My time in Iraq permanently changed me. Spending six months working in a trauma hospital, I was confronted with pain and evil in ways I never expected to in my life. But I caught glimmers of the kingdom.
Prior to leaving Iraq, I photographed a handful of items inside of a bunker on our compound. These mementos are sacred to me — each carrying the weight and honor of what it meant to serve at the field hospital.
There’s a lot I don’t know about life and grief and moving on. But I know something about art. These photos give a glimpse into my six months living on the edge of the battle for Mosul. I won’t say they sum up my time, because nothing could do that. But these items provide a glimpse. These are the items that I brought with me beyond the blast walls.
Prior to leaving Iraq, I photographed a handful of items inside of a bunker on our compound. These mementos are sacred to me — each carrying the weight and honor of what it meant to serve at the field hospital. These are the items that I brought with me beyond the blast walls.
The fighting was in East Mosul when the field hospital opened, and we received trauma patients not long after the moment of injury. I have never seen such evil as the acts committed by ISIS.
I knew I needed to find a way to process what I was experiencing. I contacted a friend in Erbil and asked her to send me candles. Without giving her any more instructions, she sent me out four candles in a holder.
I created a practice for each time we lost a patient. My mind fell to Psalm 103 and memorizing it for a class in university. I selected the song “Saturn” by Sleeping at Last to listen to. I chose it for a specific lyric — “how rare and beautiful it is to even exist.”
This became my practice almost every night: I lit a candle for each patient lost that day, played that song and read Psalm 103 out loud. The first few weeks, I was working until 1 or 2 a.m. Lighting candles was the last thing I did before I went to bed.
I sat in the grief of a lost life for just 5 or 10 minutes, blew out the candles and released it. I went to bed, woke up early the next morning and did it all again.
For months after Iraq, I was unable to read Psalm 103. It touches on a wound that hasn't entirely healed. Last month, I opened up Psalm 103 again. The tears streamed down my cheeks as I read it out loud. In Iraq, I underlined these verses:
“The Lord executes acts of righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.”
“For He knows what we are made of, remembering that we are dust.”
We are dust.
I wondered what would happen on the day that more than four patients died, and I didn't have enough candles. As the battled moved to the west, we became a surgical referral hospital, and deaths decreased. In the six months I served at the hospital, I never needed more than four candles.
After I acquired my candles, I needed to track down a lighter. Given the popularity of smoking in Iraq, they weren’t terribly difficult to come by. I asked a friend if he had an extra, and he quickly produced one from his supply. Every single I time that I lit my candles, I used that exact same lighter.
A few weeks later, I received another small gift from the same friend — a bracelet with my name in Kurdish. Wanting to see it regularly, I attached it to the top of my water bottle. For my entire time in Iraq, that’s where it stayed. It was so fun to hear people say my name perfectly simply by reading it in Kurdish.
A month after I returned from Iraq, my birthday rolled around. My mom had baked me a lovely cake, which was decorated with candles. Unable to find another lighter in the kitchen, I got my lighter from Iraq and lit my birthday candles. It made that moment very particularly special — so much of the previous year had revolved around Iraq for me. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Occasionally, I got a glimpse of items that had been collected from nearby homes when ISIS had occupied them. Any number of remnants could be found. Eventually, these two items landed in my possession — a booklet with a few chapters of the Quran and an ISIS propaganda newspaper.
I empathize with my Muslim friends who have watched their holy text being distorted by ISIS. The practice of their faith is entirely unlike what ISIS claims to follow. I grieve for the ways that ISIS has twisted a faith in such a way that it’s made the West fearful to help an entire group of people in need. To ignore the needs of my neighbor contradicts my faith and scripture, which does not instruct me to worry about my safety but commands me to not be afraid.
As someone with a background in journalism, I believe in the power of storytelling. In many ways, ISIS’ use of newspaper is fascinating and, obviously, concerning. The stories that are told and perpetuated by a society can have an immense impact on it. ISIS has a well-documented history of using social media for recruitment. In a world of media that is often spun and muddied, truth must prevail.
I was at the hospital for Lent and Easter. Growing up, the church I attended didn’t observe Lent. When I lived in Cambodia a few years ago, I fell in love with the liturgical practices of the Anglican Church. For the first time, I observed Lent and had done so every year since. However, last year, I struggled to decide what to fast from for 40 days. I already felt like I was living in a space of scarcity.
On Palm Sunday, we waved olive and palm branches in a morning service. I kept this piece of my olive branch and placed it on my desk. It matched the tattoo that I have on my left elbow — two crossed olive branches. I got the tattoo in Greece, a symbol of peace while in the midst of working with refugees of war.
Lent is filled with both celebration and mourning. On Maundy Thursday, we washed each others feet. On Good Friday, we mourned the darkness taking over. We sat in the tension of Holy Saturday — the space between death and resurrection. We celebrated Easter morning with a sunrise service.
Those days were special and sacred to celebrate in the Nineveh Plains. Mosul is historically Nineveh, the very city from which Jonah ran, before reluctantly traveling to and preaching to the Assyrian people. The Assyrians are still the Christian population in that region. In each of those services, I sat beside my Assyrian coworkers. We prayed the Lord’s Prayer in English together, and then they prayed it in Aramaic.
Much of my time at the hospital felt like Holy Saturday, feeling the tension of living in the already but not yet. I saw the horrors of evils yet caught glimpses of the kingdom. I ached and mourned and desired hope. I longed for the battle to be over — for ISIS to be defeated in Mosul so that the long road to recovery could begin. My last day at the field hospital was June 30. Ten days later, Mosul was declared liberated.
When the hospital first opened, the fighting was on the east side of Mosul. This meant that we received patients that were fresh off of injury. The most common injuries were gunshot wounds and shrapnel wounds from some type of explosion. It’s awful and shocking to see the effects of war on the human body.
Patients often arrived peppered with shrapnel wounds. Many of our medical staff would tell stories about assessing patients as quickly as possible — trying to figure out which of the dozens of shrapnel wounds required the most immediate care. I watched them work tirelessly to help as many patients as possible.
These small pieces of shrapnel were from a building near the hospital. The closer you got to our compound, the more destroyed and abandoned buildings you saw. The buildings almost looked like they had been hit by a natural disaster and were reminiscent of the earthquake-affected areas in which I’ve worked. But this was no earthquake. The hands of men perpetuated the destruction of these buildings with a complete disregard for human life.
Despite being a photographer, I am also a words person. I don’t just consume the written word, I collect it in all its forms. Quotes that I have stumbled across fill digital notes on my phone and computer. I scratch notes and quotes into notebooks and on sticky notes. I regularly write letters to friends or scribble out a few sentences on a notecard for a coworker.
It should come as no surprised that I also love receiving notes. The pocket of one of my Moleskines contains letters that I have been carrying around the world with me for years. They are near and dear to my heart. Whenever friends ask if there is anything that they can do for me while I’m abroad, I tell them that a letter would be more than enough.
While in Iraq, I collected more notes from friends and coworkers. Some arrived as part of hand-carried packages from the U.S. and Greece. Others appeared on my desk. I hung many of the notes in a spot where I would see them everyday. I held their words close to my heart. I read them often, clinging to the words of encouragement in tough moment. Some of these notes have now been added to my Moleskine pocket.
My best friend collects rosaries from her travels and owns a beautiful assortment of them. Wanting to copy her tradition, I asked one of my Iraqi friends where I could find a rosary. I explained what my best friend did and how I thought it was a lovely idea. I didn’t find myself outside of the hospital very often, which meant shopping was difficult. My friend graciously offered to pick up rosaries for me and my best friend.
Shortly after I received the rosaries, I learned some wonderful news. A miracle had occurred. In a beautiful twist of faith, or most likely Divine intervention, my best friend would be arriving in Iraq the day before I was to leave the hospital. She would be in Iraq for a few days and then we would both depart on the same day — I would be flying to Turkey and she to Lebanon.
Leaving the hospital was unbelievably difficult. I won’t attempt to convey how my heart felt that day. However, that evening, I got to run into the arms of my very best friend. It was truly a gift. This is now the second time our work schedules have aligned — the first time being in Greece at the end of 2015. I gave her the rosary in person, and she met the friend who had picked it out. This trip would be the only time I would see her in person in 2017. A special time indeed.
That rosary nows goes where I go. It’s hanging in my apartment in the South Pacific, a constant reminder of my friends, of Iraq and of my faith.
I was afforded the incredible opportunity to visit the city of Qaraqosh and the Church of the Immaculate. Qaraqosh is a historically Christian city southeast of Mosul and had regularly made the news over the last few years.
Upon their rise to power in 2014, ISIS had given Christians living within their so-call Islamic caliphate an ultimatum — convert, pay a tax or die. When ISIS stormed into Qaraqosh in August 2014, residents fled to Erbil. ISIS destroyed Qaraqosh — burning homes and churches, destroying icons and statues — trying to erase the city’s Christian heritage.
When I visited the city in the spring of 2017, it was still almost entirely deserted. The previous Christmas, a service had been held at the Church of the Immaculate, the largest church in town. However, Qaraqosh was still far too destroyed and too dangerous for residents to return.
Many of my coworkers at the hospital were originally from Qaraqosh, and I had heard story after story about the atrocities committed by ISIS. I had seen photos of the church, but I still wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I visited. I stepped inside its door to scorched black walls. ISIS had famously used the courtyard of the church as a shooting range, and shell casings littered the area.
A sense of both awe and grief came over me. Even as I was seeing it with my own eyes, it was hard to believe what ISIS had done. More than anything, I was struck by the resilience of my dear friends from Qaraqosh. As I would later tell one of them, it is truly an honor be counted in the body of believers with people such as them. I will likely never experience true persecution in the way that they have. What has my faith ever really cost me? Next to nothing in comparison to them, and they have persevered with remarkable grace.
In the courtyard, I picked up this small piece of glass and stone. The glass is for me — a reminder of my friends and fellow believers. The stone is for my sister, her commonly requested token from my travels. As a geography teacher, she collects little parts of the world and shares their stories with her students.
It’s no secret that I am incredibly fond of scarves, and it wasn’t long before I had amassed quite a collection of them. When I first arrived in Iraq at the end of December, scarves were a mandatory facet of my winter wardrobe. A variety of colors and styles, I had a scarf for just about every outfit. By the time I left Iraq in the summer, scarf season was long over.
My favorite part about the scarves were the questions and the stories that come with them. I was regularly asked, “Are you Kurdish?” at checkpoints and airports. While on R&R in Brussels, I smiled at a Kurdish man wearing the same scarf that I owned. He looked at me with a knowing but confused stare — he clearly recognized the pattern but had no idea why I would be wearing it.
That top scarf still travels with me wherever I go, even while I’m here in the South Pacific. It keeps me warm on ice-cold flights and protects me from the sun on boats. It’s a little piece of Iraq that I take with me wherever I go.
One day a mini bouquet of flowers appeared on my desk, a gift from a close friend. The details of their origin are far too comical and special to be shared in such a medium as this. At any rate, the presence of greenery on my desk was life-giving. It was a small bit of life in a place where we were so regularly surrounded by death.
Week after week in a white-walled compound with colorless gravel takes its toll on a person. After my little flowers had been hung and dried, a coworker from Erbil surprised me with a lovely potted succulent. It brought life to my desk again.
Being an artist living in a monotone compound was difficult. Six months of that really does something to a person’s psyche. Halfway through, I realized that I needed more art in my daily life. I read more poetry, I looked at famous art galleries online — I did whatever I could to inject art and beauty into my world.
One of my tasks at the hospital was to take a patient census twice each day. For the first six weeks, I completed all of the data entry and analysis on my own. It was a job designed for at least two people. I eventually got two staffers hired to work for me. Managing those two guys became one of my favorite parts of my job. My staffers took the data entry tasks, except for the census.
I enjoyed taking the hospital census. Some days, that walk was filled with smiles and laughs with my coworkers. Other days, it was solemn and intense. It wasn’t long before the guards got to know my schedule. We would chat in a mix of broken English and Kurdish. If I was even a few minutes late, they would notice.
One guard in particular was always smiling and would greet me with, “Hello my friend, how are you?” The only English words he seemed to know. He enjoyed his job and getting to work at the hospital. He certainly stood out from the pack.
One day, when I was making my normal afternoon walk to take the census, he handed me a can of olives. Someone had written a note on it in English for him. I graciously thanked him for the olives and smiled at how friendship can transcend language barriers.
A few weeks later, he was in a terrible motorcycle accident and put in a medically-induced coma. Those of us that knew him well were all shocked and saddened. We prayed for his recovery. A couple of the other guards were able to visit him in the hospital in Erbil.
I soon went on R&R to Vienna and Prague for a few days. Prior to arriving back at the hospital, I texted a friend to ask if there was anything I should know. It wasn’t a leading question — you just never knew what would happen at the hospital.
She said she wasn’t sure if she should tell me or not. I pressed her about what was going on, and she called me. His extensive injuries had overwhelmed his body, and our guard had passed away. I gasped when I heard this news and choked back tears.
I returned to the hospital that afternoon. That night, I lit a candle for him. It’s the only candles that I lit which was not for a patient in our hospital.
