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Singular voices, both here in the US and in Iraq.
Our loss, what was the use?
We lost a lot of things, like we lose our identity.
The reality of life after war, a lifetime walking for peace, and a disappearing lifestyle.
I'm Susan Barnett, and this is 51% the women's perspective.
With all of the problems we face in the world, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.
So the story of one woman who set out to change the world might just be the antidote you
need.
On January 1st, 1953, she set off from the Rose Bowl Parade with a goal of walking
the entire country for peace.
She left behind her given name, Milderid Norman, and took up a new identity, peace
pilgrim.
She spent the next 28 years criss-crossing the country on foot.
Zach Rosen has this profile.
When peace pilgrim started out, the Korean War was still going on, and an ominous threat
of a nuclear attack was on the mind of many Americans.
And so, with peace pilgrim written across her chest, she was walking as she called it
coast to coast for peace.
For 28 years, the entire length of her journey, she never used money, ever.
She gave new meaning to the word minimalist.
She wore the same thing every day, blue pants and a blue tunic, which held everything
she owned, a pen, a comb, a toothbrush, and a map.
That's it.
And I own only what I wear and carry, and I just walk until given shelter fast until
given food.
Don't even ask.
It's given without asking.
I tell you, people are good.
There's a spark of good in everybody.
In July of 1981, the day before she died, peace pilgrim was interviewed by Ted Hayes, the
manager of a small radio station in Nox and Diana.
Peace pilgrim, you know, there are a certain number of people that would probably think
of somebody like yourself as a cook or a nut.
Do you have a problem overcoming this barrier with some people?
Well, I'm quite sure that some of those who have just heard of me must think I'm completely
off the beam after all I am doing something different, and pioneers have always been looked
upon as being a bit strange.
But you see, I love people, and I see the good in them, and you're apt to reach what
you see.
The world is like a mirror.
If you smile at it, it's vials at you.
I love to smile, and so in general, I definitely receive smiles in return.
I was driving along the road in Ohio at night, and I saw this figure, white hair, with some
kind of white lettering, walking along the road, and then as I drove by kind of dashing
a bit out of the way of the traffic.
And I had no idea who it was.
My name is Richard Polacy.
I'm a book publisher and editor.
Years after Polacy saw her walking on the side of the road, he met Peace Pilgrim, and they
became friends.
A decade after she died, he and some other friends collected her writings in a book.
Peace is what we call her.
We call her by her first name, Peace.
My name is Helene Young, and I am the sister of Peace Pilgrim, and I am 97 years old.
I live in Cologne, New Jersey, two miles outside of Egg Harbor, where Peace Pilgrim and I
were born and raised.
I came from a very quiet life.
I was born on a small farm, on the outskirts of a small town.
I had a woods to play in, and a creek to swim in, and room to grow.
She was very much what they call the flapper in those days.
She had the latest clothing, so she made so many changes in her life to a very simple
basic life.
During the early years of my life, I discovered that money-making was easy, but not satisfying.
We were brought up without a formal religion or politics.
We were taught to think for ourselves, not follow the sheep.
Out of a feeling of deep seeking for a meaningful way of life, I began to walk one night through
the woods.
And after I had walked almost all night, I came out into a clearing where the moonlight
was shining down, and something just motivated me to speak.
And I found myself saying, if you can use me for anything, please use me.
Here I am, take all of me, use me as you will, I withhold nothing.
That night I experienced the complete willingness without any reservations whatsoever to give
my life to something beyond myself.
I was 18 years past between this striking moment of clarity and the official beginning of
a pilgrimage.
To prepare, one of the things she did was walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail
in one year.
Peace Pilgrim was the first woman to do this.
She was not interested in being a mother, and that was why she knew that she could handle
the pilgrimage because she did not leave a family behind.
She and her husband were divorced because she thought she should be a conscientious
subjector and his sergeant told him that was grounds for divorce.
You do not possess any other human being, no matter how closely related that other human
being may be.
No husband owns his wife, no wife owns her husband, no parents own their children.
I'm Rebecca Solnit, I'm the author of Wanderlust, a history of walking, a book that goes
all over the world to talk about people on foot, including peace Pilgrim.
The pilgrimage traditionally dealt with disease and healing of self-reluft ones, but she
had taken on war or violence and hate as slaves ravaging the world.
She foreshadowed the shift in the nature of the pilgrimage from appealing for divine intervention
or holy miracle to demanding political change, making the audience no longer God or the
gods but the public.
We are so completely out of harmony that when we discover something like nuclear energy,
our first thought is to use it for destruction.
This is because our spiritual well-being lags so far behind our material well-being.
It is more material advancement we need in this nuclear age.
It is more spiritual advancement we need and need desperately so that we will know how
to use constructively the material advancement we already have.
The first year she was thrown in jail for vagrancy and they found out she wasn't a commie,
so they let her go.
She would gather the women prisoners together and teach them a little song and a little
chant called the Fountain of Love and she'd have them do this.
So she felt that prisons and jails were wonderful places to carry on a mission.
She had no fear.
She knew that everybody had their own calling and their own mission and this was specifically
her own.
She was simply a singular witness for peace and you know her peace message was overcome
evil with good.
And falsehood with truth and hatred with love.
There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts.
It is this.
Half as your objective, the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage.
There is a magic formula for avoiding conflicts.
It is this.
Be concerned that you do not offend, not that you are not offended.
That formula will work between men or between nations.
As she became more well known, peace pilgrim began getting invitations to speak at schools
and churches.
That's what brought her to Knox and Deanna in the summer of 1981.
Was there anything about her that you remember?
We didn't know who it was at first.
Not until it was in the paper.
My name is Terry Baal and I am just a housewife.
And my name is Tony Baal and I run the business here about collision repair.
Peace pilgrim, a woman who spent her life walking thousands of miles through every state
and most of Canada lost her life riding in a car.
Tony and his wife, Terry, were outside in the yard when the accident occurred.
About 75 to 100 feet up the road there.
Approximately right where that utility pole is there.
I got on the side of her.
She was still alive when I got up there.
I was talking to her just telling her everything would be okay.
That's all I remember.
Peace pilgrims journey ended on the side of that road in Indiana 30 years ago.
Peace pilgrim has been my guest today.
It appears to be a most happy woman.
I certainly am a happy person who could know God and not be joyous.
I want to wish you all peace.
Coming up the aftermath of war in Iraq and a woman fighting to keep the farming tradition
alive.
If you missed part of this show or want to hear it again, visit the 51% Archives at WAMC.org.
As we show is number 1248.
The Iraqis you're about to hear tell a story of a remembered landscape.
It's a story about how war blackened the city of Baghdad, split its neighborhoods along
sectarian lines and left its streets crammed with checkpoints and traffic.
War news, radio, Sabrina Singh and Amy DiPiero co-produced this piece on memories of the past
and hopes for the future.
Every day in Baghdad, Iraqis brave one of the world's toughest morning commutes on their
way to work or school.
I spent one hour and a half in the traffic because of the checkpoints in Baghdad.
And I spent the same time returning home and sometimes more.
That's Nur, a recent college graduate who works for a non-governmental organization in
Baghdad.
She preferred that we not share her full name or occupation on the air.
So either I choose to stay home and not work and not study and not do anything or I must
go out and face all of that and live my life.
Even 10 years after the invasion of Iraq by American forces, four Iraqis living in
Baghdad, Nur, Ibrahim Muhammad, Basam al-Hashimi and his mom Huda are just trying to get by.
They remember how war broke down the city's neighborhoods and people.
And they're still learning to navigate the scar tearing the war left behind.
I didn't think it was seriously.
In 2003, Nur is still in college when she first heard news that the US might attack
Baghdad.
The day before the invasion, she remembers her neighbors making preparations, taping their
windows and buying food and supplies just in case.
They said if this day passed, okay, then no war will happen.
Ibrahim Muhammad, now a communications engineering student at Al-Mumon University, was still
in elementary school in 2003.
I was here in the jet fighters and the entire craft.
I was just wishing that this thing would be over.
I was thinking about when the hell would it be over?
Both Ibrahim and Nur fled Baghdad for other parts of the country.
Nur came back to a city she barely recognized.
You left the place you used to know and it was beautiful.
Suddenly you back, you see Baghdad is black and the city looks sad.
Once I see it, my tears begin to fall down.
The city itself seemed foreign, but to Basam, a friend of Ibrahim's at Al-Mumon University,
the political system that emerged when the dust cleared was all too familiar.
We hope that the Americans will help us or something like that, but they did nothing.
They just, I think, I don't sure they still, some oil or something, nothing has changed.
The government now is worse and worse.
Since the US President Sinirak has brought positive political change, Nur wonders why exactly
the US invaded Iraq in the first place.
As far as I can remember, it was about they want to see if Saddam has chemical weapons
or something like that.
I always think that America did that because they want to move Saddam from his chair.
I don't see it for Iraq is good because our loss was huge.
We lost a lot of things.
Like we lose our identity.
Basam's mom, an English teacher, says Iraqis have no illusion about why Americans invaded
Iraq.
It's very clear, plan, for all the people here.
We are not naive Iran, for example, we want to attack Israel.
So they want to weaken the area in general.
They want to keep Israel in a safe.
For Vada, the map of Baghdad is not just internally redrawn but also recentered in a larger
web of interests.
She traces one such group al-Qaeda to specific nations.
America, of course, is Israel, America.
They send them and they pay for them.
Not the people.
We like the people of America.
I mean, you know the power, the government.
Nur also suggests outsiders have shaped divisions within the city as they try to take Iraq's
oil and land or to win over ethnic groups by telling them it's all for their own good.
There are people who want to divide Iraq because if you are divided, then you are weak.
And when you are weak, you can easily make use of all the things, not as mine.
Huda, Basam's mom, notes how during the worst periods of sectarian violence, women carried
most of the burden of family care.
The Iraqi women should be built for her as a statue because she is very, very strong
and patient and suffered a lot.
Nur adds that as neighborhoods in Baghdad began to separate into groups of Sunni or Shia,
Christians or Kurds, women made the dangerous trips to run errands for their families.
Only women who was buying food or drinks and completing everything.
No man will dare to ask, you know, your identity or what you are doing.
They are kind of not coming near women, but men, no, men will not afraid to face another
man and ask him, what's your identity or who are you or what is your name.
Sectarian neighborhoods also threaten children.
In 2006 and 2007, Ibrahim often came across bodies in the street on his way to class.
The casualties of daily firefights he heard during the school day.
Once when Al-Qaeda fighters sought refuge in the school, Ibrahim, his brother and a friend
were forced out of the building and into heavy fire outside.
Ibrahim made it home that day, but for everyone interviewed in the story, home as a safe place,
even as a physical location is lost.
You feel everything you used to know has been stolen from you.
It's not yours anymore, it's not the way you used to see it anymore.
You know, it's like my room and someone took it from me and took my stuff and took my clothes
and took all the intimate things that I love.
Even though the landscape and people of Baghdad have changed forever, Huda imagines her city
moving forward.
We hope we dreamed.
We spend all life just dream and dream and we want to see just a little light at the end
of this tunnel.
We are waiting.
This is the narrative of Baghdad these Iraqis know, the map they used to travel into the
future.
They are still inching their way from checkpoint to checkpoint through Rashar traffic.
Dreaming of the light they will see at the end of the tunnel.
For War News Radio and Sabrina Singh with Amy D. Pierro.
Lydia Ratcliffe has farmed her 90 acre plot of land in Andover Vermont for 43 years.
She left behind a city life and despite developing breathing issues, she's still driving the
tractor and hanging season.
Producer Jennia Taya looks into whether she's the last of a dying breed or the future of
small farming in Vermont.
Farming in Vermont's becomes so difficult.
It's almost an endangered species.
I think a lot of the people who are kind of starry eyed and have this pastoral image
of farm life are being rudely awakened and I think they just, you know, they wonder,
when is the time you go on vacation?
Well, there is no time you go on vacation.
You don't have a vacation.
Betsy Miller is a farm management expert at the University of Vermont where she works
on the farm viability program.
I think we're facing something that nobody has ever seen before and that the face of
agriculture is going to change significantly maybe even in the next year and where that's
going to end up is anybody's guess.
So what lies in store for Lydia?
Her 90 acre farm lies on a panoramic bend in the dirt road.
She has bustling with goats, sheep, cows, chickens and livestock guardian dogs.
It's for all intents and purposes almost organic.
The organic certification process is too costly for small farms like Lydia's but she uses
antibiotic and hormone-free feed and provides ample space, fresh air and sunshine for her
200 odd animals.
We haul manure many, many miles to fertilize hay fields as opposed to commercial fertilizer
for the hay that we feed.
So that is an organic principle.
The result of a superior product to increase her bottom line, Lydia founded Fancy Meets
From Vermont, a cooperative of small local farmers which cuts out the middleman and delivers
its meats directly to the best restaurants in New York and New England for a premium
price.
Yeah, is honor Kathy there?
Oh sure.
It is Lydia and Vermont.
Hope all's well with you.
Do you want something from Vermont?
Next week if you do call me today or tomorrow with the latest.
Thank you.
Hope all's well.
That is neither a soft nor a hard sell.
It all began in 1965 when Lydia Radcliffe was working in Manhattan for the financial
journalist Sylvia Porter.
At the time she had no intention of becoming a farmer or even moving to Vermont but Lydia
fell in love with the old farm which had lain fallow for over 15 years and bought the place.
I can't tell you when but I started acquiring a few animals here and there a goat, a cow,
very very old cow called Lady who was awful looking and my brother who was a farmer could
not believe that I would buy such a decrepit creature.
But anyway I loved her and learned how to milk a cow and I started getting pigs.
I thought I would go into pigs and I soon found out that they could eat a lot faster
and more than I could possibly put on the table.
So I gave that up and went to goats.
Do you think your farm has been a success?
I think being alive is success of sorts.
It's very little such thing as a rich farm.
Those huge operations in California probably have made some people rich but I am sure it's
at the expense of some others or of quality or purity.
It's a hard scrap of life but could it be the future?
Has Lydia found the formula for survival?
It's the ones that think outside of the box if you will.
They're the ones that are out there making it work.
Again Betsy Miller with the Farm Viability Program.
I think we're seeing more diversification.
Almost stepping back in time to the farm that had the eight or ten cows and didn't just
milk the cows.
He raised some other crops and some meat, beef, pigs, chickens and we're seeing more of
that again.
Lydia was probably ahead of her time in the diversification and in going to those alternatives
to just milking cows.
Unless some of these farms continue are we going to depend on Chile and China for everything
that we eat or is this society going to wake up to the fact that agricultural lands
and farms and skills really must be preserved for our own future.
We won't last long without eating.
Our podcast, this is Jenny Atea in Andover Vermont.
That story comes to us courtesy of Thought Cast.
And that's our show for this week.
Thanks to Katie Britton for production assistance.
Our theme music is by Kevin Bartlett.
This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio.
Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Shartock.
If you'd like to hear this show again or visit the 51% Archives, go to our website at
www.amc.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 51% the Women's Perspective.
