Just a few weeks ago, CPT hosted a delegation to Iraqi Kurdistan. The team took delegates on a tour around the region to hear the stories of its people – stories of the land, stories of loss, stories of grief, stories of hope. This week, we publish a reflection written by Naz, one of those delegates, who found herself in the space between grief and hope. At the beginning of the trip, she says, she was overwhelmed by stories of suffering and the scale of the statistics. But as time went on, amidst the pain, she found something else: the determination to keep going and the refusal to give up hope.
Reading through the updates from our teams this week, I’m struck by the ways in which they keep memory alive and refuse to look away. In Colombia last week, three young men were killed in Santa Rosa del Sur, Bolívar. CPT Colombia remembers them. In Turtle Island, Canada’s government proposes yet another bill that threatens the land and rights of Indigenous communities and labour unions. CPT’s Turtle Island Solidarity Network stands with them. In Hebron/Al Khalil, settlements and checkpoints encroach into the heart of the Old City, in an attempt to make life unlivable for its Palestinian residents. CPT Palestine documents them, one by one.
Our work puts us face to face with violence, pain and loss. And yet our teams keep going. They carry the weight together, alongside their partners. Perhaps this is how we keep going in the space between grief and hope: by showing up, by making space for one another’s stories, and by carrying together what is too much to carry alone.
