Dr. Curt Rhodes

I did not yet know anguish in June of 1982. I knew only fear and friends. 

 

That summer, during the invasion of west Beirut, I was new to war. It did not occur to me that the death visited on us - from fighter planes in the sky, ships on the sea and guns on the ground – was to kill an idea. I thought it was just about killing people. 

 

As a volunteer in a small clinic in that dreadful summer of 1982, I thought the idea behind war must be just to kill people, because that is what I witnessed. I visited underground car parks to “do” triage for Palestinian civilians who fled for their lives from their homes in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Triage, the first-line work of speeding up care, is terrible – this one can go to a clinic later, this one can be treated here, that one needs an ambulance, now! And I saw people fearful of death. So, I thought the idea was to kill people. 

 

I was afraid of bombs. I went into shock one day when an “implosion” bomb sucked an entire 7-story building into a hole in the ground – leaving the laundry waving on the clothesline that was on the roof that was now at ground level. I had been sitting in the front room of our clinic just across from the disintegrated building. My brain stopped. A Lebanese friend put me on the back of a bicycle and pedaled me several blocks to the apartment where I was staying. I knew fear. And I knew friends. And I lived, like so many others did not. 

 

When the shelling, bombing, and strafing stopped in September, I thought killing people was over. Then, those Palestinians who lived in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut, those unarmed Palestinian civilians who just went back home to those camps, those Palestinians were systematically massacred. So, the killing has not stopped, I thought. 

 

As I looked through the CNN camera’s eye at the body of a woman lying dead on the ground in one of the camps, I recognized her. She was in her early 20s, pregnant for the second time, mentally challenged, paralyzed by fear. I had seen her 3 times in our little popup clinic. And there she lay.

 

And it dawned on me that killing people was not the driver of this war. The point apparently was to kill an idea.  But killing people does not kill an idea – like the idea that Palestine was once home and could be home once again. If killing people could kill an idea, then after enough people are killed, then the surviving folks will give up such an expensive idea. But that is not how ideas work in people. Ideas stick. Even if they stick with blood. Especially with blood. 

 

I felt a deep anguish that it was necessary for such a young mother to die – she who was the last person on earth to be a threat to the pilot of an F-16 raining bombs down on her house. Anguish that she was now part of the body count called “collateral damage.” In the plan for violence to kill an idea, she was a human in the way.  But ideas don’t die. Mothers die. Fathers die. Little girls and boys die. Young men and women on the cusp of life and careers die. Why her? Was she so significant that she should be killed? Was she so insignificant that it didn’t matter anyway?

 

My internal emotional space, my soul, is now filled with both anguish and grief. Grief, it is said, is love that persists when what is loved passes away. I have spent more than half my life in the Levant – Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt – where I learned to love people and places, and people there loved me back. There is so much beauty. But there is also so much fear and anguish. So many people die because no one wants to give up the thought that ideas are not killed. People are. Ideas are not destroyed by violence. People are.

 

The price to be paid for trying to kill ideas in Gaza will be an even higher commitment to kill more people. That is what a cycle of violence means. Each death, each killing will extract its own death, its own killing. And the blood of each killing will demand the next one. But only people will die. Not ideas. Not this idea, that Palestine was once home, and could be home once again. 

 

This is truly grief. How long will we pretend that the offspring of violence can become children of peace?  Let’s stop going through life pretending, but instead make life safe and beautiful, remembering that no one deserves to become “collateral damage.” No one. Ever.

 

 

Curt 

(Sort of) retired founder of Questscope 

Curt pic1
Founder

Dr. Curt Rhodes

Curt Rhodes has spent close to 40 years working with, and on behalf of, marginalized communities and young people across the Middle East.

As the recipient of the 2014 Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, Dr. Rhodes was recognized by Tufts University for his demonstrated compassion and tenacity in creating a highly effective and determined organization dedicated to the survival and nurturing of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised.

In recognition of his work with marginalized youth in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and in the region, Dr. Rhodes was awarded 2011 Social Entrepreneur of the Year for the Middle East and North Africa by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Dr. Rhodes began his career in the Middle East in the early 1980s, as Assistant Dean in the School of Public Health at the American University of Beirut. During the 1982 invasion of west Beirut, he volunteered in a community-based clinic alongside students and friends, doing around-the-clock triage for wounded and ill civilians. That was when the seed idea for Questscope began to take shape. Living and working with people in great suffering compelled him to find a way that he and others in the Middle East could assist the most vulnerable: participating with the voiceless ones in invisible communities.

In 1988, Questscope was founded with the goal of putting the last, first. From the beginning, Questscope worked closely with local communities, identifying their aspirations and together addressing their greatest needs.