'It's not whether I'll die, but how I live'

IN THE somewhat clinical surroundings of Heathrow Airport's hospitality lounge, Norman Kember clung onto the hand of his wife, Pat. The couple had only recently been reunited after Mr Kember's British Airways flight from Kuwait had touched down.

Their daughters Jo and Sally were there for the family reunion they never thought they would see. They had watched the grainy images released sporadically by the captors of their 74-year-old father, who had appeared looking haunted and thin. They knew of the threats of execution hanging over him every day.

Spectacles perched on the end of his nose, Mr Kember read out a short statement to the media about his 119 days in captivity. "Was I foolhardy or rational?" he asked.

There were plenty of people thinking the former as the spotlight fell on the Canadian-based organisation, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) that Mr Kember had flown out with. "Do-gooders" was one of the kinder names being touted.

Mr Kember, a retired professor, had been seized in Baghdad on November 26 last year along with three colleagues, by a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, which had accused the hostages of being spies.

The CPT had been working in Baghdad for three and a half years. It was founded in 1984 by three churches - Mennonite, Church of the Brethren and the Quakers - with the aim of reducing violence and protecting human rights in war or conflict zones. Its members range from clergy and teachers to social workers and engineers, and comprise 36 full-time peacemakers and 152 part-time volunteers across the world. It adheres to the motto 'Getting in the Way' of injustice through non-violent intervention.

Christy Bischoff, 29, is one of the part-time volunteers who is studying conflict resolution at Bradford University in West Yorkshire.

Christy was born into a United Methodist family and grew up in Missouri, America. She followed her brother Michael into the Quaker church and became interested in the social justice issues surrounding violence around the world.

She worked in West Belfast with young children who had witnessed the violence caused by the Troubles where she heard about the work of the CPT. She felt she could make a difference with the group and signed up for a training course in January 2003 in Chicago.

The students looked at the Biblical basis for non-violence and received instruction in how to deal with confrontation and cultural information for the areas they may end up in, from Chechnya and Iraq to Palestine and Columbia.

"There was a lot of role playing. We did a session that was really exploring our feelings by looking at situations where you might risk your life," she says. "It was also a time when people were reflecting pretty deeply on those risks. I naturally felt some nervousness and some hesitation, but by talking to other people and through more intense prayer I felt a lot of being calmed at times."

Christy certainly appears calm. She has a softly spoken American voice, a quiet belief in what she does without any signs of evangelical zeal. But perhaps there's also a naivety to her. Can she really have come to terms with the fact that she might die in the name of peace - just like Mr Kember's colleague, Tom Fox, who was beaten and murdered?

"If I go to the fear place I do think 'oh no, I might die," she admits. "But to me it's about focusing on not so much whether I'll die but how I live - living as close to my values - and how we bring about a more loving, just world."

Like Norman Kember, she also signed a document stating that she wouldn't want to be rescued by armed forces. In Mr Kember's case, the kidnappers left before the SAS got there so there was no bloodshed. Christy stands by the form that she signed.

"I wouldn't want to be rescued if it meant it turned into another cycle of violence," she says simply.

For her first trip with CPT, Christy went to Hebron, Palestine. The organisation had been in the region for 11 years since being invited by the local mayor shortly after the massacre of 29 Muslims by Israeli settlers. The situation was still volatile in the summer of 2004. In the city, 500 Israeli settlers lived in Palestinian territory, guarded by 1,200 Israeli soldiers.

"We would walk the (Palestinian) children to school because often they would be attacked by settlers," she says. "It was just so militarised. Everywhere you went there were checkpoints."

The following September, Christy went back to Palestine to Attuwani, a village in the southern part of the West Bank. The work was similar, walking the children to school, only this time two CPT workers were attacked by Israeli settlers in masks, leaving a woman with a broken leg and arm and her male co-worker with a punctured lung. Two weeks later an Amnesty International aid worker was attacked.

As a result of the media coverage, a parliamentary order was passed which led to the Israeli military escorting the children to school. The CPT, however, refuses to have bodyguards.

"I actually feel much safer not having bodyguards," says Christy. "There were a couple of times in Hebron when the Israeli soldiers were saying 'aren't you afraid?'. But if you have a gun, you're a target."

Other work involved collecting documentary evidence on video cameras, the CPT members clearly visible in their red peaked caps.

"There was one time when we were on a hill and an Israeli tank came and they were saying 'move your sheep,' and they were hitting the sheep with guns, but as soon as they saw us they stopped because they knew we had video cameras," says Christy.

But surely they can't always be there with their video cameras, like big brothers warding off school bullies? What would happen if they left?

"This is the tricky bit," she concedes. "The work we did there was purely to reduce some of the violence that was happening, to give space for negotiations to take place. And there were other things, like helping them with plans, like they soon realised that it was safer for the shepherds to travel together than alone."

Christy has, so far, never been injured but has been in threatening situations. She returned to the West Bank in March last year and admits the place looked 'pretty grey'. Has it been hard for her to keep her faith in such situations?

"Every morning we would have prayership together which kept us grounded and looking at the larger picture. In some ways there was the depression of it's only going to get worse, but then there were the people, the way they still love life and still make jokes about everyday things."

She says she has never wanted to go to Iraq because she feels as if she has invested too much time in Palestine, and the CPT presence in Baghdad is made up of more full-time members. The organisation is usually asked to go to an area by local people and they assess what work is being done already by aid organisations. The main work in Iraq after the war was helping civilians to find their loved ones and it was CPT members who uncovered evidence of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison.

"The work CPT does may be a small drop in the ocean but I feel that we have to start somewhere, that we have to be able to do what we can," she says. "It may not be measurable in terms of it hasn't stopped the war, but in Palestine and Iraq we are there to work with the people and those people want CPT to stay."

Mr Kember received criticism for initially failing to thank the forces who rescued him, but Christy argues that the "thank you" thing was a way of deflecting attention from the real issues of Iraq. The CPT had already issued a statement th anking the forces, she says.

Christy is single at the moment, but concedes if she had a family or husband she may not be inclined to work in "conflict areas". She says her family in America is "working on understanding" her work, but are supportive.

"It does feel like there's a lot of darkness sometimes, but there's a lot of love as well," she says. "It's a power that can change some of the darkness."