Mennonite Weekly Review

Earlier this summer, the bank foreclosed on my neighbors’ house.

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

When the new owners arrived and put on the curb debris the family left behind, I went to scavenge.

Seeing a box of newspapers I could use for weed control, I dragged it out. On the side was written “Iraq war.” It contained carefully organized newspapers and magazines from 2003.

A month later, when my siblings and I were cleaning out my mother’s house to prepare it for sale, I found another box of papers from 2003 — a box my mother had also labeled “Iraq war.”

I wonder how my mother and neighbor would have felt in 2003 if they had been told that the war would still be going on in 2010. How many more boxes could they have filled?

The two they did fill took me back to daily antiwar demonstrations in Rochester, N.Y., that the children in my household attended with me in the weeks before the invasion. I remember 12-year-old Sylvia weeping on the morning of March 20, 2003, because seeing the thousands of people against the war made her think the U.S. couldn’t possibly follow through on its threats.

So much has changed since then. Sylvia just finished her freshman year at Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario. I have married, lost my last grandparent, acquired stepchildren and a new nephew, moved into my own house for the first time, discovered I loved gardening, wrote my second novel and become more proficient with computers.

As of this June, between 97,139 and 105,988 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths since 2003. Many more have died from disease and malnutrition spawned by the war. By this February, death had claimed 4,413 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, more than half under the age of 25; 9,537 Iraqi police and soldiers; and about 55,000 insurgents and guerrilla fighters.

Although some refugees have been able to return, there are still more than 1.5 million internally displaced people in Iraq. According to Worldvision, one in eight Iraqi children dies before the age of 5. Eritrea, Sudan and Haiti have lower under-5 mortality rates than Iraq.

One in four children under 5 is chronically malnourished. One in four is born underweight. Seventy percent of child deaths are due to diarrhea and respiratory disease. Five million people lack access to safe water.