thanks to my lizzy b.

http://www.shadk.com/

Liz sent me this link in response to my trauma post, specifically the song "I'll never understand."

Tonight there was a full-time CPTer visiting us, she's in Palestine now, but she was part of the Iraq team last year. She told a story about a member of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams who got a number of email threats, and finally had a death threat pinned to his door, so he bought a gun. Even though he had no idea how to use it. Finally one day he was shot at, and he jumped back and fell down, and felt something dig into his back. He realized later it was the gun he'd forgotten about at that key moment. It seriously bruised him in the fall, his only injury from being shot at.
She told this story as a joke. And that more than anything brought forward to me how you have to think differently when you live in situations of tension and violence. Finding the humour in events like that is a coping mechanism. I guess it just really struck me, how terrifying to think how people's minds are inevitably shaped by "bad stuff" that they have to live with every day. Just imagine what that would do to you, growing up with that Fear Every Day. I mean, you could be optomistic and think, how wonderful that people continue to find humour in terrible situations. But...I'm just not there today.
End of that MPT member's story: he's okay, he was able to get out of Iraq.
Another MPT member was killed within the last few months.