing future acts of terrorism against the West.
Another foray into another church yielded similar results. We decided to go to a secular church (read pub) and try our luck another day. On Holy Saturday I visited the churches in Ankawa and found no services. I couldn’t find God anywhere.
On Easter Sunday I volunteered with the French ngo Acted to assess the Syrian Kurdish refugees living in Erbil. The goal of the project was to map how many families were in a host community and to perform a vulnerability analysis on the families. Because the situation is dynamic, by the time information is processed (for example, a two week time lag) it is often obsolete. That is how quickly refugees enter Kurdistan and are processed by the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government).
Sometimes the families are not registered (issued a temporary residency card and issued an ID number from UNHCR), so aid organizations are not sure where they live. Knowing where refugees are determines where service centers will be located and what kind of aid will be initially implemented. Teams of two go into the field, find the local mukhtar (a poorly paid public servant), and ask him where the refugees live. Next, assessors cold-call on doors. The first door we knocked on was opened by a 21 year old tattooed Syrian Kurd who obviously hadn’t been expecting us. At another time in his life he might have just woken up from a night of clubbing.
The initial response was one of suspicion. The person behind the door wanted to know who was asking if he had a government registry number, and the person knocking on the door was wondering about the propriety and safety of entering the flat. The number of people living in the flat was counted, both registered and non registered, health issues were addressed, and government services information was distributed. Some two room flats house 6 adults; some two room flats house 2 families.
The first door we knocked on houses 6 young males from the same village who are loosely related to each other. Effort is made to keep families together. One room was the sitting room with clothes, towels, and personal items rimming the walls suspended from nails or from a clothes line hung low from the ceiling. Suitcases were strewn in corners, shoes neatly lined the wall near the entrance, possessions were kept packed in duffels along the floor. There were no appliances in the kitchen except for a kettle to boil water.
After both parties relaxed into something resembling trust, we sat on floor cushions in the main room as we took down information. They made no mention of the half eaten breakfast lying on the floor of the kitchen being visited by flies, the first meal of their day so obviously interrupted. They showed no signs of annoyance or inconvenience. Rather they made us fresh tea and offered us cigarettes. Slowly I realized I didn’t need to go to church to find God. He/She/It was in that room embedded in generosity and patience.
