Dealing With the Pain of Others

On Twitter, I'm known as projectmaven. That's me. I get involved in a lot of projects.
One of them is a play, No Place Called Home. It was written by a friend of mine, Kim Schultz. She's an actress, improv performer and writer. And now she's an activist. That's right, back in the fall of 2009, she traveled to the middle east with a group of other artists on a trip organized by the group, Intersections International, to meet with Iraqi refugees and hear their stories. She came back to New York a changed person. Not only had she heard literally hundreds of stories of ruined and traumatized lives, but she also fell in love with one of the refugees she met, an Iraqi artist named Omar. Then she wrote a play about it.

That's Kim.

Meanwhile, while Kim was busy getting her mind blown apart in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, I was back in New York, coping with the death of my husband, Ivor, from a life long battle with sickle cell disease. By the time she and I were reunited, the funeral was over and my son and I were well on our way down the road of Life without Daddy.

That's me.

Now I'm working with Kim to help her develop a national tour of her play. She's already had a successful run of this one woman show in New York City and New Jersey, and a performance in Washington, DC. I'm helping her to book dates at college campuses and museums all across the midwest, California, Baltimore, New York and other cities throughout the country.

There's one more piece of important history here.

Back in 2009, I had begun my own two-year journey of working on a project that was also related to Iraqi people. Although some of the folks I eventually met were also refugees living in the US, at the time, most Iraqis were still civilians living in their own country that was busy being decimated from the inside by US led sanctions aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein. The impact of these policies on Iraqi civilians, and the efforts of activists to bring light to the situation was the focus of my film, "Christmas in Baghdad." The Iraqi infrastructure had already been shredded, and many activists I knew were busy doing "peaceful" protests against the cruel policies by bringing medical and school supplies to the country, in quiet defiance of the restrictions. Although one friend had traveled to Iraq with a humanitarian delegation and shot ten hours of footage for me, I had largely approached my subject matter through the lens of the activities of protesters and students here in the states, as well as by meeting and talking to Iraqi Americans who still had family living in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

In my final leg of research, I also came to know a group of Iraqi refugees living in Lincoln, Nebraska, whose situation had stemmed mostly from their involvement in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, at the end of the first Gulf War. As I remember it then, meeting with those families had led me to the soul of my film.

Iraqi people are indescribably gracious, soulful and thoughtful people. The poignancy of their suffering, coupled with their dignity and generosity was almost too much for me to bear. How does one witness this and stay silent? I was determined to bring their voices to the American public, to let other Americans have the opportunity to see that they are just like us! They love their children, and want to create a good life for them and the rest of their family members. They are interested in education and culture and living good, healthy lives within a community. Surely these are universal values that everyone could understand? Just share their stories with good hearted American folks, and they will see that we should not be supporting policies that hurt these other good hearted people who are not so different from us and our families...

But 2001 had other things in store for me, and for all of us.

In May of that year, my father died. Then, two months later, we lost my grandmother. Two months later was 9/11 which pretty much shattered the world as we knew it, and then in November, my cat died. It was a terrible year.

With much to recover from, I put my project aside for a while. "Christmas in Baghdad," would have to wait.

And then, the following summer, I became pregnant and my younger sister had a heart attack, just about in that order. My personal life was about to take over in a big way. By the time 2003 rolled around, I was becoming a new mother, and we were entering a new war in Iraq. My film about sanctions was a thing of the past. I had a whole new level of family responsibilities and concerns to occupy my thoughts. The lives of Iraqi people were no longer at the forefront of my consciousness.

Until Kim brought them back in. Coincidence? I don't think so. I believe things happen for a reason. Back when I was working on my film, the psychic burden had in some ways become too great for me to bear. At the time, I could not see how I, one woman functioning as an independent filmmaker, could take on the the criticism of US policies or even manage to look critically at their aftermath, in the form of the suffering of these very real people, about whom I had grown to care tremendously. I simply did not believe I had the inner resources to do it.

Over the next several years, as I dealt with the responsibilities of unraveling two estates, being a new mother, supporting my sister through her acclimation to what became chronic, though manageable heart disease, and coping with my husband's own quietly advancing illness, I often felt pangs of guilt for having abandoned my Iraqi friends. They had told me their stories. They had invested me with the responsibility of sharing what I knew, of doing whatever I could to help, and here I was, letting all of that just... go...

Until Kim brought it back into my life.

So yes, now my son is about to turn eight years old, my husband has been gone for over a year and a half, and my sister has learned to adapt to her underlying illness and is living a very normal and successful life. And I, amidst the many other things I do in a given day, am helping Kim Schultz, as her tour coordinator, to bring her one woman show around the country, to share the stories of Iraqi refugees whose country has been decimated.

And no, we are not alone. There are other artists, activists, advocates, aid workers, family members and friends of Iraqis throughout the United States and around the world who are also doing what they can to help. And the more we reach out and connect with them, the more we will be able to do. And, I am sitting on over a hundred hours of footage documenting the recent history of this current situation. So I'd say, there's a lot of potential here...

The big question is, how do you get people to care about people they don't know? How do you get people to want to deal with the pain and suffering of others? Especially when there is so much hardship right here at home... and in Haiti... Japan... the list goes on and on...

This is just the opening question in a conversation that will continue. I have much more to share on this topic...