We Are All There

This past September, I was in Santa Fe to attend benefits for the Tomorrow’s Women nonprofit. They are a world-changing organization and I help them with their digital strategy. They train Palestinian and Israeli young women, together, in leadership, dialogue, and peacemaking skills. The young women actually meet each other. They live together. They cook and clean together. They actually listen to each other.

It is so hard to really listen.

I picked up Colum McCann from the airport. I was his handler. He wore black jeans, a navy jacket, and a maroon scarf and I immediately felt comfortable with him. As a voracious reader, this was a dream gig. I had read Apeirogon and was almost done with Let the Great World Spin, which I was reading so I could speak intelligently about his oeuvre as I drove him around Santa Fe. I forget if we did talk about his work, but I don’t think so. We talked about a lot of other stuff though. He told me he had bicycled across the U.S. when he was in his twenties, and talked to everyone.

“Hearing other’s stories makes us understand each other,” he said.

He ran a storytelling workshop for us, similar to ones his Narrative 4 nonprofit does around the world. I was paired with nineteen-year-old Yasmeena who wore a hijab around her wide smiling face. She told me how she and her mother got teargassed by Israeli soldiers when they were trying to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They had to run holding each other through the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, and then they lost each other. Yasmeena moved alone through the alleys, in the crowd, her eyes stinging from tear gas.

“Ummi,” she called out for her mother. “Ummi.”

She ran and ran, away from the tear gas.

And then by her side was the hand of her mother, reaching out for her, like she was never gone.

When they finally escaped safely, her mother said she would never again go back there.

“But, I went back,” Yasmeena told me.

When I retold her story to the group, I remembered walking through the streets of Jerusalem myself, as a ten-year-old, under arches, placing my feet on the ground of white stones. I wasn’t thinking of history then. I was just there. But my ten-year-old self and the memories of walking in the Old City led me to understand Yasmeena’s story on a deeper level, and I cried when I told it.

At the benefit Colum spoke and said in his Irish lilt, “We are all involved. We are all there. It is incredibly important for us to realize that. I can’t wait to get a chance to speak to these young ladies…I come from Ireland and we have now had twenty-seven years of peace. If you had talked to me at their age and asked if it were possible, I would say never. But the word possible exists within the word impossible. And it takes people of bravery and courage, even if they seem to be on the edge now, they are the ones who will create the currents, who create the dynamic that allows us to exist together in the way that we should do.”

I remember the young women dancing after the benefit, to Palestinian and Israeli music, while they did the dishes together. They needed to be anonymous so I filmed their feet. Their soles blurred together into one dance, and they, and we all, for those moments, seemed to be from the same place.