Hussain and his Fulbright fellows from all around the world visit a high school in Phoenix, Arizona, in February.

Hussain, like many of his compatriots, uses only his first name because he fears violence directed at himself or his family. For the same reason, he decided to stay at his university campus in Arkansas last January when the State Department invited him to meet President George W. Bush in Washington D.C. to mark Iraq’s first democratic election. “I don’t want to submit myself to death,” he says. “I am very recognizable in photos.” Hussain has heard enough about terrorists simply opening fire at people whom they identify as having gone to the United States or the United Kingdom.

Compared with the first group of Iraqis who were granted Fulbright scholarships in 2004 to study in the U.S. after 14 years of interruption — all met President Bush and Colin Powell at a White House reception their first year — only a handful of people in the second group showed up to the latest meeting with the president last January. Hussain said most of them come from southern and northern Iraq, where it is safer.  

The State Department blamed limited attendance on short notice and said that not all current Iraqi Fulbright recipients — 34 of them — were invited to the informal event.  However, according to some of the Iraqi intellectuals, many stayed home either in fear for their lives or to avoid the tormenting questions about the conflict taking place in their motherland.

The Fulbright scholarship is a cornerstone of U.S. public diplomacy, credited with forming a network of leaders around the world that are knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, the U.S. government. But for many current Iraqi students — men and women ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late-40s — studying subjects such as public health, journalism, international affairs, and English at top American universities, the award is also a bit of a curse. Years of embargo make studying in an American university a lifetime opportunity for ambitious young Iraqis looking to obtain the education they need to help rebuild their country (Fulbright requires grantees to leave the U.S. after studying). But an association with the U.S. could also mean death for them and members of their family.

Although all of them seem uniformly happy that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, they are painfully watching the news from home for signs of civil war. And many blame unfair, insensitive, and poorly designed American policies for the clashes among Sunnis and Shiites and the way post-dictatorship democracy in Iraq seems to be going awry.

Worry and wait

It was hard for Dr. Ali Fadhil, a 29-year-old medical doctor turned filmmaker who is studying journalism at New York University, to shake his mind of the image of American soldiers after he arrived in New York City in January. His three-year-old daughter runs to grab him in fear whenever a garbage truck stops outside their apartment in Brooklyn. The sound from the truck is similar to that of the explosives that U.S. troops used to shatter the door to his Baghdad house in January. Soldiers mistakenly suspected the award-winning filmmaker was involved in the abduction of the American journalist Jill Carroll. “I know that people on the streets here are different from the U.S. army in Baghdad,” he says. But it seems he has to keep reminding himself of that fact.

Tucked away in America’s most elite campuses, Iraqi scholars remain safe for now. But with grim thoughts and the shadow of omnipresent danger looming larger in their lives, the biggest group of Iraqi Fulbright students still call each other to share feelings of warmth and worry. They place phone calls from New York to Philadelphia, Kansas to Ohio, anytime they hear about a bombing at home to make sure their families are safe. Last year, a brother of a Fulbrighter was killed by insurgents.

Mohamed, a Fulbright scholar from Baghdad who is studying in Kansas, is worried because his elder brother wants to continue working as a policeman, even though he was shot and seriously wounded by insurgents last November. “He wants to show them that he is not afraid. But I don’t want him to do that. The situation is too dangerous now.”

With three of his children in Baghdad, another student, Hussain, feels sad when he imagines them seeing corpses on the sidewalks on their way to school. He observes that many Iraqi women now wear a veil because of threats made by fanatical groups, a precaution that they never had to take during Saddam’s regime. Friends at home tell him that the number of flies and sandstorms have increased rapidly in Baghdad due to the deteriorating environment.

However, Hussain doesn’t have any hatred toward the U.S. “I feel sad, the same way when I hear either Iraqi people or American[s] die,” says the 46-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard. His sunburnt face has a look of calmness and wisdom. “I hate violence. I hate war. I love all people to live, not to die. I understand the American army as a tool to manipulate the policies designed by politicians here in the White House.”

Questions for the president

Hussain doesn’t hate Bush. “Bush is good [for his country]. He attracts terrorists from all over the world to Iraq in order to make them forget about attacking America. Iraq becomes a battlefield for terrorists.” The master’s degree candidate in comparative literature at the University of Arkansas says Iraq is a laboratory for the Americans to study terrorism. He expects the war to end in six to eight years. “The U.S. opens Iraq’s borders intentionally. All extremists in the world can go to Iraq to join terrorist cells without any papers.” He said the American army is well shielded, so few of them have been killed. But the Iraqi people are not shielded and Iraq is bleeding. “About 15 Iraqis die every day. Why should war exist in Iraq?”

Dr. Fadhil says he would love to meet the president. “I would thank Mr. Bush for removing Saddam; at the end this is the only major achievement that all Iraqis agree on,” said the filmmaker, who became a journalist by chance when a Guardian reporter asked him to work as a translator in 2003. “But it is not worth it for hundred[s of] thousands of Iraqis to die. We got nothing after Saddam — no jobs, no security, and no better life.”

Fadhil was chosen the U.K. Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year in 2005 for his coverage of the Fallujah aftermath on Channel 4 news, which the association said “was the first independent witness account of the battle and questioned the U.S. military’s claim that the city was getting back to normal by confirming that no aid agencies were operating inside the city. His footage shows images of bodies rotting in the streets, open sewers, and refugees living in tents.” He would like to ask President Bush ten questions from “ordinary Iraqis who had their homes destroyed by the U.S. troops, and people who lost their beloved ones for the sake of the so-called democracy that is not there in Iraq now.” He would like to ask what President Bush thinks about the fact that human lives in the “shredded” Iraq are so cheap, except those of Americans and top officials.

Another Fulbrighter from Baghdad, who declines to be named, says, “I hate when the Americans say that they are shifting the anti-terrorism battlefield to Iraq. It really pisses me off. This is the city where I live. Why is there terrorism in my city? They didn’t think about me or about my people when they declared that. Who gave them this authority?” He laments, “Don’t they think of [the] 25 millions people living there, who are killed and being killed everyday? Nobody cares for Iraqi civilians.”  

Open borders

Hussain and Mohamed believe that fanatic Islamism has come through the borders, brought in by foreign fighters. They say that border security is miserable and that people can easily transport money and weapons to support terrorists into or out of Iraq.

Hussain said that Iraqis would not plan suicide bombings or kill their neighbors, and cites the fact that terrorism was brought to Iraq after the war, not under Saddam Hussein. More proof is that three months after the war, Iraq was stable, apart from theft, robbery, and kidnapping “which have nothing to do with terrorism,” before the terrorists infiltrated Iraq.  

He said that some Iraqi people — most of them former Baath and intelligence members who lost the benefits they had under Saddam — are helping the foreign fighters. Hussain blames it on the American decision to dissolve the former Iraqi army. “This is one of the biggest mistakes made by the U.S. in Iraq,” he says, “These people are well-trained to protect Iraq and guard the borders. They lost their job[s] but need to feed their families. Foreign terrorists are clever enough to pay them good salaries and make use of them.”

Sectarian division strategy

Most Fulbrighters interviewed tend to think that the Americans trust people according to how much they endured under Saddam’s regime and that this creates further divisions between ethnic groups and sectarians.

“When the Americans first came to Iraq in 2003, most translators, subcontractors, or anyone closest to the Americans was Kurdish. They took the people who Saddam tortured most as their best allies. They did not trust all people. They did not know enough about Iraq,” said an Iraqi Fulbrighter from Baghdad who declined to be named.

“The U.S. is creating enemies day by day, not friends,” says Hussain. He and Ali believe that the malicious divisions in Iraq now are the result of the Americans’ sectarian division strategy. Ali describes the sight of many Sunnis waiting along the international highway to welcome American troops. But according to him, their attitude toward the U.S. cooled down after the Americans gave their support to the Shiites who held government power. “The Sunnis were close to the U.S., but now they are enemies because the U.S. supports the Shiites and the Kurds at the expense of the Sunnis. They consider Sunnis as supporters of Saddam,” says Hussain, “The Americans don’t know our country enough. They treated the sects of Iraq unfairly and wrongly.”

Dr. Fadhil suggests another reason for the chaotic situation in Iraq: 30 years of powerlessness and isolation from the outside world. “Iraqi people live[d] inside Saddam’s prison for many years and the Americans freed them, like opening a cage for the criminals,” said Fadhil. “Everyone wants to be on top of each other. Everyone is Saddam now.”

There is no consensus among Iraqi Fulbrighters on the subject of American troop withdrawal. Mohamed believes that American troops should stay. “If the U.S. troops pull out, the country will be controlled by fanatics and extremists. There is already a small-scale ‘civil war’ carried on by some armed groups against civilians from both sects,” he said.  

But Dr. Fadhil thinks things will only improve after U.S. troops are gone. He sees the deadly drift of Iraq into a civil war as having already begun. “But yet it will cure Iraq afterward,” says Fadhil. With a Sunni father and a Shiite mother, Fadhil doesn’t believe that people from the two sects can continue to hate each other because they have been living with each other for thousands of years. “The civil war will upscale when the troops pull out. But the American cannot solve this malicious legacy. The only way to solve it is to let the Iraqi find [his] own way to get out of the manipulation.”  

Understanding Iraq’s “own way” — its culture and history — is a problem for the American troops in Iraq, some of the Fulbrighters contend. Hussain says that Iraqis find it offensive when U.S. soldiers say “hey” to them, a greeting that in Iraq is used only to call animals. “More seriously is the way the U.S. army seems to have little regard for the life of Iraqi civilians. They kill civilians on the street,” he asserts, as a result of overreaction and fear of insurgency. “[America’s] tanks sometimes tread on civilian cars in traffic jams and the like,” says Hussain.

“Do you think Iraq is a primitive country?”

The sadness and tension in Hussain’s face temporarily disappears as he sips a glass of California red wine at a reception in Phoenix, organized by the U.S. State Department to introduce Iraqi scholars to America last February. The sky is clear, lighted by a full moon. The desert air is warm and comfortable, although the area hasn’t had a drop of rain for four months.

“What do you think of America?” asks his host, an American woman who is a member of Phoenix’s City Council. “I should not say anything because my judgments may be wrong now. I cannot judge other culture from my own cultural background. I should live more with American people before I can say anything,” Hussain replies. His face has a look of experience. “Do you think Iraq is a primitive country?” he asks. “No, no,” the woman responds in a hesitant, almost nervous, voice.

Hussain’s wide eyes present an expression of pain. “We are a civilized country. We have 500 registered scientists. One of them is working for NASA. We can build two-storey bridges, construct refineries and chemical plants, and the like.”

Hussain is angry about how the Western media portrays Iraq. “They do that to show the world that Iraq desperately needs the American help. But Iraq is full of energy. It can restructure the country on its own in a secure atmosphere.”

The feeling that American people are ignorant about Iraq motivates him to study translation. “Translation is a problem between cultures. I would like to learn how to convey meaning in all senses, helping [to] remove all cultural problems that stand between countries. I am happy to understand people from the other side and make my people understand them, too.”  

After going home in 2007, he plans to work as an interpreter to help reduce misunderstandings between the Iraqis and Americans.  

Hussain becomes sad when he thinks about his five-year-old son, Baqir. Every day, the boy with big brown eyes waits behind the wooden door to receive a banana from his father as usual. He waits for hours and hours until the sunlight dies over the window, the streets, and the Baghdad International Airport nearby. His mother is cooking in the kitchen. But Baqir wants to wait and eat with Hussain. Whenever his father calls, Baqir asks why he hasn’t come home for a long time even though he still talks to him on the phone like he is in his office. Hussain has not told his son where he is.

“If he knew, he would tell everybody that I am in America,” Hussain says with a sad voice, horrified to remember how his children were often asked in kindergarten if their parents ever said anything bad about Saddam Hussein. “The terrorists consider anyone who goes to America a traitor or a secret agent. They cannot wait for me to come home. They will kidnap my child and kill him.”  

Although he misses his family very much, Hussain has a single entry visa, and cannot leave the U.S. until he finishes the two-year program. He was stunned when he found out that all Fulbrighters could bring family with them to the U.S. except Iraqis. Like most Iraqi Fulbrighters, Hussain prays at home and avoids Muslim mosques in America or events where he may be recognized by other Iraqis.

Although the Fulbright is often considered one of the most competitive and prestigious scholarships in many countries, only the Iraqi Minister where Hussain worked knows Hussain received it. He told his neighbors and colleagues that he would be studying in Canada “because Canada doesn’t send army to Iraq.” His friend, Mohamed, has told people he studies in Germany.  

Now, as the situation at home deteriorates, Hussain tells family members to build a big steel gate to protect the house. He intends to cut short his studies to return to Iraq early, even though it may be dangerous if his status as a Fulbrighter is revealed.

The first five Iraqi Fulbrighters went home recently. “There is lots of reluctance to leave,” Hussain says, “Half of the Iraqi Fulbrighters may face death when they go home. Nobody likes to die. But we have to go back to change our country.”

For Dr. Fadhil, who plans to return to Iraq to continue filming after finishing his studies, death is not beyond his everyday expectation. He says he can imagine dying in the street in Iraq, because “holding a camera there is like holding a gun.”

At a Fulbright event in February in New York, two Iraqi scholars seemed happy to meet each other. But after a passionate conversation, one woman in traditional black dress, who is studying at Columbia University, left without giving her contact information to the other Iraqi woman from Baghdad. The fear is so deep that some Iraqis have kept strict anonymity, even among fellow scholars.

Hussain, for his part, cannot stop thinking about terrorism. “Terrorism could not be fought by arms, but by mind. We should convince the mind of people about love, peace, respect for all sects, religions through culture and education,” he said, “Iraqi people should be treated with love, not hostility.”

In The Fray Contributor

Young Karen women head back to their homes in the camps.

The sun shines down fiercely in Tak province. I’m on a rented bicycle peddling hard and trying to keep from going blind from the afternoon brightness and blowing dust. The world is dry and hot, with rice fields and tree-covered hills in the horizon — a far cry from the images of beaches and jungle cliffs that Thailand usually invokes.

At last I reach the soi I’m supposed to turn down. It’s a quiet road in a no-name neighborhood of faded teak houses. I look around for the office I’m supposed to be visiting, but all the buildings look alike and there isn’t a sign to point me in the right direction. Children and adults mill around, peering curiously at me — I’m a stranger, and they have reason to be suspicious. We’re in Mae Sot, a Thai border town and outpost of illegal gems, timber, and drug trade, and — because of its proximity to Burma — a mixing bowl of Burmese spies, undocumented migrants, and illegally roaming refugees. During the dry season, the Burmese military clashes with the ethnic Karen people, causing waves of Karen to flee their land and cross the river into Thailand. This is where the good, the bad, and the in-between fight their battles, out of sight and underground.

A lifetime of waiting

I first learned about the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO) when I started interning last fall as a production assistant for Outer Voices, a U.S.-based radio documentary group that tells the stories of women working towards non-violent social change throughout the Pacific Islands and the Asian Pacific Rim. The KWO and their work supporting their communities in the refugee camps were to be the main subjects for our piece on the conflict in Burma.

Raku Mae was at the office of the KWO with four other young women that day. She and her friends giggled nervously in anticipation of our meeting. Since refugees are not supposed to be outside the barbed wire fences of any of the nine camps scattered along the border, if the police decided to visit the office that day on one of their “routine checks,” it would cost the equivalent of $25 or more per person to keep from being arrested. This regular charge is no small fee in a country where the United Nations Population Fund estimates that 30 percent of people live on $2 a day. Yet their biggest concern wasn’t the fact that they had snuck out of the refugee camps they live in to work in this office, but that they would have to conduct the interview with me in English (usually a second or third language after Karen, Burmese, or Thai).

Founded in 1949, the KWO was established at first as a welfare organization to support the Karen people as civil war smoldered in Burma between the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). After the first wave of refugees arrived in Thailand in 1984, the KWO expanded their work to address problems that had arisen from 22 years of living in camps. As part of their efforts, the KWO established the Karen Young Women’s Leadership School to develop women’s professional skills.

Raku Mae, one of the school’s graduates, is the friendliest and by far the loudest of the bunch. She sprinkles laughter throughout her conversation and nudges others to overcome their shyness and talk. When that doesn’t work, she fills in the details for them. Raku Mae has been in Thailand the longest, having lived in camps since her family fled Karen State in 1984 during the first major exodus of the Karen from Burma. At the age of four, she fled her home with her mother and father when the Burmese military attacked their remote village. Homes, schools, churches, and rice paddies were burned to punish the community for their ties with the Karen National Union (KNU), the Karen’s governing body and the group seen as threatening the stability of Burma. After weeks of trudging through the jungle, threatened by bullets and malaria, they crossed the border into Thailand.

At 26, Raku Mae has spent nearly her entire life in the camps. Now the assistant accountant at the office in Mae Sot, where the KWO provides her with a room in exchange for her work, she first joined the KWO two years ago, learned to speak Thai and Burmese, and was trained on human rights, the environment, management, accounting, leadership, and government. Although Raku Mae has managed to develop and hone new skills, for one of the longest running refugee settlements in the world, there has been little development. She describes the endemic stagnation of life there, joking that the only thing that’s changed over all this time is her weight.

Karen women gather together for company and discussion.

A permanent state of temporary

Though the first wave of refugees did not enter Thailand until 1984, the battle that persists today began over 50 years ago, when Burma was granted independence from Britain in 1948. Despite an earlier promise from Britain of sovereignty in return for their aid in fighting the Japanese occupation during and after World War II, the Karen’s dream of their own state dissolved with the formation of the new Burmese government. Since then, Burma has been wracked by ethnic unrest and civil war, and by a military government that is unwilling to either tolerate or negotiate with those it labels insurgents.

Well-documented, systematic destruction of villages, detention, torture, rape, and forced labor by the Tatmadaw created hundreds of thousands of Karen internally displaced persons (IDPs). By the early 1980s, the Tatmadaw had edged out the Karen in battle and gained control of more of their lands. Kawthoolei, the Karen homeland that once covered the eastern mountain border by Thailand and the central delta area of Burma, has eroded, the majority of it now under the rule of the junta. Those Karen unlucky enough to be in captured areas faced persecution and worse. Many left for Thailand.

When the Karen first arrived, they were not officially placed into refugee camps. “Refugees were allowed to cross over into Thailand to set up their own village-like encampments and they were encouraged to be as self-reliant as possible,” recalls Sally Thompson, Deputy Executive Director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, an organization that has been working on the border for the past 14 years. Because the Thai government expected the situation to be temporary, the Karen were neither allowed to plant rice nor build permanent housing, resulting in villages of bamboo shelters that had no ability to grow their staple food. International non-governmental organizations such as the Thailand Burma Border Consortium began providing basic rations, health care, and school materials. As time passed, more refugees crossed into Thailand until 30 camps were spread along the border.

After attacks on the border areas by the Burmese army between 1995 and 1998, including incidents where entire camps were burned down, the Thai authorities consolidated camps to provide better security. “We went from a situation where the largest camp was 6,000 people. Within three months it had been consolidated into 25,000, and now the largest camp has 44,000 people,” remembers Thompson. Today, over 110,000 Karen live in the nine refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border, with the number growing as fighting continues. The situation can no longer be regarded as temporary.

Because Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, supporting the refugees is a complicated matter. Refugees are designated “persons of concern” or “persons fleeing from fighting” by the Royal Thai Government.

“What it meant was the UNHCR [United Nations Refugee Agency] … was not actually present in the border area from the Thailand-Burma border, and it only got a mandate from the Thai authorities in 1998. And whereas elsewhere in the world UNHCR usually provides asylum to refugees, here in Thailand, it was only given a mandate for protection because the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] were already working here,” explains Thompson.

The late involvement of the UNHCR and the policy of the Royal Thai Government have affected the way that this long-standing refugee situation has been handled. Usually, under UNHCR supervision, refugees would be given temporary asylum in a second country (in this case Thailand). If the situation in their home country did not improve over time and did not have the potential to change in the near future, rendering repatriation too dangerous, the next plan would be to consider the refugees for either formal integration into the asylum society or resettlement in a third country. While there are no set time limits for how long refugee camps can or should exist under the U.N. Convention, camps under UNHCR supervision have never held refugees as long as the ones living along the Thailand-Burma border have been held, without the options of integration or resettlement. It is an open secret that the plight of the refugees has been highly influenced by the desire to maintain political and economic relations between Burma’s governing body, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and the Royal Thai Government, the latter quietly tolerating the presence of the refugees for over two decades with the hope that they could be repatriated.

“It was always thought the refugees would go back to Burma. Whereas now, the situation in Burma continues to look bleak and it is unlikely that there will be any large-scale [repatriation] in the near future,” says Thompson.

It has only been since 2004 that Thailand has changed its policies to allow resettlement.

A chance for a new home

Life in the camps is an uncertain monotony. Guards and barbed wire are only the physical barriers to the Karen’s self-determined future. Inside the camps, education is available only through the tenth grade, with no prospect for formal higher education. While young children attend school, often teenagers stay at home and help around the house. With few concrete possibilities open to them, many get married and start families at an early age. Boredom and depression are inevitable. The lucky ones who are able to finish school can try to find jobs within the camps, usually as teachers or health workers. But the environment is invariably the same.

Some risk their security for a taste of freedom, sneaking out to work as day laborers on nearby farms. Others join local non-governmental organizations, like the KWO, where there are more opportunities to obtain an education. But there remains the risk of being arrested or deported. Involuntary repatriation to Burma could mean prison or even a death sentence at the hands of the SPDC for those who have been involved with political organizations while in exile.

Within the camp, income generation projects such as weaving and making handicrafts have been employed to a degree of success by the KWO. The products are then “exported” out of the camps to be sold on the outside. Nonetheless, with over 110,000 Karen refugees and the ability to include only a small percentage of the people in these projects, the majority face inactivity and insecurity.

Voluntary resettlement has been urged by many countries as a long-term solution. However, according to Thompson, it was refused for a number of reasons until 2004, when the Thai government finally agreed to a trial resettlement to the United States of a small population of refugees who had been illegally living and working in Bangkok. As a result of its success and the stalemate on the border, Thailand has been encouraged to see resettlement as a way to deal with both the large population of refugees and the constant stream of new asylees. Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, and the U.S. are the seven countries thus far interviewing applicants for entrance into their countries, where they will be given residency, jobs, and aid to start a new life. Ultimately, citizenship will be offered if they decide to stay.

Still, resettlement is not as simple a solution as it seems. Typically, a “brain drain” occurs in the camps, where the most well-trained people — leaders, teachers, and health workers — are often the ones accepted to be resettled due to their transferable skills. Those that remain are left with the task of training replacements to administer the camps. In addition, the decision to apply for resettlement is a difficult one in and of itself, trading one uncertain and difficult situation for another despite the promise of relative freedom and citizenship in the end.

“I can completely understand why people want to leave this situation, the future is so uncertain …  I understand but I think it’s really tough, they know it’s not the promised land,” observes Anna DeGuzman, an American aid worker for the Burmese Medical Association in Mae Sot. “They have very meaningful work here, but in the U.S. they end up working in Wal-Mart or something, starting life all over again, no records to prove they finished university.  There, they end up making sushi … whereas here they are designing training for traditional birth attendance.”

Saw Hte Hte fled Burma 14 years ago. A grandfatherly older man, he acts as the Secretary of the Karen Refugee Committee, the group of Karen refugees that oversees their fellow refugees and is in charge of administering the distribution of aid provided by the international NGOs.  I ask him what he thinks about the new resettlement program and he replies, “[The Karen refugees are] quite unsure what is their future, so resettlement may be some kind of a future for them, that’s what most of them feel. Maybe it is the straw that they would like to grasp for their future.”

“Some young people born in the camps as refugees, they didn’t even know where they came from, which country, which place, they don’t know — they have never been there. They are born in the camps, and as [far as] most people are concerned, it is their future, and let’s say the military government in Burma disowned these people, these refugees, these people in the camps,” he continues.

“Let’s say they are people without any identity … As a refugee, what would be your choice for your future?”

Children in the camp are excited to see someone new.

A future in the works

For Raku Mae, who does not have authorization to leave her home at Noh Po Camp, the knowledge that she lives in a different reality is permanent. “For security, [it’s] very strict for us, because we are here illegal, not legal, so we have to pay a lot,” she sighs. To travel from the camp to the office, it costs her between 15 to 20 times the fare paid by Thais to ride the same route because of the unofficial fees she must pay to get through the military checkpoints along the road. “It is very difficult to travel … We don’t have money.” Later, she recalls a Thai police raid on the KWO office when a group of students and their English teacher, an American volunteer, were taken across the border into Burma in an unofficial expulsion from the country. Though they were allowed to return after one day, incidents like this further underline the unpredictability of their situation.

Despite everything, Raku Mae and her friends cannot fathom leaving their work in the border area. Cho Cho, 24, is a trainer for the KWO who is learning about subjects like democracy, federalism, constitutional law, and human rights, and then transferring the knowledge to other Karen. Her hopes are still high that her work may bring about improvements in her country. “I hope to change [the] government inside Burma, because I want to come back inside Burma.” She sees herself as indispensable to her people. Resettling would be equal to deserting her people and their plight, even though her own future would be much brighter if she left.

Young and intelligent, Cho Cho would have a good chance of attending university if she left, and likely would be able to pursue her dream of being a lawyer. If she stays, biding her time for freedom in Burma, she loses this opportunity forever. Even if Burma someday becomes the democratic country she longs for, her whole life will be devoted to reconstructing the country — with no time to pursue the sacrificed desires for her own future. Yet her idealism runs strong. “I want to learn,” she says, “so that when the time comes, I will be here to help my people know their rights and to know what they should ask for themselves … If they know their rights, they can do anything.”

Catherine

Iraqi artist Esam Pasha at his studio in New London, Connecticut.

On a warm afternoon in early March, I went to New London, Connecticut to visit Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist. At the time, Esam lived in an apartment at the Sapphire House, a renovated mansion, owned by the Griffis Art Center, where he was an artist-in-residence. I had met Esam in January at a gallery in New York’s SoHo district, which had opened an exhibit featuring Esam and five others, billed as the first opportunity for Americans to view works by leading contemporary Iraqi artists.

Only six months prior to the exhibit opening, Esam was still living in Iraq. The juxtaposition raised several questions. How did Esam become an artist in the first place? How did he end up in the United States? I also wondered how Esam’s experiences could serve as a window to view and understand Iraq’s past and present.

Sitting in the living room of the Sapphire House, over coffee and countless cigarettes, we began talking. A former national judo champion and discus thrower, Esam has an imposing presence that is offset by a calm demeanor. Flecks of grey in his beard make him look older than he is. Born in Baghdad in 1976, he is one of seven children. His parents divorced in the 1980s. His grandfather, Nuri al-Said, was prime minister until he was assassinated in 1958 as part of the coup that toppled the Iraqi monarchy.

Growing up, Esam studied English at school, which he perfected by watching American movies, and then taught himself three other languages. On weekends, he prowled a book market on Mutanabi Street. It was there that he caught his first glimpses of Western art. He devoured a wide range of art books, but was particularly drawn to Klimt, Miro, Rembrandt, and Durer.

Esam lived through the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the ensuing sanctions. He worked odd jobs as a teenager in construction, carpentry, and commercial painting before becoming a full-time artist in 1999.

During this period, Iraq suffered years of economic hardship and isolation, and as such, only two art galleries in Baghdad remained open. The only patrons were United Nations and NGO workers who typically requested works depicting scenes of “exotic Arabia.” Even these pieces fetched prices so low it was hardly worth the time and expense of artistry, Esam said. “You would get more money if you just broke a bronze sculpture down and instead sold the bronze.”

The intelligence service, or mukhabarat, kept a watchful eye on Iraqi artists for any sign of dissent. Being seen with foreigners raised suspicions. When Esam got a commission from the U.N’s Baghdad office for a panorama, the mukhabarat made it clear that he should not paint anything political. Stick to landscapes or abstracts, they said.

A sense of paranoia became widespread. Some friends warned Esam about a painting he had lying around his apartment of an eagle soaring down. Government censors could interpret the eagle as symbol of the regime’s demise, they said.

Any remnants of an authoritarian state quickly dissolved as the American military moved into Baghdad. In its place emerged a bonanza of opportunity, particularly for an English-speaker, like Esam.

Esam remembers the early days after the U.S. invasion. After the fall of Baghdad, the Americans set up a base near his home. Officials began recruiting local Iraqis for hire. Esam waited in a separate queue for English-speakers. “I thought I’d have to fill out a lot of paperwork and would hear back from them in a few days or weeks,” he recalls. In less than an hour, though, he was shaking hands with an army captain who hired him on the spot.

After the war, people’s spirits were lifted, Esam said. His fellow Iraqis could express opinions, go to cafés, talk politics, and publish newspapers and magazines. In September, Esam landed a commission to paint the first public mural in post-Saddam Iraq.  

But before he could paint anything, he had to rip down a portrait of the former leader. “I kept peeling back layers,” Esam said, shaking his head. “But each time I did, I discovered another portrait. It took me days before I got to the bottom.”

His thirteen-foot tall mural, described by one critic as “yellow, orange, and purple paint swirling around images of doves, traditional Baghdadi architecture, and the sun rising over a sky-blue mosque,” came to symbolize a crystalline break between past and present, despair and hope. He purposely avoided black paint in this piece because “we needed color, after all those years of suffering.” He named the mural “Resilience.”

However, as security deteriorated by early 2004, Esam was getting nervous. Unlike some translators, he chose not to wear a mask. “My face was well-known,” Esam says. At that point, he began thinking of coming to America.

A Connecticut art dealer, Peter Hastings Falk, read about Esam’s mural and took notice. “I had to find out who this guy was,” Falk recalls now. Hebegan emailing Esam about organizing an exhibit of Iraqi artists.

Esam applied for and was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Griffis Art Center, which he had learned about from Falk. In June 2005, Esam flew to JFK. He initially stayed with Steve Mumford, a New York artist who had worked in Iraq. Falk recalls first meeting Esam, who was carrying a traditional rug he had brought from Iraq as a gift for a friend. “Steve has a walk-up apartment, and we had to lug that rug up those flights of stairs. It weighed a ton.”

When asked if he had experienced any culture shock, Esam said no, but then apologized, sensing his answer was disappointing. “I knew all about Dunkin’ Donuts and Waffle House. I even had Starbucks,” he says, alluding to the time he spent on U.S. army bases in Iraq.    

Since coming to the U.S., he has visited many of the soldiers he worked with at their homes around the country. “We are real friends,” Esam says. “We’re not just polite to each other. When we call each other, it’s not a courtesy call. It’s to discuss real things.”

In his studio behind the Sapphire House, Esam discusses the practical difficulties of being an artist in Iraq. “During the embargo, I had to paint with whatever materials were available, mostly industrial oil paint. It wasn’t the best quality,” he says matter-of-factly. “Paint knives were hard to find, so I just started making my own, but even then, I used them sparingly.”

During the war, Esam was unable to buy oils or acrylics. After scouring his apartment for supplies, he noticed a box of crayons. So he heated a few and began applying the hot wax to a canvas. Pleasantly surprised by the results, he continued working until he produced a triptych, “Tears of Wax.” Falk later told Esam that the technique he employed, using molten wax, has a long history. Known as “encaustic painting” — the ancient technique was actually used by artists in what is present-day Iraq, among other places.

What stands out in Esam’s works is the swirling of color, conveying a sense of unease that runs through his repertoire. The images he employs form a discomfiting tableau: waiting vultures, floating coffins, faceless women, thrashing whales.

The dark mood is a stark reminder that the young artist’s lifetime spans the rule of Saddam Hussein. While Esam is adamant that he does not infuse politics into his art, he does not shy away from contemporary themes either. In one painting, he includes references to Iraq’s three distinct regions—marshes and reed homes for the south; minarets for the center; and mountains for the north. It is an attempt to stress that while differences exist, a national identity binds everyone.

Esam says the question he gets asked most often is whether conditions in Iraq are better or worse than portrayed by the media. Skirting the question, he prefers to talk about Iraqi culture—a topic he says is unfamiliar to most Americans. “It’s not surprising. For thirty years, we were pretty much cut off from everyone. And they were cut off from us. We didn’t have magazines, or satellite dishes, or Internet.”

The government no longer censors its artists, but limited exposure and security concerns make conditions tough, Esam says. The Internet has provided some relief. After the U.S. invasion, for instance, Esam sold several pieces to foreign clients on artvitae.com, a website for artists.

While Esam wants to return to Iraq, he has decided to stay in the U.S. as long as possible because he feels it is best for his career. At the same time, his decision to remain in the U.S. comes at a steep personal price. Esam says he greatly misses his family, all of whom remain in Iraq. Thinking about home, Esam sounds a bit homesick. “I miss just walking down the Tigris,” he says.

Esam has started building a new life. He has a girlfriend and travels to New York frequently to visit friends and museums. He likes New London and the people there, whom he says are “very friendly, kind of like Iraqis.” In July, Esam emailed me to let me know about an upcoming solo exhibition and talk he was giving at the University of Connecticut. He is also working on a memoir, which he hopes to get published.  

In an essay written when he was still in Iraq, Esam summarized his defiant spirit. “I have come to accept the daily electrical blackouts in Baghdad. On a good day, we would have one hour of electricity on and seven or more hours off. I have even come to accept the ever-present dangers of simply getting around Baghdad.” Concluding, he writes: “But I could not accept running out of pigments to create my art.”

Esam’s future, much like his country’s, is uncertain. If he has to return to Iraq, there will be much danger waiting and difficult conditions in which to work. But Iraqis, Esam says, are resilient. He has, after all, been through it before.

In The Fray Contributor

ABC No Rio lets FNB use their kitchen on Fridays and Sundays.

Observing a Food Not Bombs event makes it easier to shop for produce. The moment I touched slime when sorting through old broccoli, deciding which vegetables were safe to feed to the homeless, I realized the silliness of fretting over a dented pepper at the corner bodega.

On a Friday in April shortly before 1 p.m., there was no way inside ABC No Rio, the art and activism hangout on New York’s Lower East Side that lends its kitchen to Food Not Bombs. The doors, marked up with graffiti, were locked, but they also didn’t have handles or knobs. There was a set of four buzzers, but punching them accomplished nothing. A placard next to the stoop read “Culture of Opposition Since 1980.”

Someone spoke up from behind. “Are you here for Food Not Bombs?” A kid with long brown hair hanging across his left eye poked his head around the outside hallway that enclosed the stoop.

He introduced himself as Pat, a high school senior who, instead of going to class, had arranged to spend most of his school days working at the John Heuss House, a homeless drop-in center on Beaver street. For the last few Fridays, though, he’d also been helping out with Food Not Bombs.

Food Not Bombs exists in 46 of the United States and on six continents. Every branch operates independently, but shares the same guidelines: get local grocers to donate ugly produce and other unwanted food, cook up a vegetarian meal (the NYC group is vegan) and serve it to the needy, no questions asked. The ABC No Rio branch gets its food mostly from Perelandra Natural Foods in Brooklyn.

The local Food Not Bombs website says that it was founded on anarchist principles, without leaders or hierarchies. Every Friday and Sunday, anyone who wants to help out with Food Not Bombs can show up in front of ABC No Rio. “There was no walk-in tutorial,” Pat said of his first visit. “It was just, ‘pick up a knife and start cooking.’” When the food is ready, the group brings it over to Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and offers it to anyone who is hungry.

These tomatoes and onions didn’t make the cut due to the puffy white mold near the bottom of the box.

“Usually we talk while we’re making the food, so if you’re willing to cut a tomato they’ll probably tell you what you want to hear,” Pat suggested.

Pat kicked the door a few times and eventually sat down on the steps. He talked about his desire to start carrying rope so he could scale walls, about the origins of his Mao Zedong tee-shirt, which he bought as a novelty item in China, about what he called the self-righteousness of leftists and about Critical Mass, the monthly rally where bicyclists flood the streets of Manhattan to raise awareness for non-pollutant transportation. Pat would be in attendance with his bike that evening.

A college-age girl with the keys to ABC No Rio arrived a few minutes after 1 p.m., gave a brief hello and let us inside.

The house rules certainly didn’t ban writing on the walls; every vertical surface was covered with graffiti, and a blacklight in the hallway gave an intimidating glow to the cryptic art. The girl led us to the second floor kitchen, where someone had neatly written in marker on the door, “Food Not Bombs Mash the Potatos Smash the State.” (A superscript “E” was wedged into “Potatos” to fix the typo.) We finally introduced ourselves — her name was Rudi.

Diane helps prepare a tomato and tofu salad.

We went back downstairs to grab the groceries. Rudi pulled out the food from a sliding-door fridge: an extra-long milk crate full of red, orange, yellow and green peppers, a damp cardboard box of lettuce, broccoli and indiscernible foliage, a crate of cucumbers and squash and an industrial-size trash bag full of bread.

The menu is dictated by what they receive from the stores, and Rudi decided to make stuffed peppers because there were so many. Potatoes, she said, are a popular donation in the winter. A lot of the donations are bread and produce so there’s usually a need to buy extra ingredients. Today, rice would be needed to stuff the peppers.

Before cooking, the inedible vegetables had to be discarded. Most of the greens were too slimy to be used, and those that passed the loose standards still had some rotting at the tips, or were covered in brown juice, which had left a stench on everything in the box.

During the sorting, another girl, Rosie, arrived. She had brown-red hair in dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail, and wore eyeglasses and one of those belts with spiky metal studs. When a question arose about a pepper with a brown spot near the stem, Rosie shrugged and said, “It’s Food Not Bombs,” as if to suggest that anything that wasn’t bombs was passable for consumption.

A song by Oingo Boingo played on a boom box while everyone chopped peppers in the dining room and discussed their plans for the next few days — a party here and there, a benefit for May Day Books, the Livewire music and activist festival, the anti-war rally on Saturday and the May Day rally on Monday.

Gaylen strains some potatoes to be mashed.

Meanwhile, Rudi gave money to Rosie to go out and buy rice. “Leader” is too strong of a term for the group’s anarchist principles, but someone has to make sure everything goes as planned. Rudi, an American Studies major at Brooklyn College, has been “bottom-lining” since two Januarys ago. She started visiting ABC No Rio for their weekly punk shows. When her friend, who was in a punk band at the time, went on tour and passed the Food not Bombs job to Rudi’s roommates, they bailed at the last minute and asked Rudi to fill in. Since then, she’s only missed a handful of Fridays, which she blames on oversleeping.

Food Not Bombs will make a temporary move to St. Mark’s Church soon, Rudi said, while renovations are being done on ABC No Rio. After years of legal battles, the administrators at ABC No Rio purchased the building from the city last year, and work is needed to bring it up to code; Rudi pointed out a shoe-sized hole through to the ground floor next to the kitchen sink as a noteworthy issue, and other holes, dents and dilapidations could be seen throughout the building.

A new round of chopping began as another girl, Diane, arrived. Of the group, she had the most radical hairdo — chunks of it were variously shaded, and some of it was randomly clipped to the side of her head. She had been taking time off from The Gallatin School at NYU, and she wore a white shirt with ripped sleeves that said “I (heart) my adjunct professor” on the front. At a later event, she wore a hat that advertised “Balzac,” the balloon ball toy from the mid-90s. She grabbed a knife and chopped onions while Pat chopped garlic, two more items that had to be purchased, since Rudi said it was impossible to cook without them. In the kitchen, Rudi added the vegetables to a pot of tomato sauce. This stew would be added to the rice to create the stuffing for the peppers, which were soon to be placed in the oven.

An older guy with wavy blonde and gray hair named Roger arrived to drop off split pea soup. For the last three or four years, he’s been donating extra food from a local Catholic Worker community. He waxed nostalgic about anarchy in the old days, when the movement was small enough that everyone knew each other. Once the dining room table was clear of stems and stalks, Rudi asked Pat to carry the day’s trash down to the corner, warning him not to get busted for unauthorized dumping. Pat asked me to keep an eye out, but then rushed ahead to the west street corner. He only took a few steps before spotting an officer, and quickly turned around, muttering an expletive, and heading to the opposite end of the block, where he placed the bag down next to a city trash can — it would not fit inside.

The food was almost ready to go, so Pat stepped out behind the building to select a shopping cart from ABC No Rio’s courtyard, which was at least 25 feet wide and 50 feet long with graffiti on every wall. A city parks sign that once belonged to ABC Playground — “No Rio” was painted in between the two words — was wedged between two rusty window bars, but so much of the sign was suspended in air that it seemed a minor gust might dislodge it.

The group hauls the food to Tompkins Square Park. The sturdy undercarriage of the red cart is great for carrying bulky pantry items, like bread and crackers.

There were three shopping carts outside, but Pat had instructions to pick from the two larger ones: a silver cart from Waldbaums and a red cart of unknown origin. He selected the red cart for its sturdier undercarriage and brought it out to the street to load up. The group left ABC No Rio at around 4:15 p.m., pushing the cart packed with a tray of stuffed peppers, a bucket of leftover stuffing, a tub of split pea soup, some plastic bowls, plates and forks and an industrial size trash bag full of bread.

“We’re not really pro or con anything outwardly,” Rudi said on the way to the park. Some Food Not Bombs groups give out activist literature along with the meals, but the New York City group only focuses on food. “I guess what’s radical about Food Not Bombs is that we get everything for free, we cook it for free and we serve it for free. But the most radical thing is that we don’t ask anything of the people we serve it to.”

Legally, a permit is required to do this kind of work, and Rudi said that Food Not Bombs never bothered to get one, because doing so costs money. Besides, legit soup kitchens like the nearby Trinity’s Service and Food for the Homeless have to buy produce locally. Carolyn Williams, who runs the kitchen and pantry there (and who has sampled Food Not Bombs cuisine), said that she relies on monetary donations and an annual stipend from the state. Food Not Bombs, on the other hand, relies on what would otherwise have been thrown away.

Rudi admitted that the lack of permit and paperwork, the stolen shopping cart, the street dumping and the state of the kitchen means that almost every aspect of Food Not Bombs is illegal. They’ve gotten in trouble with police before, Rudi said, and on Sundays, which are busier than Fridays, food is served outside of the park.

Rudi gets the impression that the police don’t really want to come down hard on them, which isn’t always the case at other branches. Food Not Bombs’ website says that co-founder Keith McHenry has been arrested over 100 times for serving food. On a more extreme level, the Los Angeles Times reported in March that the FBI’s Denver office listed Food Not Bombs as an anarchist group that may be associated with terrorism.

The cart was wheeled up to the southeast side of the park near the chess tables — the usual spot, Rudi said. People were hanging around, and a tall man wearing a woolen newsboy hat, patchwork pants and one of those cowboy jackets with two-way curving arrows on the breasts walked over. “The apple of my eye!” he exclaimed, and gave Rudi a hug. She greeted him by name — Manny — as he examined the food.

While they were talking, an older woman with thick blonde and gray hair walked over to the cart, inspected the contents, grabbed a bowl and served herself. Rudi, Rosie and Diane started serving as people lined up by the shopping cart. Once the initial crowd was fed, Pat, Diane and Rosie took portions for themselves.

It was a beautiful, cloudless day, temperature in the mid-60s. Rudi said that Food Not Bombs serves all year, rain or shine. In the winter, not as many people volunteer, but not as many people are in the parks either.

A man with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder and a boom box in his hand walked over. He acted as if it was his duty to provide music, and as soon as Rudi acknowledged his presence, he punched the play button and heavy metal music blared. The man nodded slightly and stared off into the distance. I tried to talk to him, but he just looked back, confused. “I can’t hear you, man,” he said, pointing to the speakers, “It’s right in my face.”

As AC-DC screamed through the stereo, another man who called himself “Black Jaximus” complimented the music and growled a few comical poems about himself, his sexual exploits and his warrior prowess. Amused by the ramblings, the man with the boom box told Jaximus that he had two questions for him, “What are you on, and can I have some of it?” Jaximus explained that he was about to run to the liquor store, and that he was willing to share.

Rudi realizes that some of the people she feeds have drug and alcohol problems, but said that it wasn’t her place to judge them. “The people that we serve in the park don’t eat healthy food like that otherwise, they don’t eat vegetables or stuff that’s good for them. The best service I can give to them is to give them healthy food once a week, and then let them sort their own shit out.”

Some diners help themselves.

In The Fray Contributor

Ira Glass at Wordstock. (April Cottini)

Last night I went to a church in downtown Portland, Oregon and watched a radio show.

It was the last day of Wordstock, the city’s annual literary festival, and the closing event was billed as “An Evening with Ira Glass.” Glass, the 47-year-old creator and host of the perennially popular National Public Radio show This American Life, sat at a table behind a mixing board and microphone and proceeded to give a performance blending radio snippets, iPod instrumentals, and disarmingly personal patter.

“Okay, so this is probably more than you want to know about me, but I have operated an ATM while on LSD,” he confessed.

Glass, who told the audience that he began his radio career at 19 as an editor at NPR, specializes in mixing things up. He strode onto the stage sporting a sleek, gray suit and pale yellow tie, the very image of the smooth broadcast professional. But once he was seated behind the table, his thick dark hair and trademark Buddy Holly glasses took over — the visible signs of the proud geek that he is. He dispensed facts and stories with charm and aplomb, reminding listeners, “We’re on 500 public-radio stations, with an audience of 1.7 million,” more than once, and cueing music to enhance his own improvisatory chatter. But he littered his rapid speech with more “likes,” “you knows,” and “I dunnos” than a teenager.

He was entertaining a crammed church with the zeal of P.T. Barnum while confessing to that same audience as if it were a composite confidante, a Dear Abby sitting in the dark on the other side of the microphone. For most of us, listening to the radio is a solitary activity — we listen in the car, in the shower, in the bedroom — and while Glass is a regular on the lecture circuit, he understands the oddity of actually seeing a radio personality.

“When I was an editor at NPR, I’d spend all day editing interviews in a room the size of this table,” he told us, his lips moving but his voice emanating from the two tall speakers framing him on the stage. “And then, when I actually met one of the interviewers, like Bob Edwards, I couldn’t believe that the voice coming out of their mouth was the same one I listened to all day in the editing room. It was uncanny.”

Except Glass didn’t say it this way; what he actually said was something like, “It was, like, totally uncanny.”

Like his episodic radio show, Glass moved sporadically from topic to topic, beginning the evening with a radio clip about Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., before launching into a series of jokes and manifestos, tossed together like a salad.

His audience, a congregation of the converted, applauded both his humor and his opinions. They giggled at the increasing intolerance of the Federal Communications Commission (“Yes, Ira, it’s okay to run the piece about the hippopotamus with a leech up his ass.”) and cheered This American Life’s increasingly political slant, with episodes about prisoners in Guantánamo, sailors in the Middle East, and victims of Hurricane Katrina.

As befits the producer of a radio show that gained a following for its quirky, heartfelt stories about ordinary people, Glass asked journalists to stop falling prey to seriousness and start looking for “the surprise, the joy, the humor in life.” He blamed this epidemic of seriousness on the tyranny of the topic sentence, and then winsomely admitted that his demand for the abolition of the topic sentence was itself a topic sentence.

Glass also talked about how he compulsively analyzes television story lines, citing such popular shows as The Sopranos, Gilmore Girls, and South Park.  The recognition goes both ways. Glass re-enacted his own shock at hearing his show mentioned on Fox’s drama The O.C. by leaping from his chair. Then he played the TV audio: “Is that that show where those hipster know-it-alls talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? God.”

“I couldn’t ask for a greater compliment,” Glass beamed.

People love Ira Glass. He’s intelligent, funny and sexy in a nerdy way. And he demonstrates his trust for his audience by confiding in them and assuming they’re just as offbeat and witty as he is. Most public personalities guard their privacy with the ferocity of Dobermans. But Glass embraces his fans even from behind a mixing board.

During several of his serious interludes, Glass explicated the story structure used on This American Life. “It’s easy, it’s simple, and it works,” he said. “First you have an action, which leads to another action, and another action, and then you step back and have a thought about it.” His exposition turned into a lovely reminiscence about his childhood rabbi and a spiel about how rabbis and Glass really have the same job.

“You know a rabbi, or a minister or a preacher or a priest, is really good when the kids stay to hear the sermon,” Glass explained. His rabbi told stories from the Old Testament and then explained them in a way Glass found irresistible. “I’d be sitting there, thinking, ‘You know, this is pretty cool. You get to say your piece once a week and then people go out thinking about what you’ve said. That’s a cool job. That’d be nice.’”

But it was hard to tell how much Glass had really listened to his own lecture. He was precise about the story structure of This American Life, but his rabbi anecdote was a little fuzzy, with asides about his parents and a trip home to Baltimore that distracted from the original inspirational story of the rabbi. He mocked his own speech habits, saying that this is what he sounds like without the benefit of editing.

His entire talk — performance? ad-lib? — seemed both rehearsed and improvised at the same time. On tour to promote his show (and its upcoming television version on Showtime), Glass understandably recycles many of the same anecdotes. But does he also recycle the charming confusion he displays on stage? He’s a performer begging journalists to stop performing and start being natural. That’s impossible. Despite the intimate trust he’s built with his audience over years of radio shows, Glass will never be anything but a performer. It’s like, you know, totally unnatural to ask otherwise. But perhaps that’s the secret of his success.

In The Fray Contributor

When Miner Seymour started recruiting performers to Old Settlers Inn 12 years ago, he couldn’t pay them much, so staying the night at his family’s house was part of the deal. At breakfast, Miner asked performers for names of others he should call to book.

When he called singer-songwriter Susan Werner’s agent to see if Werner would come to south-central Kansas to play, Werner’s agent said, “Why would I send her out there?”

This is a story about a one-room venue in a small town. It’s the story of an Ohio transplant who envisioned a space for creativity. It’s a story about a piece of culture that blurs red state identity and paints a different picture than news reports on the state school board, evolution or Thomas Frank’s book What’s The Matter With Kansas?, which pondered why Kansans vote against their own interests. This is the story of the gathering power of music.

Old Settlers Inn is in Moundridge, a town of almost 1,600 people. It’s about an hour from Wichita and a half hour from Hutchinson. It’s an area thick with Mennonite culture and religion, where some people have distinctive Moundridge speech patterns and last names. There are six Mennonite churches, a history of high school debate and forensics championships, and an obsession with Moundridge Wildcats basketball. It’s an unlikely place to start a music venue for national performers.

Yet Old Settlers Inn has become a musical stand-by in the region. It’s the anchor date for performers on a circuit that includes Kansas City venues, West Side Folk in Lawrence, the Birdhouse in Manhattan, the Listening Room in Hastings, Nebraska, and sometimes the Blue Door in Oklahoma City. Cheryl Wheeler, a country-folk songwriter from New England, has termed this the “Silo Circuit.”

Old Settlers draws people from bigger cities to Moundridge for music. Almost half the crowd now drives in from Wichita, Kansas’s largest city. There are 40 zip codes in Miner’s audience database.

Still, Miner expects new performers to be skeptical. He imagines musicians driving toward Moundridge from Kansas City according to his directions: Highway 50, then 150, then 56 through the Flint Hills. He imagines they are surprised that Kansas isn’t flat at all. He imagines them driving west to where the land flattens, between the towns of south-central Kansas, where winter wheat pushes green shoots into wide, square-mile fields. He imagines them driving into Moundridge on a Sunday afternoon, when there is hardly a car on main street, and wondering, “Who the hell set this up?”

Main street, where Old Settlers sits behind a limestone storefront, is called Christian Avenue. The corner Conoco station is always open and the Country Kitchen is full on German Buffet night. Further down the block, The Lean-To bar has closed for good.

Inside the inn

Old Settlers isn’t a real inn, but people spend about a dozen Sunday evenings a year there, eating soup and listening to music in a long, narrow room with beige walls and black soundboard borders. A high white ceiling stretches above rough wooden floorboards and the stage, which emerges from the long left wall and is only a few feet off the floor. It’s covered in large marbled tiles and the wall behind it is painted as a marble arch over blue sky and wispy clouds. The face and dove of Picasso’s L’homme en Prole a la Paix, which he reportedly drew for the peace movement, is incorporated into the arch. A painted banister creates the vision of a performer on a circular, outdoor balcony in front of a perfect sky.

For the audience, the 150 seats are less romantic. Wooden folding chairs flank three sides of the stage and fill the floor. Some listeners sit on the bleacher pieces and church pews in the back of the room.

Behind the performance room is the lavender-walled kitchen, where people line up at the counter for the soup-of-the-day. Valetta, Miner’s wife, sells her famous cobbler and key lime pie. At the end of the counter a poster of Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front hangs on the wall, declaring:

Across the room, a poster advertises cider made in the Seymours’ orchard. Another wall is filled with autographed photos of Old Settlers’ performers, including Greg Brown, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Cheryl Wheeler, Janis Ian, Martin Sexton, Jeff Black, Susan Werner, Slaid Cleaves and Guy Davis. On the edge of this collage is a sign that says “Peace is Patriotic.”

The congregation

On the day of a show, professors, teachers, students, farmers, doctors, lawyers, business people and artists start arriving around 4:15 p.m. Miner, who wears a bushy, golden-grey beard and button-down plaid shirt, spends his time between the main room and a huge closet used as the performer’s dressing room. In his strident, ornery voice, Miner chats up the crowd and checks in with the musicians. It’s a mostly 30-and-older crowd, some dressed in suit jackets, some in sweatshirts, some in overalls. They are music aficionados who bring Miner new music to listen to. They are also friends who simply trust him to put on a good show.

People here know each other, and some have been at every show since Miner started Old Settlers. Once the entire front row — all season-ticket holders — went out for dinner before a show. Before the show starts, people mill and talk to each other. The ones who drove from out-of-state are soon chatting with regulars.

After 12 years, the Old Settlers audience is still mostly out-of-towners, although there are some local regulars. In general though, the population of Moundridge and the Old Settlers audience do not reflect each other. Miner thinks people like to go to other people’s towns to do things. After all, it’s a nice Sunday drive through rural Kansas. But he feels like Moundridgers still think, “If it’s in our town, how good can it be?”

Small stories

When songwriter Louise Taylor drives across Kansas, heading to her home in Arkansas, she likes listening to Midwest agriculture reports on the radio and trying to decode the beef and grain prices. Sometimes, Louise stops in Kansas and stays overnight at Miner and Valetta’s house. She first met them in 1996 when she played at Old Settlers Inn, and she’s been back to play three times since. Miner and Louise have become good friends, and Miner recently became her agent — his first shot at the enterprise. Louise says the main reason Miner is her agent is because of Valetta’s cherry pie.

Louise believes that people from small towns are more willing to listen to the kind of storytelling she does in her songs. Louise and Miner both say Midwesterners aren’t inundated with shows like those on the coasts, and Kansans are eager to have performers come to them.

When a song moves the crowd at Old Settlers, Louise and Miner can tell. There are no hoops and hollers. Instead, there’s a slight pause — a silence — after the song and before the applause begins.

When she plays at Old Settlers, Louise casts spells on the audience with her poetry and her heavy voice. She’s tall and imposing with a sturdy smile and long, curly brown hair. She fuses her singer-songwriter craft with country-blues, jazz textures, and finger-style guitar playing.

There aren’t many frills about Old Settlers, but Louise says it’s the perfect environment for performers. There are warm personalities, food, and a ready and willing audience. Old Settlers’ performers are treated — and paid — well. Miner can guarantee performers an unusual bonus for a venue this size: $1,000 and a full house. That’s because Miner doesn’t try to make his own living off the ticket price, which now averages $15 a show. Plus, the venue’s good sound and good stage aren’t terribly common in the world where Louise plays.

Coming home

There wouldn’t be an Old Settlers Inn if Miner hadn’t met his wife Valetta while doing pro bono accounting for a Columbus, Ohio, medical clinic. Valetta, who had just returned from working in Africa, was a nurse at the clinic. She was a farm girl from Kansas, not the kind of girl Miner was supposed to marry. His wealthy Ohio family expected him to be a professional, he knew, and to marry a Theta. But this wasn’t what Miner wanted.

In 1985, after living and working in the Northwest — and getting married — the Seymours moved to Kansas. Miner had been studying architecture and doing construction work, and he and Valetta began building a house next to the farm where she grew up. It was a few miles outside Moundridge, on North Old Settlers Road. Soon, their daughter Kate was born.

Valetta knew the Mennonites who farmed the flat fields and lived in Moundridge, but Miner had no connections to the area. He couldn’t believe people identified each other by which church they attended. He didn’t have a group — or a place — with which he identified. But he could relate to the Mennonite values of living simply, pacifism, and a passion for four-part singing.

The small town wasn’t an easy place to be a newcomer; regional history runs deep. Moundridge was born of railroad routes and transplanted roots of homesteaders from Europe, Canada, and other parts of the Midwest. The largest group of immigrants were the German-speaking Mennonites who migrated from Russia to the area in 1874 and brought with them a new winter wheat, which eventually made Kansas the leading producer of hard wheat. Around Moundridge, people still farm the grain.

The Seymours can see the horizon — the curve of the earth — from their front porch. Miner slowly fell in love with Kansas. Although standing in the middle of an empty square mile used to spook him, he likes the vastness now. Once, when they were snowed in on the day of an Old Settlers show, Miner and Valetta strapped on their cross-country skis and sailed across the stubble fields into town.

Putting down roots

It was soon after the move to Kansas in 1985 that Miner saw a building for sale on Moundridge’s main street. After living in the Northwest, he couldn’t believe the low price. He bought it immediately for $11,000 from the VFW without any idea what he’d use it for.

Then, he began to think about what he’d put into the 110-year-old structure that once held a pool hall, senior citizens center and a VFW. He and Valetta thought about opening a film house or a puppet theater for kids. The bottom floor was leased to a pizza joint, and pizza ended up paying the mortgage. The top floor, accessible only up a narrow, precarious and peeling stairway, was empty. It had been used for bingo and parties, so there were restrooms and a food service area.

Eventually, Miner’s songwriter friend Anne Zimmerman told him there was a shortage of venues for her kind in Kansas. Miner got his answer.

The first show at Old Settlers was in 1993, after the upstairs walls had been stripped of decades of wallpaper and painted white with mint green trim. Seventy people came to hear the Waffles, a local old-time string band, play on the foot-high, corner stage. Valetta made chowder and bread to sell to the crowd. People sat at square tables, coffeehouse style. Miner made $37.

By the time The Kennedys drew 80 people to a show in March 1994, Old Settlers had hosted 12 shows and Miner still worried every Sunday if people would show up. At one show, only 27 people had come, and four shows had ended in a net loss for Old Settlers. A few Moundridge residents came to shows at the beginning, but the majority of people came from surrounding small towns.

The Kennedys had been touring with Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra. At the time, Miner didn’t even know who Nanci Griffith was. But Pete Kennedy befriended Miner and started providing names of performers who might play there. In February 1995, songwriter Brooks Williams was the first to attract concertgoers from Wichita.

Tending the flame

As Old Settlers’ popularity grew, Miner decided to move the venue downstairs to increase seating and accessibility in 2001. The pizza place below had folded and left a kitchen and dining area. Miner did all of his own construction work. He brought down the wooden folding chairs he’d bought at a rental yard in Hutchinson. He also brought down the wooden theater seats, grouped in threes, that he acquired from Moundridge High School. He used two church pews and elevated wooden bleacher seats from a tiny high school in northeast Kansas. Seating is tight, but Miner has tried to make it more comfortable by providing foam seat cushions, printed with the Old Settlers logo — a candle with rays of light arcing outward.

Old Settlers Inn is now operated by the non-profit Acoustic Arts Association, which Miner started. It includes five board members and is directed by Miner. There is also a radio program on KMUW called New Settlers Radio Hour, which plays live shows from Old Settlers and other places in the area. Miner uses his connections from Old Settlers to bring musicians to local colleges and larger performance venues.

The Seymours have never expected to make a living from the venue, and Valetta works as a nurse practitioner in nearby Hesston. On show days, a local family runs the kitchen and makes and serves the soup, bread and dessert. But Valetta is also in the Old Settlers kitchen after the show, helping clean and wash dishes. People are employed to do this (they get free tickets), but Valetta can’t help herself. Miner says it’s how she is — it might have something to do with her farm-girl roots.

Musical testimony

By now, Miner has used Old Settlers to put down roots in the region. For him, developing Old Settlers Inn has been an exercise in creativity, and his goal has always been to foster an artistic space. The soul of Old Settlers Inn has everything to do with why Miner loves living in small-town Kansas. It’s the phenomenon of the clerk at the bank, the guy at the lumberyard, and the waitress at the café in the next town also being on your sports team or members of a committee to which you belong. They shop at the same grocery store. And maybe go to the same church on Sundays. Old Settlers is a hybrid soul that feeds on this community’s desire to hear stories and songs from beyond south-central Kansas.

One recent evening, Old Settlers hosted musician Paul Thorn for a Saturday night show. A few minutes after 8 p.m., most people were snug in their seats. Miner hates announcing anything in front of a crowd, so as the house lights go down he asked Billy, Paul’s agent, if he wanted to do it.

“Welcome to Settlers Inn!” Billy said. The crowd didn’t care that he left off the “old,” and they erupted with applause and hoots. In the swinging kitchen doors, Paul waited in a western-style, white button-down open at the collar, jeans and black lace-up shoes with heavy tread. He used to be a boxer, and in 1987 he shared the ring with Roberto Duran on national television. After he quit boxing, Paul worked in a furniture factory and started playing local gigs at night. Since then, he’s been onstage with folks like John Hiatt and John Prine. Clearly, he has some song material behind his shaved head and stubble beard.

Paul walked through the chairs and applause and into the spotlight onstage. He sat down in the chair, about three feet from the audience, grabbed his acoustic guitar, and smiled. Then he played a full night of southern gospel, soul and country-blues.

Paul told the crowd he wasn’t used to going to a new town and having such a big turnout; usually, no one knows who he is. He narrated stories to the audience in his slow, thick southern accent and at one point invoked his heritage as a preacher’s son. “I feel like testifying tonight,” he yelled to the crowd, and then moved into the song “Ain’t Love Strange.” At one point, he got two women on stage to sing backup. On his more spare and serious songs, Paul turned inward and closed his eyes, but the audience was perched and listening until the end.

And that’s why Old Settlers Inn isn’t a bad place to testify. The story continues, on Sunday after Sunday in Moundridge, before the work week begins. At 2 p.m., Miner drives in to town, opens up Old Settlers, and prepares the stage and dressing room. Within an hour, performers show up for sound check. Then the cooks arrive, and at 4 p.m., the doors open. The parking spots on main street begin to fill up as people arrive at Old Settlers Inn to meet their friends. They look forward to hearing stories. They gather to listen.

In The Fray Contributor

ITF Columns Editor Russell Cobb makes his radio debut this weekend with an hour long piece on This American Life. He traces the mercurial career of Reverend Carlton Pearson, an evangelical preacher in Tulsa. The interview begins with Pearson recounting one of his early ministerial successes: driving the devil out of his then girlfriend at the tender age of 17. A man known for his charisma and sense of humor, Pearson later jokes in a sermon about him and his wife getting in a fight and each trying to drive the devil out of the other.

After growing up in a black ghetto in San Diego, Pearson later attended Oral Roberts University and was anointed by Oral Roberts as “my black son,” an appellation Roberts’ biological white son didn’t seem to enjoy. He went on to found Higher Dimensions, a surprisingly successful and racially integrated church, which at its peak was taking in 20,000 parishioners and half a million dollars every month. That was before Pearson became, in the words of his former followers, “a heretic.” Cobb lets the minister tell of his Road to Damascus moment in his own words. Essentially, he stopped believing in hell. And as one of a few pastors who remain loyal to Pearson afterwards explains, the belief in hell is a huge draw for churches. Stop believing in hell, he says, and you’ll have people — pastors like himself — out of a job.  

Cobb documents the inevitable fall. Some who leave Pearson’s church explain that while they don’t really like contemplating hell all the time, “they didn’t make the rules, God did.” Pearson, of course, disagrees, and brings a passionate eloquence to his new theory that all, even non-believers, have been saved. His “Theology of Inclusion” wins him some surprising new friends and foreclosure on his church building when he can’t make the mortgage payments. The story is compellingly told in Pearson’s rich tones and with Cobb’s own subtle humor. It is well worth hearing, even if you only catch the snippet in which a still-parishioner tells of the cost among her neighbors of remaining with the Reverend.

You can find “Heretics” broadcast the weekend of December 16-18, or can download it from This American Life in subsequent weeks.

Nicole Leistikow

The short angry gusts of wind that bend the branches of the palm trees and blow the miasma of the meandering sewage into the nostrils are a welcome — if feeble — respite from the debilitating heat of Port-au-Prince. Market women in old floral dresses shield themselves from the sun as they balance brimming baskets of produce. Men squat under the shade of trees, selling paintings, cell phone chargers, and tubes of car oil. Children hawk plastic pouches of water out of burlap sacks perched on their heads like oversized turbans, letting the cool contents slide over their brows and ears.

“Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo,” shriek the young vendors as they try to lure thirsty pedestrians. When a customer comes they raise an arm, dive crooked fingers inside the sack, and pull a pouch out of the lot. A sachet of water costs 10 cents.

“Delmas, Delmas, Delmas, Delmas,” echoes another army of kids, urging pedestrians to board colorful tap-taps headed to an uphill neighborhood. A ride in one of those is an experiment in patience and humor, at twice the price of water.

It is the daily pulse of Haiti’s capital city. The patter of gunshots that sometimes rips the early evening haze and dies beneath the shouts of the kid-merchants does not seem to rattle anyone anymore. Homebound workers might quicken their step, honking drivers might lower their din, but panic is only a thought, not a reaction. Moments of public danger rarely stand apart from the normally frenzied pace of this town.

It has been a full year since the killings and kidnappings of civilians began, and the staggering number of the victims — more than 1,200 killed since last September and over 500 abducted since mid-February — seems to have dulled the survivors’ capacity for shock. In July, when violence peaked and at least six people were being plucked from the streets of Port-au-Prince each day, a couple of shots from a distance seemed more salute to the dead than threat to the living.

This is the kind of thing that battles common sense: in downtown Port-au-Prince the bustle of daily life lends an illusion of security — an illusion sustained by the cacophony and the ant-like collective movement on the streets. Police officers in black uniforms ride six deep in dusty pickups with the rear doors flung open, brazenly pointing the barrels of their automatic rifles against the river of cars. Blue-helmeted U.N. troops cruise along atop snow-white armored personnel carriers (APCs), the turret mounts swiveling about jammed intersections. The proximity of cops and soldiers diminishes the immediate danger, and so the illusion grows, despite the alarming statistics.

But the pushing crowds, panting traffic, car horns and compas rhythms rapidly thin out as one leaves the heart of the city, and the illusion vanishes too. On the potholed road to Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, and past its peeling marquis on to Bel Air, the air hangs empty and the haze thickens like a membrane of concentrated sunlight.

A tap-tap headed to an uphill neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. The cheerful colors of its facade and the contagious compas blaring from the car radio make up for a sweaty, bumpy ride in this distinctly Haitian public bus. (Gergana Koleva)

The situation

I arrived in Haiti last July to acquaint myself with a culture of dashing beauty, contagious vitality, unassuming playfulness — and joltingly stark contrasts. Although the purpose of my trip was journalistic, I had no badge, no press credentials, no letter of introduction from an important news organization. Instead, I arrived for my first dig into foreign freelancing with a modest research grant from my university in New York and a handful of local contacts given to me by a generous friend.

The check-in clerk at John F. Kennedy airport’s international departures surveyed my face, furrowed her brow, and questioned, “United Nations?” I shook my head. She studied my passport. While I waited for her to finish and tag my bags, I noticed that my line, for Flight 837 going to Port-au-Prince, was the thinnest of all surrounding Caribbean destinations.

“The situation,” as Haitians refer to the political impasse generated by the strain between the wealthy ruling elite and the masses of Haiti’s poor, had reached hysterical proportions.

Violence between chimères — the name of the mythical two-headed monster given militant supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — and the equally militant members of the opposition has been escalating since February 2004, when Aristide left Haiti amidst a bloody popular rebellion. After his departure, hordes of admirers blocked city roads and highways with barricades of burning tires and protested the leader’s removal in chanting processions from their slum homes to the National Palace.

But if those were disparate attacks intended to inject terror during the spring and summer months, September saw the beginning of uninhibited street war. Prime Minister Gerard Latortue dubbed it “Operation Baghdad” after the rebels’ alleged use of Iraqi insurgent tactics in trying to pressure the U.S.-backed transitional government to restore Aristide. Slum residents viewed the police- and U.N.-orchestrated raids seeking to take out gang leaders in their neighborhoods as mass murder. Women, children, and elderly citizens living in proximity to alleged rebels’ homes were often killed in special operations. The chimères — who are said to be financed by the former president himself —responded by killing or kidnapping cops, civilians, and those they thought aligned with Latortue’s government and the foreign brain trust behind it. The violence claimed more than 1,000 lives and sent those who could afford it packing.

It broke off on September 30, 2004 — the 13th anniversary of the first coup d’etat against Aristide only seven months after he was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of Haiti.

Abandoned cars and piles of trash litter the streets of Bel Air, a slum of Port-au-Prince where many militant supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide hail from. A decorative wire installation suspended between a lamppost and a house window reads “Titid,” an endearing appellation for the first democratically elected president of Haiti, who is said to have funded armed militants to protest his exile in South Africa. In the far background, the triumphant cupolas of the National Palace. (Gergana Koleva)

The priest

A young, charismatic Roman Catholic priest who spoke the language of the poor, Jean-Bertrand Aristide emerged from his pulpit in the slum of La Saline as a beloved leader of the masses during the long-overdue disintegration of the Duvalier dictatorship in the 1980s. In 1990, he won a landslide victory in unprecedented free elections, but his fiery rhetoric for empowerment of the poor did not sit well with the elite of wealthy mulattos, who to this day own most of Haiti’s natural and industrial resources. Neither did Aristide appeal to U.S. business and ideological interests in the region, or the Bush Sr. administration.

Thus in the fall of 1991, Haiti’s popular leader was overthrown. Re-installed three years later under Clinton’s presidency and with the help of 20,000 U.S. marines, and re-elected in a sham election in 2000 after sitting out a term, he was again forced to resign on February 29, 2004. But this time it was his own former partisans, backed by awakened voices from his own electorate, who insisted the humble priest had become a vicious dictator. There were marches, there were popular protests. Blood was spilt. Aristide quit.

Securing his safe exit to South Africa, where he is now in exile, the Bush administration — backed by the Canadian and French governments — asserted that Aristide stepped down voluntarily. Aristide said that American officials forced him to sign his resignation on the steps of his departing jet and “kidnapped democracy” as they shut the door behind him.

Solange holds a portrait of her son Enok, 34, who disappeared from their home in Bel Air on July 13 and whose body she found in a morgue the next day. She believes members of the Haitian National Police killed him when they invaded Bel Air searching for armed gangs. Slum residents and human rights activists have accused the police of raiding poor neighborhoods and summarily executing young men they regard as bandits. (Gergana Koleva)

Welcome to Bel Air

Bel Air’s name is a cruel joke. It hails from the colonial era when it used to be the capital’s fanciest neighborhood, and at the turn of the century its most prominent popular settlement for migrants from Haiti’s countryside. Today, tainted by a corrosive mix of human waste, rotting garbage, and burnt metal, life in this slum of Port-au-Prince is anything but fresh. Seared car skeletons line the streets. Heavy bolts lock the invisible denizens inside single-story cinderblock shacks. Palm trees poke defiantly among the tin roofs and tilted electric poles, but no friendly breeze stirs the broken spirit of the place. It is said that armed kidnappers guard its roads so as not to miss a good catch.

My translator Herby categorically refused to accompany me on this trip. My Haitian friend Garaudy who splits his time between New York and Port-au-Prince rolled his eyes and thought I should concentrate on interviewing local businessmen. My landlord Matt, a young American and former Peace Corps volunteer here, shot me a bemused look when I mentioned my plans. I won over one Haitian journalist, Reuters news service correspondent Guy Delva, but he said that we’d have to make it quick.

As we approached the house, the group of young men and women who sat on its tiny porch interrupted their talk. Some 15 pairs of eyes followed us from our car to the open door, jammed with more people, leaning, standing, and crouching at the threshold. Inside, Solange was serenely seated on the edge of the bed in a white eyelet dress and tattered flip-flops, dwarfed by a throng of neighbors around her, as if she had already been waiting for us. Her granddaughter, a solemn-faced three-year-old, sat in a chair next to her, eating a peanut butter sandwich and glancing at the floor.

Solange’s 34-year-old son, Enok, had vanished six days ago. She learned from a neighbor that police had arrested him. She didn’t know why, nor where they had taken him, so she went to inquire at the police precinct in Port-au-Prince. Nobody there knew anything about him either.

The Haitian National Police (PNH) have a bad reputation among many of Port-au-Prince’s poorest residents for the summary executions of civilians that unidentified police officers have carried out in recent months while trying to ferret out feared gang leaders. But the police are also the arch-nemesis of gangsters who see themselves as local heroes avenging the deaths of their fellow citizens.

“I knew there was one place left to look,” Solange continued. “I took my husband and we went to the morgue, and there we found him. He was killed. I know that police in black uniforms arrested him. I think the police killed him too. I don’t know who did, but he was in their hands.”

Solange doesn’t use words like “good” and “evil” when she talks about her son. She is sad and her eyes are empty, but dry. Look, look at his picture on the dining table, which has worn the same plastic tablecover for so long that the wooden corners are poking through. Its cheap metal frame is the only object in the house new enough to have a glint of luster. Other ornaments are an old mirror conquered by patina, a tattered map of Haiti, a couple of exposed sockets with dangling wires. Oh, but the walls — such bright blue fills the eye with the pristine brilliance of a postcard beach. No, he wasn’t formally employed, but he often found odd jobs at the port. He used to count the boats coming to dock at night. He was a quiet man. No, he never was involved with any of those gangs out there. Maybe he just happened to be on the street when the police came, looking for something. You see all these guys out there? They were all his friends. There’s a bunch of them who got arrested before him. It is a massacre. They bust into people’s houses and kill them.

The crowd that sat outside Solange’s door had been listening closely. They had been respectfully quiet, despite drawing more and more passers-by, until she and I breached the topic of the police. Now the narrow steps to the house are jammed with lean young men, some shirtless, some fingering their guns, and all with Aristide on their minds. As they hear us discuss the police, they begin elbowing each other for a better look.  

“Look, journalist!” one of them yells as I strain to hear my friend’s translation of Solange’s words above the din on the street. I lift my eyes to see him drawing a black pistol out of the back pocket of his jeans. He points it up in the air to amuse me, to give me, the blan, as Haitians half-humorously, half-pejoratively call white foreigners, what he believes I have come to see. Or perhaps to convey his opinion of the police.

Enok’s daughter, 3, right, plays with friends in the back alley adjoining their house. Narrow, high-walled communal passageways weave between the houses in Port-au-Prince’s shantytowns, serving both as playgrounds for children and as ambush sites for kidnappers. (Gergana Koleva)

Bel Air, day two

July 20th — the day I was kidnapped — dawned as a typical day in Port-au-Prince, filled with stifling heat, shoving crowds, and ubiquitous transistors crackling with incessant news bulletins. It was the 10th day of my first foreign trip as a freelancer. Tomorrow, the streets would clog with people attending the public funeral of Jacques Roche, a journalist at the daily newspaper Le Matin who had been kidnapped and brutally murdered one week earlier after his family came $240,000 short of paying a $250,000 ransom. Many of his colleagues believe he was killed less for failing to pay up than for his adamant opinions against Aristide.

I’d never met Roche, but he had been my friend Dario’s high school teacher in Haiti almost 20 years ago. The two had remained close over the years and, following Dario’s suggestion, I emailed him last spring. He promised to help me once I got to Haiti. He was kidnapped on July 10th, the day I arrived.

The spate of kidnappings that erupted in Port-au-Prince last February have been attributed to political and criminal gangs with loyalties to Aristide and the lucrative side of a climate of insecurity. An Indian businessman and a Russian contractor were kidnapped in May, but were released after paying a ransom. A local doctor, a police officer, a Red Cross worker, and Jacques Roche were also kidnapped last summer, and killed.

Despite such alarming statistics, I had visited Bel Air to speak with Solange, and then, testing my luck, decided to go a second time into the neighborhood known to belong to the chimères. In Haiti’s 200-year history, the urban poor, whose interests these urban soldiers claim to defend, have never been regarded as worthwhile citizens by the country’s successive oligarchies, except for a few brief moments during Aristide’s presidency — first in 1991, then in 2000. Despite the fact that during his second term Aristide too had stripped the poor of the fragile hope for getting their voices heard in the hallways of the National Palace, many still regarded him as the humble Catholic priest who had fanned the flames that ended the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986, and as their personal and only savior. I went to Bel Air in the hope of learning from those people why they still put their trust in him.

The whipping rain, huge potholes, and heaps of rotting garbage made navigating the narrow streets a daunting task for me and Guy, so at first I thought the young man who jumped in front of our blue Nissan Saloon needed help. That was before I saw his gun, ordering us wordlessly to pull up and step out.  

My camera, tape recorder, cell phone, and sterling silver earrings quickly vanished in the pockets of the angry-faced men who stood us against a cement wall. My friend’s face glistened with sweat as he silently nodded to the gunman’s demand that he leave Bel Air immediately, and leave me there, the muzzle rammed into his temple. The rain beat down the rutted pavement, sweeping the streets clean of passersby. But it was only when a skinny youngster grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside an inner alley that I fully realized the danger. Prodding me onward, he brought me to an empty crumbling shack, where several others soon surrounded me, wrapping strands of my hair around their fingers and uttering obscene remarks.

As one of the men stared at me, I thought, desperately, to ask him about his name, using one of the few Kreyol phrases I knew. “Komoun ou rele?”

“Poshu,” he answered. He was a character out of a Miami gangster flick — muscular, barechested, with the smell of marijuana on his breath. “We’re Haitian mafia, baby,” he said in unaccented English. I wondered if he was one of those Haitian-American deportees angry at losing their place in the promised land, as some of Haiti’s criminals are said to have been. “It’s revolution,” he added.

“Revolution against whom?” I asked, but Poshu only repeated, “Revolution.”

My eyes traveled from one frowning man to the next. What to do about the one by the door, brandishing his rusty weapon and bearing down on me in silence?

I ventured a simple word. “Police?”

They all gathered around me. One took out a wallet and showed me a baby boy’s picture. I looked at Poshu for translation. “His son,” he said. “Dead.” The move was popular. The gunman at the door hid the weapon and came near me. He too took out his wallet, and there too was a baby’s photo.“Nephew. Dead. Don’t worry. No violence. Only money,” Poshu smiled at me, evidently amused by the mask of horror on my face. “Police mal. Anpil mal.”

If it hadn’t been tragic, my role as a POW against police brutality could have been comical. How could I, a Bulgarian national, be a meaningful pawn in the hands of a dozen desperate, disenfranchised Bel Air thugs? The Bulgarian embassy closest to the epicenter of this spectacle was in Cuba, and U.S. Embassy officials had told me before I arrived in Haiti that because I don’t hold an American passport, I was not to call on them in an emergency.

Ultimately, I was not as important to the chimères’ cause as Roche and the men who shared his fate. I am a woman, and so far no kidnapped woman has been killed — though a few have committed suicide after being viciously tortured. I was also fortunate to have been captured along with a veteran Haitian journalist, whose reputation went a long way with the urban gangsters he frequently writes about. They did not get the $100,000 they requested for my release, though they did get the contents of our wallets. The confluence of these circumstances allowed me to walk out of my three-hour confinement miraculously unharmed, but they also allowed me a profoundly intimate look at the possible effects of attempting to document the lives of people whose self-appointed guardians do not want to be documented.

Gergana Koleva