RezaRitesRi.com

By Reza Corinne Clifton

WINNER OF THE 2007 METCALF DIVERSITY IN THE MEDIA AWARD, TECHNOLOGY FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM

A RezaRitesRi FIRST PEEK, this article also appeared in the October 12 edition of the Johnston Sun Rise newspaper and the October 19 edition of The Providence American newspaper. It also appeared at www.pluralism.org/news

(Nada Samih in a Providence cafe on a recent Sunday)

PROVIDENCE, RI - “It’s so crazy because it doesn’t hit you. I’m doing this and I have classes and I’m teaching. So it’s all in my agenda: do homework; read for class; book room for event; email out flyers. It’s just part of my everyday.”

Certainly not everyone’s everyday is like Nada Samih’s, a politically active graduating senior in the secondary education program at Rhode Island College (RIC). Yet even fewer people can say that their background is like hers.

Samih spent the majority of her childhood in Johnston, RI, where she graduated from Johnston Public High School. But Samih and her mother were both born in Kuwait, moving to the US—to RI—when Samih was six years old. But Samih’s family roots are not Kuwaiti; they are Palestinian. All of Samih’s family is from Palestine; her maternal and paternal grandparents were born there and lived there till the Israeli-Palestinian War in 1948.

Samih’s Palestinian roots were never forgotten in her family.

One reason is because Samih and her family are very aware of their history. In the case of her maternal grandparents, it was often talked about that it was a case of “the city girl marries the country boy,” explains Samih, referring to when her mother’s parents met and married in Kuwait.

Samih’s grandmother was from a Palestinian city and a well-educated family, who moved to Syria after the war began in 1948. With the persistence of conflict and combat in her home country, Samih’s grandmother—and sister—moved from Syria to Kuwait to pursue a vocation of teaching. It is there that she met her husband, Samih’s grandfather, whose family had themselves moved to Kuwait following the conflict which had arisen in Palestine.

Samih never met her grandfather, for he died while her mother was still a teenager, but it is common knowledge in the family that her grandfather’s “last wish was to be buried where he was born,” explains Samih. Furthermore, “[s]omething happened with the border so that they were able to sneak him in. It was a relative quiet period maybe, but he definitely made it in there.” He is buried in a family cemetery.

“He was the most stubborn in the family—‘we’re going to go back, we’re going to go back,” Samih shares, highlighting how well-versed she is in her family’s history.

Kuwait proved to be an escape from conflict—in Palestine—and a place where Samih’s grandparents met, where Samih’s parents were born and met, and where Samih herself was born. Her identity, however, was still engulfed in a Palestinian identity as national, civil and social laws there barred her family, and many others, from full Kuwaiti citizenship.

“We lived with other non-Kuwaitis—Palestinian-Kuwaitis, Lebanese-Kuwaitis,” recalls Samih. “We did not go to school with Kuwaitis, we could not own property…my mother never had a Kuwaiti friend!”

Conflict eventually found its way to Samih’s family and Kuwait, “…I’m six years old and here comes Saddam,” remembers Samih. But it was the very segregation that kept them separate from Kuwaiti “citizens” that helped save Samih and her family.

During the (First) Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, remembers Samih, they were intentional in targeting Kuwaiti neighborhoods. “‘Kuwait City is getting bombed, don’t leave the house,” Samih recalls her uncle telling her mother in Kuwait over the phone; he was studying at Roger Williams University in Bristol at the time, and he was calling after seeing the live shots on CNN.

Her mother, in the meantime, was “getting ready to go to work,” and was briefly incredulous. But when a relative staying there in their house came in from outside indicating “‘…there are tanks rolling down the street,’” the news was confirmed.

“We lived, like, 20 minutes away from the city,” which means they could hear the Kuwaiti neighborhoods being bombed, recalls Samih. She also remembers turning on the television and remembering no cable. “And I must have been a kid who watched the news alongside my mom because I remember saying to my mom, ‘Oh I know why Iraq is invading Kuwait. They’re mad because Kuwait took their oil.’”

Samih’s family escaped. “It took us a bunch of days driving through the dessert, going to Baghdad, driving to Jordan, going cross-country by car in my mom’s little Honda.

“I just remember it being fun. It was like, ooh, we’re going on an adventure. My mom stayed calm, so I stayed calm. But it was crazy. There were soldiers everywhere, patrolling the borders.”

Yet Samih’s mother and neighbors who all left together were brave, even fearless at times: “My mom and her friend actually embedded their gold in some pita bread. So [when a solder was looking around suspiciously thinking, how do these women not have any gold] she had the guts to say, ‘do you want a sandwich’ holding the bread out.’ The soldier said no. My mom used that gold to sell it and buy tickets to America.”

Those who remember Samih from high school might remember her leadership in the World Culture’s Organization; while some—like the advisor of her high school group—are still aware that she’s remained active at RIC. She is a huge advocate of the college’s Unity Center; a founding member of the school’s chapter of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and an active member of RIC Students for Justice in Palestine (RICSJP).

Her activism on campus, particularly with RICSJP is how her name was passed along to Jacob Pace, Program Coordinator of Washington, D.C.-based organization, Partners for Peace, whose four-part mission is:

“To educate the public and to raise awareness about the issues in the quest for peace and justice in Palestine/Israel; To promote a just and lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by engaging existing networks and unaffiliated individuals who share this concern; To facilitate working relationships between women in Palestine/Israel and communities in the United States; [and] To advocate for human rights in Palestine/Israel.

One of the cornerstone projects of Partners for Peace is the Jerusalem Women Speak Tour, a program that brings together “three women, a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, who are living the realties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [who] come to the United States to call for an end to war and suffering in the Middle East…”

The program began in 1998 to highlight the voices of women with “fears, hopes, and frustrations in the midst of this ongoing conflict,” according to the website.“Each speaker brings her own voice to this movement, but represents an alternative vision for a more hopeful and peaceful future,” explained Pace, referring to this year’s three speakers in an interview I arranged shortly before the tour began.

Pace concedes that “[t]he issue of Palestinian self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation have been front-and-center in the activities of activist groups around the US in recent years.” Nevertheless, he still sees a need for the Jerusalem Women Speak tour, and his organization. “The tour never ceases to touch the hearts and engage the spirits of U.S. citizens. Our hope is that people turn the experience of hearing these women’s stories into empowered and sustainable action for peace in Palestine/Israel.”

But especially distinctive is that the tour promotes peace from what are usually muffled if not silent voices in mainstream news and analysis. Explains Pace, “What Partners for Peace brings that is unique…is a long-running program that focuses on women’s issues and that travels throughout the country.”

And when New England was chosen as the region to target, another woman’s voice answered the call in Samih. Ghada Ageel of Khan Unis Palestine, Shireen Kamis of Beit Jala Palestine, and Rela Mazali of Herzlia Israel—the speakers of Jerusalem Women Speak—will appear at RIC sponsored by RICSJP, The Unity Center and RIC NAACP on Tuesday, October 10 from 1:00-3:00 at the Student Union Ballroom.

In no part unrelated to Samih’s networking, the tour will also make a stop at Johnston High School; this stop as well as one at Cranston High School East are not open to the public, but there are others throughout RI and New England that are.

And this is a culmination of sorts for the work that Samih has been doing, but she’s far from slowing down. In a café on a Sunday as we drink our respective caffeine and add to the surprisingly noticeable buzz of a bevy of conversations, she talks about the importance of the Unity Center at RIC in the face of depressing statistics:

“You’ve got to push where you can, because the retention rates of minority students—my boyfriend went through PEP…” A program at RIC, Preparatory Enrollment Program gives preference in selection, explains the school’s website, “to low-income students who are first-generation college students and to students with disabilities evidencing academic need. PEP is designed to assist students who have underdeveloped academic skills, inadequate/inappropriate curricula in high school, lower-than-average standardized test scores, etc.”

“He started out with a class of 30-something,” she goes on to say, “And there’s only 5 left in his senior year. I know I can go to Aaron Bruce or any of the kids in the Unity Center if I need help. If you are a person of color, and you are not aware of lifelines…”

I fool myself into thinking I might slow her down momentarily. I just want her to appreciate that she’s doing a good job; that Jacob Pace and Partners for Peace heard about her activities, sought her out, looked for her to get these women and the voice of peaceful nonviolence to us here in RI. But she’s right; there is still work to do.

Another RI tour stop of the Jerusalem Women Speak Tour - open to the public - is Newport Library, 300 Spring Street in Newport, on Wednesday October 11 from 7:00-9:00, sponsored by the Social Justice Committee of the Channing Memorial Church.

For more information about other dates and locations of the tour, visit www.partnersforpeace.org/documents/db200609090. For more information about the different student groups and the Unity Center at RIC, visit http://www2.ric.edu/unitycenter.

Reza Corinne Clifton is a community organizer for high school reform at RI Children’s Crusade for Higher Education. She is also a freelance writer who is regularly published in several RI-area publications. Her articles can be seen at www.RezaRitesRi.com and she can be reached by emailing rezaclif@aol.com.

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