Madison Rafah Journal

Cassandra is the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ) contact for Mary House, a Catholic Worker House dedicated to offering support for visitors seeing relatives in Oxford Prison. She has also served as a CPT witness in at-Tuwani, Palestine, accompanying children to school and standing with others to protect their homes from demolition. She is a winner of a 2008 WNPJ Peacemaker of the Year Award.

In a few weeks I will be traveling to Palestine for a one-month stay as a Christian Peacemaker Teams reservist, helping with their accompaniment and violence-reduction work in Hebron and the 2000-year-old West Bank village of at-Tuwani . I invite you — my friends, family, supporters of Mary House, and my very valued work clients — to be part of this adventure in peacemaking in these war-filled times. This is extremely challenging for me — I’m no traveler, I find it terrifying to think about being so far away and unavailable to my two college-age children, and the financial cost of the trip and loss to my family of my income for a month is challenging to say the least.

I very much need your encouragement, prayers, and financial help.

Like everyone I know, I’ve felt despair standing just outside the window recently. A high-school friend of my daughter’s is in Kuwait now in the Air Force. One of my son’s house mates, a gifted musician and Guard member, could be called up. A friend’s son left for Iraq with his Army unit this past weekend. Over supper on my way home from a march commemorating the start of the Iraq war, I listened as my daughter talked about her friend. She worries for his safety, and is distressed by both his participation in the war and his apparent decision to cease thinking critically — even though she knows him to be a smart and opinionated young man. “It’s just so stupid, mom,” she says. “Weapons of mass destruction?? Were there any weapons? Are we even still looking? . . .” — well, any of you who know my daughter Helen can well imagine how difficult it would be to claim that there is nothing I can do about this mess.

So, are there alternatives to our dependence on military intervention around the world? I hope so. The challenge posed by Christian Peacemaker Teams — to send teams of trained peace activists into conflict situations where our own country’s foreign policy is a contributing factor — provides an alternative to the violent response we are so accustomed to. In addition to working at home to change the social structures that causes violence, CPT offers a chance to “get in the way of violence”, and bring that violence into the light. CPT’s violence-reduction teams are currently present in Iraq, Colombia, Palestine, on the Arizona/Mexico border, and in Kenora, Ontario. Their work in Palestine began in June, l995 with an invitation from Hebron’s mayor. The team has maintained a continuous presence in Hebron, and more recently in the village of at-Tuwani, working with Palestinians and Israeli peace groups engaged in nonviolent opposition to Israeli military occupation, collective punishment, settler harassment, home demolitions and land confiscation.

This challenge — to get in the way of violence — has been intruding on my thoughts for years. With my mother’s death and my children’s graduation from high school, I realized that this is the time I have to offer — not later, but now. Last summer I completed CPT’s month-long peacemaker training and made a three-year commitment to serve as a “reservist”, promising to be available to travel for one to three months a year. The recent crisis in Iraq, where three CPT members were recently released after being held for over 100 days, and the very very sad death in Iraq of CPT member Tom Fox, have contributed to an additional need for CPT reservists in the Middle East. I find that the first leg of my commitment is coming up in May, and I very much need your help and prayers.

I’m writing to ask you to help me accomplish this trip — and among the many things I need help with, I have to admit that money is high on the list. The cost of serving as a reservist for CPT is $2,000, which covers airline tickets and the cost of maintaining teams in the field, including rent, transportation, translators, phone, email and food. To meet this cost and cover my children’s health and college needs, and my obligations to Mary House for the time I am gone, I need to raise $4,000 in the next month. I’m working full time, but I’d be enormously grateful for your help. It is unbelievably difficult to ask — I seem to spend quite a lot of time asking for help for other projects, and all of you are doubtlessly over-committed already. But whatever the nonviolent equivalent of biting the bullet is, I’m doing it, and I’m asking you for your help. To learn more about CPT, see their website, or you can write to them at PO Box 6508, Chicago, IL 60680. If you would like to hear from me while I am in Palestine, please include your email address and I will do my best to keep in touch.

I am extremely grateful for your kind thoughts and prayers, especially for the well-being of my children Helen and Carl, and for Mary House, the Catholic Worker house in which I live. Mary House is greatly in need of another live-in volunteer, and my absence — both now and periodically over the coming three years, will be a serious challenge to the house, both financially and in the providing of hospitality to our guests. If you have any inclination to help care for Mary House while I’m gone, please call me at (608)-586-4447 before April 25, or my friend Fr. Jim Murphy at (608)-742-6998 while I am gone. And to those of you who have been so kind as to hire me to repair your homes in the past, please let your friends know that I will be desperately looking for work when I return in June, and I would be grateful for their calls.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, for all of your own efforts for peace and justice, and for your support.

Cassandra Dixon
3579 County Road G
Wisconsin Dells WI 53965
608-445-0357
chrepairs (at) yahoo.com

The CPT Hebron project is closing after thirteen years. Tarek Abuata of CPT wrote in October 2008: “We have been suffering with an inadequate number of full-time CPTers on this team for months. Stretched thin, we covered the work of the Hebron team site with reservists until August, knowing that this option was not sustainable.”