SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER
NOT TO HEAL
Journal of Healing – June 18, 2003
By Mary Koch

Three months in Baghdad, witnessing war while fasting for peace, took a toll on Bettejo Passalaqua. Weak and sick, she returned to the U.S. a few weeks ago.

Bettejo went to Iraq earlier this year as a peace activist. Before that, she'd served for six years as a pastoral assistant for the Catholic church on the Colville Indian Reservation. Now she's staying with friends in Okanogan

Resting and being with friends has been healing, she says, but she's not seeking full recovery.

"I'm not sure how healed I am at this point," she told me. "I wouldn't want to become so healed that I lose my my feeling for it. We carry these things with us for a reason."

Bettejo and I were having this conversation in a quiet backyard on a perfect June morning. A native of Florida, she set her lawn chair in the hot sun. A native of Minnesota, I chose a nearby chair under the shade of a large tree. She sipped what she called her "morning caffeine." I drank ice water.

Individuals have these small differences. But there was a yawning, gaping difference between Bettejo and me. For me, Iraq was a worrisome but distant problem. For her, Iraq is at the core of every waking moment.

"When I came back, maybe after ten days I walked outside and it was a beautiful day. I felt good for just a moment. It was maybe 15 seconds before I said, 'What's happening in Baghdad?' and broke down again."

A 42-year-old grandmother of six, Bettejo was not a stranger to hardship when she went to Iraq.

"I've worked in the South Bronx and I worked here on the reservation and encountered a tremendous amount of suffering among the people," she said. "But not so concentrated -- like going into a hospital with children dying. Then after the bombing, children paralyzed, no arms or legs."

Before the war began, Bettejo had participated in a vigil at the border of Kuwait. She'd traveled with the Iraq Peace Team across the desert, witnessing the devastation still visible from the Gulf War. Not as visible but omnipresent was the depleted uranium pollution of soil and air that remains from ammunition used by U.S. forces. Medical authorities in Iraq have been charting a dramatic increase in cancer caused, they say, by depleted uranium.

Bettejo worked in a Baghdad hospital, providing arts and crafts for children in a cancer ward.

"It was a diversion," she says, "this stupid white woman coming in with paper and crayons."

"Do you think it made a difference?" I ask.

She shrugs and answers, "Other people said it did."

That's the deepest wound from Iraq: "There's a feeling of devastation, a sense of defeat, of helplessness," Bettejo says.

How do you overcome helplessness?

"Maybe the healing I've experienced thus far comes from my feeling to do service, to be of service," she answers.

Bettejo doesn't know yet what that service will be. "The best I can do is to get people to ask questions . . . to ask, 'Is this right? Can we do better?'"

The day after we talked, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried a front page story about the problems hospitals in Iraq are facing, especially the problems of treating children with cancer.