Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Eyes Wide Open Across Pennsylvania

The Spring Tour 2007

Friends Central School: Wynnewood, PA
May 25, 2007

"My concern is that the kids may joke and laugh in order to deal with their discomfort,” said one of the volunteers before the exhibit. “I am just afraid they may not get it”, said a parent. I had asked what the concerns of the volunteers were in taking 600 students through the Friends Central School’s Eyes Wide Open event to be held the next day at the school.

I was conducting a listening training, something we do at all the EWO PA events. We try to have trained listeners at the exhibit at all times. Not only does it help to prevent the exhibit from being disturbed by angry people who disagree with the purpose, but it also gives us opportunities to reach out compassionately and build bridges of understanding. I tell our volunteers to throw their politics out of the window and let the exhibit do the work. The empty boots of the soldiers and the shoes of the Iraqi civilians will tell the story of the human cost of this war far better than our arguments will.

I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened the next day.

We set up at 6:00 am on the lacrosse field. It was the start of a brilliant hot day. We were anxious to get the exhibit in place by the time the parents and students arrived for school. By 8:00 am we were able to stand back and admire the neatly lined rows of 166 US Pennsylvania soldier’s boots each tagged with their names and some with messages from family and friends. There was one extra pair of boots for Nick Berg , the contractor kidnapped and killed in Iraq. Michael, his father, had asked us to include boots in his memory . The Iraqi portion of the display was off to the side close to the podium– 50 tagged shoes to represent the civilian losses and posters with pictures and stories.

Later that morning I had the opportunity to speak to the high school at an assembly. I talked about the need to build bridges of understanding, that without the military being opposed to this war we will never end it. I talked about some of the boots out in the field and the stories I knew of them. I told them the story of the young women soldier who returned from a year in Iraq. She had been in the thick of things, seeing her buddies killed and fearing for her own life. She expressed what it was like, the confusion and feeling of disconnection, she experienced coming from active duty to return to all her friends and find them fixated on American Idol. “I didn’t even know what American Idol was,” she said. I told them about Jennifer Hartman and how her father had given permission for her to go into the army at age 17, having been promised by the recruiter that she would never go to Iraq. How her grandmother visited the boots last fall and laid a little cross that she had given her granddaughter, on the boots. “He would never have signed that paper if he had known,” she said crying quietly.

The school had prepared the students carefully by consulting with parents and faculty. The upper school had seen the DVD of the Robert Cray song, that was written for the Eyes Wide Open exhibit, and is on the AFSC website, and “Bringing the War Home” a documentary that AFSC produced to accompany the exhibit. It was decided that middle school students should not see the videos but the exhibit was discussed with them, so they were prepared. Students of the lower school, while they were not to attend Eyes Wide Open as a school activity, were invited to come with their parents. The 5th grade had made bumper stickers and among them I found what for me was the theme of the event. “Be the bigger person, you make the choice to go over the bridge." Jerome Allen, 5th Grade.

What happened on the playing field that day was amazing. From the moment the first wave of 75 students entered the sea of boots, they treated it as hallowed ground. Our group of listeners and teachers moved among the kids to be there if they were needed, but it was often the students themselves who comforted each other, sharing the feelings the exhibit provoked. Throughout the day volunteers and students went up to the microphone at the podium and read the names of our Pennsylvania soldiers who have died. It deepened the solemnity of the day.

Slowly the students began to claim the exhibit, and the people that the boots and shoes represented, as their own. These students took them into their hearts. They brought flowers and made sure every boot had a flower. They wrote loving messages and left them on the boots. They added their comments to our comment book and to poster board that we had available.

After lunch I wandered over to the Iraqi exhibit that I had been too busy to visit until then. To my amazement the middle school students had spontaneously adopted these shoes. It has always been my concern that we cannot express the pain and suffering of the Iraqis adequately. The children had filled the area with flowers and messages. One little pair of soft slippers with the name of a 4 month old on it was especially blessed. “You will always be remembered”; “you did not deserve to be in this position. You were too young to die;” “sorry” and one person had just written “world.”

It was not just the volunteers, faculty and staff who realized how special this event was. A TV reporter came, clearly bored with this assignment of covering a Quaker school with an exhibit of a whole lot of boots, she found herself deeply moved. She stayed for almost three quarters of an hour interviewing students and adults including Michael Berg who was there with his son’s boots. At 4:00 pm she came back to do a live interview and at 5:30 pm she did another. In fact, she taped a piece for the closing of the news at 10:00 pm.

At the end of a long hot sweaty day I looked out over the sea of boots and shoes, transformed now by flowers and messages. There was no doubt in my mind, these students got it!

All of these boots, belonging to those

now dead,

the brother, the sister, the husband, the friend.

Too many boots, stirred up by violence

and war, and still more boots elsewhere.

So many more. And as this continues,

have we not learned from

our mistakes? That these boots

will keep on multiplying, as we continue

this hate?

Can we hold hands with our enemies,

as well as our brothers, can we