As much as doing death penalty work was interesting and informative, I look back on this summer not as the summer that I did death penalty work, but as the summer that I spent at Reba Place Fellowship. Reba Place is an intentional Christian community, which at the core involves 35 or so people sharing all of their money in common. Originally, I was planning to simply rent an empty dorm room somewhere in the Chicago area, but when my mom heard about that she wasn’t too crazy about the idea. She wanted me to be living with other people so that if I happened to be struck down with the Plague that someone would know that I was missing. She started to then talk with anyone who knew anyone in Chicago. One of our old church friends had lived at Reba Place back in the 1970’s and recommended it to my mom. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea at first. Although I acknowledge that all of my money is really God’s money, there was something very uncomfortable about the idea of people giving every single dime that they had to a community. I originally contacted them because it made Mom happy, which is never a bad idea. I asked if they would be willing to house me in the area for the ten weeks of my internship. They countered with the idea of dovetailing my death penalty mitigation internship with Reba Place’s summer internship. Basically, it would mean that I would be working from 9 to 5 doing death penalty work, and then go home and be part of the Reba Place community. I thought that it would be a place with free food and free lodging, and so I really didn’t have anything to lose. I didn’t expect it to be life impacting.

And yet, there was something really impacting about the time that I spent at Reba. Grinnell College is all about convincing people of your ideas and learning by writing essays and getting into intellectual arguments. On the other hand, people at Reba let their lives be a testament rather than words. For example, while I had always acknowledged that God has a special place in his heart for the poor, I had never really realized how little I was spending time with people who are in need. Grinnell is a small campus in the middle of rural Iowa, so the majority of people never actually go off of the campus during the school year. As such, it means that I spend the most of my time with other college students, and while college students might complain of being poor, just the fact that someone is in Grinnell College means that the come from a family that is rather well to do. People at Reba acknowledged that God loves the poor, and then actually do something to make that impact their life. One of the things that I did at Reba was to help run a program called “House of Manna.” Basically, it was something that Reba Place set up where they went around to various bakeries in the area, got the bread that the bakeries were going to throw out for free, and then gave it out for free to anyone who needed it. It was the first time that I had actual interaction with people that were needy in months if not years.

Another example of how Reba Place changed me without saying anything in words would be the house that I lived in. It was called “The Clearing.” In a three story house that would normally serve a family of 4, Reba Place put 12 people in. Not was it a house of 12 people, but it was such a variety of people. We had me and another twenty-something and at the other end we were living with a couple of people in their mid-eighties. Putting 12 people in a house frees up the money that the extra people would have needed to spend on housing, and then frees up that money to be used for ministry. Reba Place owns a lot of apartment buildings in the area, and intentionally rents them out at 15% below market price to make sure that people who need a place to stay can afford a place to stay. They have a childcare center to help provide daycare for those who need it. And they also support a village in El Salvador and missionaries in India.

Being around people who were willing to give all of their money to provide for the entire community’s needs first and then for the work of the kingdom of God and the poor got me thinking about what career I should go into. I haven’t yet declared a major yet, and with the gifts that God has given me, I can basically go into any major or aim for any job. Considering that unlike many people, I am not forced to take a job out of economic need, but can actually choose what I want, I thought that there must be a job that could both provide for my needs and do the work of God in the world at the same time. At first I thought about becoming a lawyer. Law is something that I think that I could do very well in., and many people without money who need lawyers are unable to get them. But then I thought about my death penalty work. In this field a person spends 5 years trying to save someone’s life. I was wondering that if an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then what could I do that was before the fact. Everything that a lawyer does is after someone or something get’s hurt, and I was wondering what a job would be that would work “before the fact” so to speak.

In the end, I wasn’t able to get anywhere thinking by myself, so I asked people at Reba Place to help pray about it with me, and so I started a discernment group about what job I should be aiming for. I wanted a direct answer, and as it turns out, sometimes God isn’t into giving direct answers. What the discernment group and I ended up deciding on is that decisions about how God wants me to help the needy cannot be made by thinking abstractly. I needed to be where needy people are, and by being among the needy, God would show me how he wanted me to meet their needs.

So I headed back to Grinnell, wondering how I could best come in contact with people in need. So far, I haven’t had much success. I’m sure that there is no shortage of needy people in the world, and no shortage of needy people in Grinnell, but I simply don’t know where they are. So I started working at MICA every Thursday. MICA stands for Mid-Iowa Community Action, and it is the only organization that is working on issues of poverty in Grinnell. I thought that since it was an organization that was working with people in poverty that I would come in contact with people in poverty. So far that has not been the case. I have been doing a lot of good work –  stocking the food shelf, making lists of places to get rent assistance in Grinnell, and various other pieces of paperwork – but  so far after six weeks of work, I still haven’t come into contact with people in need. I never thought that finding people in need would be so difficult. It's actually rather scary that we live in a society where we wanted the poor to be invisible, so they have become such; so much that you can't find them when you try.

Week Four

This week I was working on the case of an Iraq war veteran named Pierre. Pierre signed up for the army. He went to Fort Ripley, and somehow there he met up with the girl that he started dating. He went to Iraq, and during the break when he came back, he, his uncle (who also has military experience) and his girlfriend went to the clothing store that his girlfriend worked at, and proceeded to ring up a large amount of clothes with the intention of stealing them and robbing th cash register. Then he and his uncle shot and killed the stork clerk.

Caryn had been working on his case for a while, but there was a period of time where they thought that they would be able to resolve it with a plea (as explained previously, a victory) and thus, as common practice dictates, she did not work on the case for a while. For one reason or another, the plea fell through and so they are preparing for trial again. The defense team thinks that the key to a successful mitigation might be in Pierre's military experience. I mean, it seems like a pretty simple equation, you train people to kill, you send them off to kill, they kill, and then you send them back home and expect that they will be able to be just like everyone else. Any sort of mental health problems are mitigation gold. There is supreme court precedent against killing mentally retarded people, and while there might not be a law against the death penalty, juries don't like to sentence people with less severe mental health problems with the death penalty. We, as a people, want crazy people off the street, someplace where they can't hurt us, but at the same time don't feel like you can hold someone accountable to their actions if they can't truly control their actions. Life in prison, but no death penalty is a nice compromise for people, and is a victory for mitigation. Thus, Caryn had me researching mental health studies of Iraq war veterans this week. Turns out that about 1 in 5 Iraq war veterans come back from Iraq with signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Iraq seems to be worse than other wars for mental health, because in addition to all of the wonderful stressors of a normal war such as being in fear of your life and limb, watching other people getting shot, having to kill people, deal with corpses and death and so forth, the Iraq war has a whole bunch of stressors added in free of charge. In addition to all the crazy wars stuff, there is no front line in Iraq. Enemy combatants and innocent civilians look exactly the same until almost too late. And when you are fighting building to building, the soldiers have the huge burden of if they shoot the might kill and innocent person, and if they don't shoot they might be killed about every 15 seconds.

Caryn has been fighting with the National Archives in order to get a copy of Pierre's military records. Unfortunately, this being a state case, she is unable to subpoena the records and light the fire of legal consequences underneath them, and as such, the National Archives have been sitting on both the prosecution's and defense's request for records since January or February. So in order to get just the basic outline of his military service we sat down in the jail and just asked him questions about his military service. Most of the information was basically procedural; where was he when, what training he received, other basic stuff to set out a skeleton of his military service. The interesting stuff can when he started talking about his military service.

Turns out that his unit was scheduled to go somewhere in California, and then when they entered the briefing room to talk about what they were going to do in California, the commanding officer told them that they were going to Iraq. No explanation, just the start of a couple of weeks of training off jumping out of cars, building to building combat, and all the rest of the flavors of fighting necessary in Iraq.

He told us how they landed in Kuwait and drove three days into the station in Iraq where they would be camped at for the rest of their time in Iraq. He was scared, like everyone else. Then he got desensitized, or, in his own words “the scared just goes right out of you.” He told us how he worked as a mechanic, and thus the trucks full of wounded people would go to him first, some of them would be unloaded to medical attention, some of them would have blankets draped over them when their wounds were declared mortal. He told that sometimes the trucks would come in, not with wounded, but the corpses of Iraqis that had been killed in the raids the night before. If he was unlucky enough to be in the general area of the truck, sometimes he would be ordered to unload the dead bodies and had to stack them in the “Ice Shack”; a clay building in the camp where the bodies would sit until the Iraqi police came to sort them out. The worst part was when you had to stack the bodies of the children. He told of how he had to kill two people. One was on guard duty when someone was sneaking into the camp and he fired a warning shot. They kept going into the camp, so he killed them. Another one was when driving in a car and manning the main gun. Someone with a gun came up to kill them, and he shot them first. He wasn't sure if he actually killed that one, since it is Army protocol to never, ever stop the car for anything. He told us that he and the other soldiers would ride in trucks and throw food to the children who would be running behind and picking it up, and then sometimes he would see a child get hit by a car (I assume by someone else who wanted the food, but he didn't elaborate on that part) and there was nothing that he could do to help, because Army protocol is to never stop the truck for anything.

The worst part, the worst part, as that Pierre as he stands now is no longer able to see the inhumanity of it all. He related all of the stories in a flat tone. When we asked him how stacking the bodies of dead Iraqi children made him feel, he sat and thought for a while. In the end all he could think of was that “They stunk a little bit.”

The cost of war is not just the body count.