The Re-foundation Project

Bring all gently used or new children shoes to the Hicksville library by April 22nd to help the displaced children and orphans in Iraq!  For more details please view our flyer.

Hi all,

We started CNSF INC this past year, May of 2017 to be exact.  Since then we built a USA chapter website and were focusing on that more then this page.  However, we decided it would be best to take down our CNSF USA website, and just have one CNSF website operated by our friends in Iraq.  Due to these changes we felt it was the perfect time to reboot this webpage. The Re-foundation Project website will allow us to better connect with our Christian friends and family while we are abroad.   Please visit and subscribe to our blog here!  To see more images check out Ed’s personal Instagram.

Happy Easter to all those who celebrate this beautiful day! It’s been a busy and very wonderful month here at the Re-foundation Project. This month we were able to connect with one family that Ed and Lenor met on their trip to Iraq, as well as our very dear friend and founder of CNSF in Iraq who came to the United States for a visit. While here, he was given NGO status for his organization, and we have planned to connect with his organization to make 501c3 organization here which can be tax deductible! It was so nice to bond with people that are doing such great work in Iraq. I was given more pictures and more stories and permission to share them on this site.

Peace be with you all!

As we approach the one year anniversary of my parents trip to Iraq.  I wanted to post this video, and share the story of a woman named Hoha.  My parents have received permission from both women (the translator and Hoha) to share this video. There are children playing while the video is being recorded in the background, so there is a lot of background noise.

Baran, Hoha’s daughter is still missing.  Hoha was able to contact her once since this video was taken, when Baran was able to get her hands on a cell phone.  It is our hope that Baran is still alive, but Hoha has not been able to contact her since. Here is the picture of Baran that Hoha showed my mom.

After seeing this video I sat down with my mother on several occasions and asked her to share more about Hoha and the other women she meet.  Here is a transcript of one of those conversations.

Can you tell me where you first met Hoha?

It was in a fenced off construction site that had been abandoned and left half finished.  There were six blocks with five family groups.  There was a gate around the construction site, and she lived in one of the housing huts -many of the families lived in makeshift sheds on the site.  It was my first experience meeting with refugees. Our group went there to distribute food.  All the children came running out to play, so some of the group was playing with the kids, and some of the group was looking over food papers to distribute food. I stood back a little with Ed, because it was my first time there. Hoha came up to me speaking Kurdish holding a picture. She was crying and I didn’t know what to do.  I felt very helpless. I called our translator over. The translator said that she was from the Shingal Mountain Region, and that she is Yazidi. She had four sons killed and one daughter taken.  She is looking for her daughter. She showed me Baran’s picture and I started crying.  Hoha said that she had tried to take her own life, but that there were 9 other children that needed her. She was trying to find Baran and buy her back from ISIS.

Wow.  Can that happen?

Sometimes. Sometimes the families can buy a woman back from ISIS, or pay to have her smuggled out, and sometimes ISIS actually will just release the woman. We meet one person that happened too.  (I will write about her story in a future post.) Actually the system they have in Kurdistan makes it very easy for families to be reunited.  The government keeps track of what is provided to each refugee by family name.  In the construction site Hohawas living in each family had an outhouse, water and food papers, and one line of electric provided by the government. A lot of the refugees had cellphones, obsolete phones by our standards, but they could use the electricity to keep it charged. So if Baran escaped and used her family name there is a good chance for her to be reunited with her family.

Was this experience typical for you?  Did refugees often come up to you and tell you their stories?

People often came up to me because they felt I looked Kurdish, but this was not usual for visiting the sites.  Often the children came running to greet us, but most of the adults hung back.  The term refugee is different there too, they prefer to use the term displaced person. But overwhelmingly, when people saw us there regularly, and heard that we were from America, they shared their stories with us. It gave them hope that people from other places would come to help them, and hear the things that happened to them. They wanted their stories shared. 

During this conversation, Mom spoke with me about visiting Hoha on other occasions and some other stories which I will transcribe and post on here later. I apologize to our readers that I have to separate the stories like this. Please keep Hoha and Baran in your thoughts and prayers.

When Ed and Lenor went back to Iraq in February 2015, Ed got to meet with the officers and men serving in some of the mobile medical units.

Some of the soldiers asked to take pictures.  Here is one of them.

One officer addressed Ed directly and shared his appreciation and a story of using a medical kit to save a mans life, and the huge difference it made for that man’s family.  Before the medical kits arrived the mobile medical unit was mostly just a place were soldiers were read their last rites.  The core men serving at the mobile medical unit said that the kits were allowing soldiers to make it back from the front lines, and to be saved, which is not only good for those individual soldiers and their families, but also for morale of everyone involved.

If you’d like to donate $25 to provide a soldier with a life saving medical kit please click here.

This post will be more about the who the Peshmerga are, which has motivated me to help in any way that I can. After hearing my fathers first story, I was very interested in learning more about the Peshmerga. In November 2015, I had a great opportunity to interview another responder, Hope, for my paper on the Peshmerga. Hope had been in the Iraq in January of 2014 and then from January 2015-June 2015. I asked her a question about what she experienced to be a cause of unity and identity to the Kurdish people. The following is a quote about her experience of the Peshmerga during that time. “The Peshmerga is one of the most unifying factors that brings everyone together. They [the Kurdish people] love their Peshmerga and it is an honor to be one of them. They are “of the people” because most of them are regular people who left their homes and families and are now fighting for little or no pay in defense of their people. Everywhere you went their would be signs, flags, posters, saying “we are all Peshmerga”. I couldn’t understand most of the words on the songs in the stores or on the radio, but I did know the word Peshmerga and almost every song had something to do with praising the Peshmerga. The Kurdish people take pride in the fact that they have survived as a people even though so many have tried to wipe them out. They also want to be known as a people that keep their word, probably because they have been betrayed by other countries so many times.”

The day before I present my paper, the New York Times ran this article, about how the Peshmerga, along with the US, is fighting ISIS. If you do happen to click the link I’d like to draw attention to the photos of female peshmerga fighters, who happen to also be frontline fighters from that article. Although my fathers accounts are of experiences with male soldiers, the Peshmerga are made up of both men and women.

Obviously my father speaks about the Peshmerga and his experiences in Iraq better than I could ever write here. But since not everyone gets to witness that I am going to make an attempt here in the next few entries.

In September of 2014, Ed went to Mahkmohr, Iraq to visit with the Peshmerga, to deliver care packages, medical kits, and to witness the life saving training class. This is a video highlighting the medical training process which is also on our donation page:

Peshmerga is a Kurdish word meaning “one who faces death”, a very accurate term. During this time the area was considered the front lines of the war against ISIS.  The Kurdish Peshmerga were making a name for themselves in our news in America, and soon became known as the fiercest adversary of ISIS. Unlike the American army, the Peshmerga are mostly comprised of volunteer foot soldiers who face death with minimal training, outdated weapons, and quite often little access to food, water, and medical supplies. So that they have been succeeding in places where other highly trained and well advantaged army’s have failed is even more noteworthy.  When Ed recounts the experience he says immediately he felt dynamic connection with the soldiers, and that he related as a father figure to the men. Ed’s small acts of encouragement where very appreciated. The soldiers spirits were uplifted by “an American who cared enough to go to the front line to provide them with kits to save the lives of their friends”.  Ed also got to meet with some of the generals, who also shared in appreciation for the efforts made by Ed and the other C.R.I. responders. The officers told Ed they felt very isolated and were encouraged by Americans who would come to help them. They asked Ed to lend his voice, and request more support when he returned to America.

These are some pictures Ed took of a medical kit and it’s contents.

One kit is $25. If you’d like to help us send more medical kits to the Peshmerga please visit our donations page or click the link below to donate directly.

Click to DONATE