Mennonite Weekly Review

Last month I spent 10 days creating an index for the new 620-page Christian Peacemaker Teams history, In Harm’s Way (Cascade Books 2008) and was struck by the dozens of people whose names appear only once in the book.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Here were multifaceted individuals, with friends and family who loved them, diverse aspirations and personality quirks. Part of me was a little sad that all that complexity boiled down to just a name on a list.

There was old Mr. Al-Bayed, whom I accompanied to an Israeli police station in 1995. He was not interested in pressing charges against the settler youth who assaulted him on Duboyya Street, but wanted the Israeli intelligence officer to do something about the fact they had called his wife and daughters whores.

And there was Antonio, who appeared only as a first name in Colombia team releases, a paramilitary leader who decided to leave the armed group after having conversations with two of my colleagues.

Our team accompanying the Asubpeeschoseewagong Nation in Northern Ontario as it resisted logging on the Nation’s traditional lands submitted for CPTnet an essay by 10-year-old Jolene Hookimaw. It ended with the wistful lines, “When I grow up, if I have a husband, he would like to hunt, but there will be no place to hunt. I would like to fish, but the fish will already be dead.”

Yochanan Lorwin, an Israeli friend, posted bail for several CPTers arrested after helping students open the gate of Hebron University, sealed shut by the Israeli military. I wasn’t able to include in the history the many enjoyable conversations about arcane religious matters I had with him, or that I had grieved when a flash flood killed him while he was hiking in 1999.

David Sanes died during a U.S. Navy practice-bombing run on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. His death set off a “dream” nonviolent campaign for which CPT could simply supply the bodies needed by local organizers with a clear vision of how to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques.

When four of our CPT colleagues were kidnapped in Iraq, Mohammed Shabluq was one of several volunteers who monitored the Arabic and Farsi-language media for news about the hostages and relayed the information to our organization.

As the reader continues through the alphabet, two people appear under the title “Unknown” near the end of the index. One was young migrant woman who died alone in the desert near Douglas, Ariz. One was a murdered man, his face eaten by vultures, whose body the Colombia team found floating in the river. A member of the team wrote that even if his family was missing him, and his grave did not bear the man’s name, his name was still “engraved on the palms of God’s hands” (see Isaiah 49:16).

And so it is with all the people in the CPT history index — and the many more who do not appear in the history who have influenced our work and lives in profound ways.

Our civilization will fall some day. Digital data will become inaccessible, and books will crumble to dust. We will all some day be Unknown. And we will all remain engraved on the palms of God’s hands.