Iraqiya

This is a large exerpt from a letter I wrote in December explaining what I plan on doing this summer. It will have a pronounced impact on the material of this blog, so I figured I'd share. 

As I imagine very few of you know, this summer I have been accepted as a reporting intern for Preemptive Love Coalition, a non-profit organization in northern Iraq. PLC exists to minimize and hopefully eradicate the backlog of babies and young children in need of life saving heart surgery primarily in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The pervasive nature of children being born with heart defects is not simply a medical anomaly or natural phenomenon. Strong evidence shows a direct correlation between these heart malfunctions and experimental tests of Saddam Hussein on the Kurdish populations of northern Iraq. PLC is bent on focusing all of its resources toward providing life-saving heart surgeries to the largely forsaken Kurdish children of Iraq.

All this sounds great and humanitarian, I know, but this is not just David trying to look for a two-month mission trip before moving on to real life. In fact that is the last thing on my mind.  This is David trying to come to grips with a passion and a hope that I seem to have fallen into, a passion for broken people.

I have spent four years in Waco trying to figure out how to reconcile that passion with what it means to be an adult; with what life is supposed to look like after graduation.

I have been largely unsuccessful, but in my “failure” a few ideas have remained constant: a lingering interest in the Middle East and her people, and the only skill that I feel adequate enough in to claim as a skill: writing.

In December of 2010, in a moment of divine revelation, or in a fit of impatience, I changed my major from a literature and philosophy style degree to the much more practical News-Editorial Journalism. I entered the program hoping to be able to fashion factual stories of real people in a light that speaks of the reality of redemption and grace, two themes that are often overlooked in the cold, rigid world of relaying news.

This internship is in part me finding out how to best direct my skills and interests in the all-too-near “real world.” Even so, I do not want to spend them in any direction. I hope to find a place where I can be an image of hope to a hurting people.

This internship allows that, but also allows me to interact with, and on behalf of, a fast growing organization that is increasingly gaining attention in Iraq and in the non-profit world.