A handful of words, etched on a wall half a world away, has inspired thousands more from a former Lac La Biche resident who’ s now an author in Edmonton. Those words were “Now that I have seen, I am responsible.
A handful of words, etched on a wall half a world away, has inspired thousands more from a former Lac La Biche resident who’ s now an author in Edmonton.
Those words were “Now that I have seen, I am responsible.” They were written as graffiti on a wall in Palestine-and after reading them, Carmen Taha Jarrah took the message to heart.
“I went, I saw, I heard and I couldn’ t forget,” Jarrah told the POST ahead of a book signing at the Stuart MacPherson Public Library.
Jarrah, who grew up in Lac La Biche and still thinks of the community as her home, wrote her first book, “Smuggled Stories From The Holy Land,” as a way of communicating to people in North America what is really happening between Israel and Palestine.
“It’ s based on first-hand experiences that I had in the Holy Land,” she said. “It includes testimonies from locals there, the stories that aren’ t often reported by the mainstream media here in the West. Really, it’ s to raise awareness of what’ s happening there.”
Jarrah will be at Lac La Biche’ s library on Sept. 8 to speak more about her experiences.
She first visited Israel and Palestine in 2009, when she traveled with the Edmonton-based Arab Jewish Women’ s Peace Coalition. That group has since disbanded, but that eyewitness look at the decades-old conflict and its consequences was the catalyst for several more visits.
“It’ s one thing to read about it...but it’ s not the same as when you see it first-hand,” Jarrah said.
As a volunteer, she helped Palestinian farmers pick olives. For many Palestinians, olive groves are the only reliable source of income-and sometimes, accessing their own land safely is much easier said than done, she says.
Speaking with a teenager who was arrested and tortured, seeing thousands of Palestinians waiting at an Israeli checkpoint-there were so many experiences, she says, each one more telling than the last.
“How do you process that? What do you say to that? Every story was so heart-wrenching,” she said.
She hopes that Canadians and others who read her book will realize there’ s much more going on between Israel and Palestine than the on-the-surface political tensions.
Half of the proceeds from book sales will be donated to the Daughters For Life Foundation, a registered charity promoting education for women in the Middle East.
She says the September book signing will be an important occasion for her because she still thinks of here as her hometown.
“For me, to go back, that’ s especially meaningful,” she said. “It’ s my home and it always will be.”
