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CLP team reports from the Middle East

Journalists cover struggles of a new generation

BY AMANDA WEBER
March 11, 2011

During a six-week journey that took them through northern Iraq and Syria, Common Language Project staff Sarah Stuteville, Jessica Partnow and Alex Stonehill, along with their friends Daniel O'Brien, a Seattle native and former corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, and Sarah Glidden, a cartoonist who specializes in non-fiction and political comics, reported on what it means to be a citizen of these countries; nations still struggling nearly a decade after 9/11.

The Road to Damascus is a series of stories from their trip in November and December, detailing what they saw and heard, from celebrations in a Kurdish city during the “Festival of Sacrifice,” to desperation in an aid distribution warehouse in Syria. Among their entries are tales of encounters with a Cairene taxi driver, a young refugee couple, and an angry old woman, all of which deliver the true human experience.

“We wanted to focus on stories about the way that a new generation in the Middle East is asserting itself, and how their counterparts in the U.S. are dealing with the legacy of the War on Terror,” said Stonehill. “The way that these two groups understand (or misunderstand) each other is going to be huge in the future.”

And this kind of misunderstanding was a common occurrence when talking with those they interviewed. “It was clear time and again that there is a lot of anger toward America from Iraqi refugees. I can absolutely understand where it’s coming from, but it’s still hard to have it directed at you,” said Stonehill.

Despite the difficulty in being faced with such hatred, and stifling the urge to defend themselves, Stuteville embraced her role as journalist whole-heartedly. In her blog entry, “The Quiet American: Why my generation should listen to Iraqi refugees,” she wrote, “I realized that I wasn't supposed to being doing the talking: I was supposed to be listening.”

From this trip, Stuteville, Partnow and Stonehill learned many things about the people, the individual citizens, whom Americans rarely hear of. “The thing that surprised me again and again is how much I could relate to the experience of Iraqi refugees.  Most of the people we met were middle class, secular and very well educated.  Not the picture that pops into your head when you think refugee,” said Stonehill.

The group found that there are clear differences in the ways Americans and Middle Easterners think about global politics, and that it would be easier to understand each other if only we could see through the eyes of one another. Stonehill said, “I think if Americans got to watch more Al Jazeera English, and Middle Easterners saw fewer Hollywood depictions of America, we would do a little better.”

Between each destination and every crowded bus or peculiar train ride (one that actually drove onto a ferry boat complete with rails), Stuteville, Partnow, Stonehill, O’Brien and Glidden could be found Tweeting, and uploading their stories and photos whenever they could find Internet access.

Holding down the fort back at home, recent journalism graduate and part-time CLP staff member Chantal Anderson maintained the website. “She also produced a video about how people in Seattle were impacted by the Iraq war,” said Stonehill. In April, Anderson will be taking a CLP-sponsored trip to Bangladesh to cover maternal health.

It has been three months since their return to the U.S., and the CLP team continues to write about their experiences in the Middle East, especially now that politics has taken a turn in many of the areas they visited. In Egypt, Mubarak’s regime has toppled, and citizens in other countries across Africa and the Middle East are participating in a spreading political uprising. But will these recent developments spark a change in international relationships?

The misunderstanding that Stonehill spoke of has the potential to shift, with the younger generation “asserting itself,” he said. But even though young rebels are making every effort to overthrow what some believe to be corrupt governments, there are still younger populations that are hesitant to join the uprising.

From his blog entry, “Syria Shows Facebook Doesn’t Automatically Equal Freedom,” Stonehill writes, “Still, while calls for an Egypt-style ‘Day of Rage’ protest in Damascus in early February garnered 15,000 Facebook supporters, UPI reported that only about a dozen protesters actually showed up, and were promptly beaten away by plainclothes police.”

There’s no predicting how the future will develop for the individuals who briefly entered the lives of the CLP team. The tension rises and falls like waves in a political ocean. “If the largest Arab country has a democratic uprising that results in a truly democratic government,” said Stonehill, “that changes everything.”