At the moment, Jan Benvie is unremarkable: a teacher at a primary school in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and the mother of two grown-up children. It is not her life now that makes her special; it is what she intends to do. In three months, when school breaks up for the summer, 51-year-old Benvie will be packing her bags -- but not for a holiday.
Instead, following in the footsteps of the recently rescued Western peace activist hostages in Baghdad, and their murdered colleague, Benvie is off to Iraq.
It will be her second trip to the country in the space of a year and Benvie says that neither the murder of Tom Fox nor his imprisonment with the Briton Norman Kember and Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden would deter her from returning.
Like them, she is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT); like them, she is aware of the dangers.
"I always knew there was a risk I could be killed or kidnapped," she says. "What happened with Tom and the others has not made me any more aware of the risks. I was already aware of them. I have weighed up the risks and I believe the work we do is important."
She admits, though, that Fox's death was a terrible blow. She met him at a training session in Chicago when she joined the CPT last year. The two became friends; they were similar ages, and both had a son and daughter in their 20s.
The CPT has had a presence in Iraq since 2002, but its profile was heightened with the kidnap of four of its members last November.
With the four hostages in Iraq, the organization came in for criticism for having placed "violence reduction" teams of civilians in troubled regions. Since the rescue of Kember and the Canadians in a military operation last month, questions have also been raised over whether the CPT has shown sufficient gratitude for the rescue of Kember and the others.
Benvie sighs when asked about the controversy. The issue of gratitude was a miscommunication, she says; the first response simply an expression of relief that the men's ordeal was over, an addendum quickly put out to thank those who had carried out the rescue. What she takes exception to, though, is any suggestion that she and Kember have no place being in Iraq. The work the CPT does there, she believes, is practical, vital and appreciated.
"Speak to the Iraqis we work with and ask them. That's what we use as a measure of whether our work is worthwhile. They do say so. For me, as long as people are saying what we do is worthwhile, then we will keep doing it," she says.
When she was there last summer, she and her fellow peace activists lived and worked with Iraqis -- she lived in an apartment with an Iraqi family. She accompanied people to detention centers to find out what had happened to friends or family members, she detailed privations and alleged human rights abuses, she visited hospitals, accompanied refugees to the country's borders and sought medical and other help for those in need. People such as the amputee in need of a prosthesis whom she was able to hook up with a US soldier specializing in the work.
What it is about, she says, is drawing up a picture of what is really happening inside Iraq, as well as being a Western ally. So she is there in solidarity and as a witness. Ask her to describe what she means and she tells a story she heard from a friend, but which she thinks may have come originally from the late Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. It concerns a World War II concentration camp guard who was so moved by the horrors he saw that he stripped off his uniform and joined the people heading for the gas chamber.
"That story spoke to me," Benvie says. "Sometimes all you can do is walk with someone as they go through what they are going through, and the Iraqi people welcome and need people to walk with them. Letting people know that you care, that they are not alone because it is horrendous out there."
In a life of quiet faith and beyond anti-war protests, visiting Iraq was the first time she had done anything of this sort. A committed Christian and a lay member of an Anglican order, the Society of St Francis, she is driven, she says, by a passionate sense of peace and justice. "I have a very strong faith in God. I feel that God chose us to make peace in this world."
When she told her family of her plans, they expressed surprise that she had not done something like it before. Not that they were all totally at ease with her choice.
"My son is quite supportive," Benvie says. "He does worry about me but he is supportive. My daughter prefers that I don't do this. Again, she accepts that this is who I am and it's important to me that I do this work, but she would much rather I didn't."
Her greatest champion, she says, is her own mother, who is in her mid 70s, but "would come with me if she was a little bit younger."
Benvie says that she is not afraid for herself but does have a healthy concern for her own wellbeing. But she says that CPT members don't receive specific training on how to cope as a hostage.
"CPT has been working in conflict zones for 20 years now. The dangers are something that we are very aware of and we are made very aware of," she says. "You are encouraged to make a will and things and to think about if anything happened to you. It is very much laid on the line."
"We are not trained what to do in a hostage situation. One of the things they ask us to do is to choose a passage from the Bible that we feel particularly inspired by and comforted by and learn that off by heart. As far as keeping ourselves safe, it is a case of getting the balance right because our motto is `getting in the way of violence.' We do believe in getting in the way of violence, sometimes in a very literal sense. Certainly in Iraq we move freely in the area we live in, and the people know us. We are careful and cautious," she says.
Benvie is adamant, however, that she would not want armed force used to rescue her; a wish, she says, that should not be misconstrued as anti-military.
"I have nothing against the military," she says. "I have friends who are in the military. I spoke to many soldiers while I was in Iraq, US soldiers ... but no, I would not want any armed force used. Members of the Iraq team, in light of where we are working, sign a statement of conviction which says in the light of us being held hostage we would not want armed force used."
"I would not want anyone killed on my behalf whether it is someone that was holding me or most certainly not a British soldier. I don't want anybody else to pay with their life for mine," Benvie says.
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