There are people in Iraq who adore Jeremy Courtney and Preemptive Love Coalition, his humanitarian organization. There are also some very powerful people in Iraq who want Jeremy Courtney dead.

The people who love him are the poor Arab and Kurdish families whose lives he has changed because he funded heart surgeries that saved children’s lives.

The people who hate him are the Islamic mullahs who issued a fatwa against his organization last year. Why? Because he arranged the heart surgeries using Jewish physicians and American consumerism.

It’s a complicated, multicultural story wrapped around a simple core. That core, as Courtney describes it, is love.

Heart Problems

In 2006, Jeremy Courtney and Cody Fisher were working in Iraq with a humanitarian organization called Millennium Relief & Development Services. Among other things, they were performing heart screenings in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. “We kept running into families with these congenital heart problems,” he says. As an example, he cites a 12-year-old boy named Aras, from the city of Halabja, the site of a 1988 chemical attack by Saddam Hussein, which killed at least 5,000 people in a single day. Another 20,000 Kurds suffered deformations and abnormalities in the aftermath of Saddam’s 281 chemical attacks during that period. “We’re pretty sure that the gases used [back then] are linked to these heart problems,” he says, “which makes Aras a human-rights victim, not just a medical case.”

The heart problems were treatable, but expensive. Very few Kurdish families had the money to pay for the surgeries, so Courtney and Fisher got creative. “We wanted to help these kids, but I was sick of begging for money from the usual financial outlets,” he says. “I wanted to find a way to get money without asking for it — a way to generate our own funds, to help people buy in without feeling like they were being manipulated.”

Their answer? Shoes.

Klash of Cultures

More specifically, hand-stitched clogs called klashi kurdi. They’re made locally by Kurdish craftsmen. Each pair takes up to 35 hours to produce and are legendary in the dusty mountains of northern Iraq.

Living among Kurds, Jeremy fell in love with the comfortable, practical shoes. If he loved them so much, would other Westerners feel the same way? In early 2007 they designed a website (www.buyshoessavelives.com) and posted a short documentary video on it about klash. And they started taking orders for $100 a pair.

“When we sold almost $5,000 [of shoes] in three weeks we thought we were on to something,” he says.

Raising the money wasn’t the only hurdle. Top medical care, especially for complex heart surgeries, isn’t available everywhere in Iraq, so Courtney and his partners had to look elsewhere. They found an unlikely solution: Israeli physicians. The earliest surgeries were performed by the doctors of Shevet Achim (www.shevet.org), a medical organization in Israel. “The people of Shevet believe it’s beautiful for the broken children of Isaac and Ishmael [Jews and Muslims] to live together in peace,” Courtney explains. The Shevet doctors purposefully cross lines of division in their work by helping non-Israeli children receive medical care in Israel. Everything they do is geared toward peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians, Israelis and Iraqis, Jews and Muslims.

“They’re humble enough to literally ‘love their enemies’ and serve the children of Palestinians and Iraqis,” Courtney says. “This means we can fund surgeries at a fraction of the market price. So what happens is children get life-saving surgeries, governments end up working together and a bunch of politics and religious differences go out the window.”

So to sum it up, a humanitarian organization based on Christian principles used American money and Jewish doctors to save the lives of Muslim children in Iraq. What could go wrong?

Hard Decisions

Due to good press and a savvy use of social media, Buy Shoes, Save Lives was turning a profit selling shoes and T-shirts to help kids in Iraq. Courtney began expanding his vision, adding full-time staff and volunteers and renaming the organization Preemptive Love Coalition. They adopted a two-tiered focus. First, abolish the backlog of thousands of Iraqi kids awaiting life-saving heart surgery. Second, increase dialogue between communities at odds.

Accomplishing the first goal made it harder to meet the second goal. In early 2008, a local Muslim cleric issued a fatwa — a religious ruling — against groups that sent Muslim children to Israel for surgery. Preemptive Love Coalition was one of them. “The fatwa was meant to partially condemn neighboring Arab states for their paltry efforts to serve Iraq’s children,” Courtney says, “and partially to scare organizations like ours so that we would stop working with Israel on threat of violent retribution.”

It forced Preemptive Love Coalition to make some changes. They traveled less. They reported less online. They cut back on visitations to of surgery candidates. Mainly, they struggled to find an answer, because the primary victims of the fatwa weren’t the organizations, but the families they help. Take away the Israel surgery option and you consign the children to almost certain death from heart disease.

“The tension inherent to our medical solution was quite provocative,” Courtney says. “Will you receive healing at the hands of your enemy? What is a desperate parent to do?” Though some of the families put themselves in danger by traveling to Israel for the surgeries, they did it anyway, with encouraging results. “In every case, these families came back from surgery with a different perspective on the love extended to them by Israelis and Americans, Jews and Christians.”

Photo by Matt Addington

A New Way

Due to the increased tension and high volume of surgeries in Israel, however, Preemptive Love eventually needed to find an additional avenue for heart surgeries. In late 2008 they came to an agreement with a Johns Hopkins affiliate in Istanbul, Turkey, for 20 surgeries a month.

Partnering with physicians in a predominantly Muslim nation eased the process considerably and the fatwa has dissipated, Courtney says, with very little backlash. It’s allowed Preemptive Love to focus again on their goal — saving lives, even the lives of a religious group that wanted him dead, in a nation with whom his country was at war.

Courtney sums it up: “Somewhere along the way in Iraq it hit me — these are people. They are mothers and fathers and sons and daughters,” he says. “They are not labels and religions and voting blocs. As soon as I started learning their names and family histories I realized that I didn’t want to see the world so black and white any more. I wanted to love first and ask questions later.”

Jeremy Courtney’s “Must-Haves”

1. Hand-Made Klash Shoes: without these Kurdish shoes we’d still be in our dark ages of basement grant-writing, without any help from the scores of normal and extraordinary people around the world looking to help out. These shoes have made it possible to gain attention and earn the trust of people from around the world, while simultaneously building up local villages and expanding their access to global markets. Without the Buy Shoes. Save Lives. program, there’s no way we’d be where we are today!
2. Staff/Community: Things don’t just happen. They happen because of dedicated, hard-working, whole people who bring their whole selves to the work place. Our staff [is made up of] creative, brave, risk-takers who love to say “why not!” more than “be careful.” We’re a community on journey together, sharing our lives with each other, in agreement, headed toward the same place. I could not do any of this without them.
3. MacBook Pro equipped with Quicksilver: I’d be half as productive without that little free Quicksilver download! I can search, find, launch, move, manipulate, and otherwise get things done with almost any file on my computer with just a few key strokes.
4. “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis: Like orange juice, I try to have it every day.
5. Twitter: Makes it possible for our offices in Turkey, Iraq, and the U.S. to stay connected in this stressful, joyous life-saving adventure. [twitter.com/preemptivelove]

WEB

http://www.buyshoessavelives.com