The city of Baghdad was just waking up on the morning of Wednesday, November 14 when a bomb exploded in the streets.

Damaging buildings and blowing out windows and doors, the area of the explosion was heavily shaken, including the Mousawat radio station, where our partners, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), run a weekly human rights radio broadcast. Fortunately, our friends at OWFI are in good health, but their work for peace has taken yet another set-back with the bombing’s damages to their equipment.

OWFI is a pioneering women’s organization that has worked to rebuild Iraq since the US war there began. They offer shelter and support to women facing violence. In 2009, OWFI launched a radio broadcast to reach out to women who felt isolated and alone. For just a few hours each week, women have access to airspace not run by religious or ethnic groups. They connect with other women to create a conversation about sexual violence, discrimination, and women’s human rights.

OWFI’s work in Iraq is plagued by lack of security. Death threats are common for OWFI director Yanar Mohammed. Yet, Yanar and the women of OWFI continue to fight for human rights, despite the violence that surround them.

In a letter from Yanar, she notes “It is not easy to have a say in a dangerous city like Baghdad, but we will continue until a better day comes.”

The blow to the Mousawat radio station was a heavy one. It has severely damaged facilities and the organization’s capacity to reach out over the airwaves to isolated women. MADRE is working to help OWFI rebuild in the wake of this explosion. We will continue to provide updates here.

In late October, MADRE intern Bonnie Haskell wrote about collecting supplies to send to Afghanistan with our friend Sunita Viswanath, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women. The following post is Sunita’s account of her experience bringing those supplies to Afghanistan!

Afghan Midwives

On my recent trip to Afghanistan, I had the pleasure of meeting Sabera Turkmani, President of the Afghan Midwives Association (AMA). Sabera came to meet me at the main office of Women for Afghan Women, along with Saleha Hamnawozada, the Executive Director of AMA, because I had brought a large bag of midwifery supplies including a breast pump from my colleagues at MADRE in New York. The women were very glad to receive this gift and will put it to good use.

I am glad to share what I learned today from Sabera.

Sunita and Afghan Midwives with supplies sent by MADRE

AMA was founded in 2005, and today has an immense membership of 2,600. 40% of the membership attends the annual gatherings where voting takes place on major decisions. After Sierra Leone, Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality in the world. In fact, the highest maternal mortality in the world is in Badakhshan, a province in the northeast of Afghanistan. AMA is present in every single province of Afghanistan – in each of the 34 provinces, a Midwifery Training School has been established. Since the creation of AMA, 3,500 midwives have been trained, and 80% of them are actually deployed in their own provinces as midwives. Sabera is proud of this achievement but says that many more midwives are needed. Sabera told me that in this country, 85% of births are home deliveries by unskilled midwives. AMA’s goal is to improve the health of mother and child throughout Afghanistan.

Sabera worries about what will happen to her country and her work after the foreign troops leave in 2014. She is committed to staying in her homeland and working for her sisters as long as security allows her to. Her dream is that every Afghan woman should have access to a trained midwife, and that every Afghan child should have a healthy mother.

Manizha Naderi, Executive Director of WAW, and Huma Safi, Program Manager of WAW also met Sabera and Saleha. This was a wonderful opportunity for these brave women leaders to meet and share about the nature and scope of their work. Now that an introduction has been made, both organizations will remain connected and invite each other to relevant meetings and initiatives.

The terrible violence in Gaza and in Israel continues to escalate. As of now, ninety-six Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed, and many more people are at risk. The Israeli military launched a strike against a media building on Sunday, where both Arab and Western media outlets had offices. The number of civilian causalities is rising, including entire families and children (see full articles at the Guardian and the NYTimes). MADRE continues to monitor and respond to the situation in Gaza and stand with our partners in Palestine and Israel against violence.

More information can be found here:

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As clashes between the Free Syrian Army and Assad’s forces intensify in Aleppo, Damascus, and northern towns across Syria, the number of civilians displaced by the increasingly violent civil war continues to grow exponentially.

In March, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that the number of Syrian refugees would increase to 100,000 by the end of 2012. That figure was surpassed in July when fighting reached Damascus, sending 30,000 Syrians into Lebanon alone over a single weekend. Since then, Syrians fleeing violence to neighboring Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq exceeded 100,000 during the month of August, essentially doubling the previous number of internationally displaced persons.

Up to this point, UNHCR has registered 352,714 refugees in neighboring countries, but both the agency and these national governments acknowledge that this number is much lower than the actual population of Syrians seeking asylum abroad. The majority of those are women and children.

As MADRE has seen in other disaster and conflict response efforts, women are often the most vulnerable, as they are removed from their social support system and are overwhelmingly responsible for the well-being of children and elderly relatives. With new UNHCR projections for Syrian refugees reaching 700,000 people by the end of the year, a sustainable response, one that supports women and their families, is urgently needed.

The UNHCR camps, as well as the national governments, are striving to meet the growing need of those in camps, but there are gaps in vital services. Medical attention, particularly for the hundreds of pregnant women and young children vulnerable to illness, is severely limited. Additionally, according to Human Rights Watch, survivors of sexual violence are crossing into neighboring countries with greater frequency, but local women’s organizations that provide counseling and community are struggling to reach the ever-greater numbers of affected refugees.

To fill these gaps, MADRE strongly believes in partnering with and supporting local women who have a clear understanding of the resources and services needed to affect long-lasting change. We’re organizing a team of midwives from the region to bring emergency aid to Syrian refugee women. We will provide updates as that work progresses.

From our friends at Jewish Voice for Peace:

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) calls for an immediate cessation of the air strikes and naval bombardment into Gaza and an end to the ongoing siege of Gaza. JVP urges Israel not to exploit its asymmetric power to exacerbate the instability in the region. We urge President Obama to  take a stand against these attacks and to use the power of the United States to insist that Israel pursue all diplomatic measures possible for the sake of life, safety and security on all sides.  JVP also urges the end of  rocket attacks from Gaza into civilian communities in Israel, which we believe is never justifiable, and which only serve to derail efforts for a just resolution to the conflict. Read More.

You can find their actions for Gaza and further resources here.

MADRE condemns the growing violence that has killed at least 18 people in the past days: 15 in Gaza and three in Israel. We assert that all attacks against civilians must end immediately.

Yesterday, Israel carried out a targeted killing of Hamas leader Ahmed Al-Jaabari, in violation of international legal prohibitions on extrajudicial assassinations. Subsequent attacks brought the death toll in Gaza to 15. Reports from Gaza indicate that at least 130 people are wounded. Three Israelis have been killed in a rocket attack that collapsed part of a building.

These latest assaults come after a period of escalating attacks and tension. In the week leading up to the assassination of Jaabari, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented the deaths of six civilians in Gaza due to Israel’s military activity. That same week saw repeated rockets attacks from Gaza into Israel, also in violation of international law.

In January, Israel will be holding elections, and some have suggested that the assassination and airstrikes are a bid by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to galvanize his far right base. Now that a ground offensive may be imminent, many more lives are at risk.

The people of Gaza already live under a US-supported Israeli military siege that denies them basic rights, like access to clean water and medical care. The current airstrikes not only risk civilian lives, they destroy essential infrastructure in Gaza still not rebuilt from the last Israeli offensive four years ago.

Today, MADRE Executive Director Yifat Susskind said, “By assassinating a man who has played a central role in past ceasefire negotiations, Israel’s leaders are further foreclosing the possibility of peace. That, in fact, is the essence of Netanyahu’s election strategy. And families in Gaza are paying with their lives for his political manipulations. The Palestinian and Israeli women we work with are committed to breaking the cycle of violence and ending Israel’s occupation and siege of Gaza.”

We received an update from our partners at Midwives for Peace about a recent meeting, and we wanted to share it with MADRE supporters.

This meeting was dedicated to watching the film “Freedom for Birth,” which presents issues of human rights during childbirth. The film was produced by British filmmakers and was screened worldwide on September 20 at over 1000 venues. It tells the story of the Hungarian midwife Agnes Gereb who is in jail because she attended home births in her country. One of the mothers she delivered brought her case to the European Court of Human Rights and cleared her name, but Agnes is not free yet.

Our group got permission from the producers to add Arabic subtitles to the film. We also got support for this project from our sisters at Madre, and for this we are all very grateful to them.

The project enabled a group of 24 women who came to the meeting to watch the film together, and discuss a subject that we all deal with at some point, as professionals and as women. The film with the Arabic subtitles will be shown to other Arabic speakers who could not attend the meeting. For more information on the film go to http://www.freedomforbirth.com/

We received an update from Halla about a new regulation that the Palestinian ministry of health has decided on to prohibit home births in the West Bank. This will of course influence Halla’s ability to continue her work as a home birth midwife, and we pray to hear better news on this issue.

Midwives for Peace gather together.

We spent parting of the meeting writing about our personal experiences as members of the group for a chapter in a book being written about different midwifery models worldwide.

Our next meeting was set for January 14th, 2013.

I spend most of my time surrounded by donations to MADRE. As a Helping Hands Campaign intern, it is almost guaranteed that I can be found rummaging through boxes filled with donations. Some might find this odd – why is she always back there?

And the answer is that I honestly love being a member of Helping Hands for this very particular reason: to be entirely hands-on. I enjoy venturing out of the office to personally meet donors and pick up donations, and I like physically packing the boxes and bags that we send to our sister organizations in Haiti, Nicaragua, Kenya, and all around the world. That is what first drew me in as a volunteer for a shipment in June and attracted me as an intern for humanitarian campaigns at MADRE this fall – the personal aspect of the organization.

The epitome of this was a recent project when I packed a bag for Sunita – a friend of MADRE – to take with her to the Afghan Midwives Association in Afghanistan. This local organization works with 2,600 midwives helping women have healthy and safe births in often tumultuous circumstances. The Afghan Midwives Association aims to improve maternal health, promote gender equality and empower women in a country where women’s rights are so severely under attack. These incredible midwives unfortunately cannot always acquire necessary resources, so I was glad that MADRE’s donation supply could contribute.

Knowing the donation storage room better than my own apartment, I quickly gathered a variety of prenatal vitamins, OTC pain medications, gauze pads, alcohol pads, syringes, and other supplies that would be beneficial to the midwives.  I also packed the bag with diapers, bed liners, and infant bottles.  And wonderfully enough, someone had just generously donated a breast pump—an ideal donation for the Afghan Midwives Association!

I remember receiving those exact medical supplies from numerous donors.  I remember reading hand-written notes from donors expressing gratitude that their donations could be used by women in need.  I remember inventorying each medication and infant bottle.  I remember storing and organizing the prenatal vitamins.  And now I will remember the culmination of it all: packing the donations to send to the Afghan Midwives Association.

It is a daily reminder that this is exactly why I work with MADRE’s Helping Hands Campaign: the personal involvement in providing humanitarian aid to local women’s organizations doing extraordinary work in under-resourced areas.  And it is this personal connection that keeps bringing me back to the donation storage room every week.

Yifat spoke with RHRealityCheck about the situation in Haweeja. Read the full article here.

It’s said that wars never end for those whose lives they touch, and it’s true. Take Iraq—a place that surely proves the maxim that war is not healthy for children or other living things.

To wit: Despite the fact that the U.S. war with Iraq came to a close on December 18, 2011, families in numerous Iraqi cities are now living with a dramatic rise in birth defects and cancer from chemical weapons that were detonated near homes, schools, and playgrounds during the nearly seven-year conflict.

The cities of Babil, Basra, Falluja, Haweeja, and Najaf are cases in point. Let’s start with Haweeja, which is 30 miles south of Kirkuk and was home to Forward Operating Base (FOB) McHenry throughout the war. Yifat Susskind is executive director of MADRE, a New York-based international women’s human rights organization. Susskind says that Haweeja’s skyrocketing health problems came to the group’s attention when members of Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI)—MADRE’s partner organization in that country—began going house to house to talk about the need to establish a shelter for rape survivors.

“When they arrived, they noticed that almost every family they visited had a child under the age of 10 with stunted or paralyzed limbs, or who had been born without fingers or toes,” Susskind says. “And they found teens who had been toddlers at the time of the U.S. invasion and were now sick with cancer. The OFI activists were shocked and wanted to know what was going on, why this was happening.”

What they uncovered points directly to U.S. culpability. Peace Alliance Winnipeg, for one, reports that beginning in 2004, the United States “tested all types of explosive devices on Iraqis—thermobaric weapons, white phosphorus, depleted uranium.”

The upshot, discussed in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, has been a monumental increase in cancer, leukemia, malignant brain tumors, and infant mortality. In Falluja alone, The Journal concludes that the rate of life-threatening illnesses and birth defects is “significantly greater than those reported for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.”

For regular updates from the front lines of MADRE and OWFI’s fight for justice for families in Haweeja, Join the Haweeja Action Team.

I know you’re not stupid, but the mainstream media seems to think you are.

Why else would Newsweek’s front page feature a picture of an angry man wearing a turban and run the headline, “Muslim Rage”? Why else would TV anchor Joe Scarborough insist, “They hate us because of their religion, they hate us because of their culture”? And why else would thousands of features and op-eds paint a monolithic “Middle East” and a monolithic “Muslims”—“others” who all think and act one way?

A lot is missing from media representations of the global protests that recently captivated the world. And what’s missing should be at the heart of our national discussion of foreign policy.

But rather than engage with complexities, the media, the US presidential campaigns and the candidates have all pushed their own agendas—from higher cable ratings to continued military presence in the Middle East—in ways that distort our perceptions of one another as real human beings.

What’s missing from the foreign policy conversation? A sense of the moment in which these protests occurred and how they were shaped by specific context and history.

In Libya, we were told that the lethal violence at the US embassy was ubiquitous “Muslim rage.”  What happened was actually the result of a moribund religious right desperate to reassert its dwindling influence and armed with weapons courtesy of the US and NATO, not a spontaneous uprising of an angry populace. People also took to the streets to denounce the violence and mourn Ambassador Stevens. But the talk of “Muslim rage” dominated.

In Yemen, protests broke out denouncing the US’ unfettered use of drone warfare and the practice of killing citizens without fair trial–including, in one terrible instance, a 16-year-old. In Egypt, there are accounts that the protests were not “spontaneous” but planned, and that people were paid to attend. None of these complexities were raised in the media’s coverage of the monolithic, angry “other.”

What’s missing from the foreign policy debate? The millions of voices of those around the world who have engaged in progressive, peaceful struggle for years on end.

Most recently, there are the activists in Iraq, often led by women, who have gathered every week for months in a Baghdad square, to voice their demands for democracy and human rights. Or there are the young Sudanese women who staged a walk-out at their university to protest soaring increases in the prices of food and transportation, triggering a national mobilization.

In Iraq and Sudan—and the many other places tagged as violent hotspots by the media—progressive people have always organized for peace, despite repression from their US-backed governments. Yet you’d never know it from the media coverage.

What’s missing from the foreign policy conversation? The vital, substantive debate that can help shape the world we want to live in.

While covering the worldwide protests, the media’s narrow lens showed only a public relations crisis for the US presidential candidates. Missing from the picture was what the candidates’ positions reveal about the foreign policy they would espouse for the next four years—and what it will mean for people worldwide.

We could look at Mr. Romney’s revelation at a recent fundraiser that he does not believe peace between Israel and Palestine is possible, because Palestinians do “not want[…] to see peace anyway.”

We could look at the way President Obama has ratcheted up drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Four times as many people have been killed by drone attacks in Obama’s first term than in the entire Bush presidency. Certainly, these killings of civilians are a valid reason to protest.

Either of these things should call for substantive discussion. Instead, the media, politicians, and talking heads on cable news create laughably simplistic, divisive “us” and “them” narratives that save us from having to ask hard questions. The answers are, apparently, already obvious.

These narratives have tragic and violent consequences. They create exactly the world Joe Scarborough thinks we live in.

But that simple, polarized world of “us” and “them” isn’t the one we truly occupy, and we know it. We need a real, open conversation to reveal not only the world we live in now, but the world we want to live in tomorrow–and how we are going to get there.

This post originally appeared on Common Dreams.