Feature on ISMer Brian Avery and How to Help
10 July 2003
Feature on ISMer Brian Avery and How to Help
The colleague of Brian Avery’s mentioned in the first paragraph of this article is Tobias Karlsson. He played an important part in saving Brian’s life. Tobias was detained yesterday in the West Bank while non-violently protesting Israel’s “Wall of Apartheid” being constructed largely inside the West Bank. Today, Karlsson, American Bill Capowski, and two other internationals were to have a deportation hearing as a result of their protesting of the Wall. Their attorney was not allowed into the court. We continue to urge calls of concern about Mr. Capowski’s situation to the State Department at 202-647-5226.
The News & Observer
Thursday, July 10, 2003
HOW TO HELP
A fund has been established to help provide financial support to Brian Avery:
The Brian Avery Medical Fund
c/o Wells Fargo Bank NM
7530 Montgomery NE
Albuquerque, NM 87109
A TIME TO HEAL
By SUSAN KINZIE, Staff Writer
CHAPEL HILL — He remembers it clearly, the rumble of the armored personnel carrier through the streets of the West Bank town of Jenin, and how it stopped in front of them. Brian Avery and another pro-Palestinian activist out after curfew lifted their arms, he said, to show they were peaceful.
Then a pop. That was his face getting shot off.
Avery fell, but he didn’t pass out. He couldn’t see anything. He knew he was bleeding, he knew he might die. He was scared, and angry. And he wanted to live.
He floated in and out of consciousness, sometimes feeling, with a sense of detachment, that he must be in an ambulance because he could feel the road underneath, hear the engine; or that he was in a helicopter lifting off. He could hear people shouting, but he couldn’t understand.
He told himself to stay calm, stay awake, stay alive.
Brian Avery survived. The bullet missed his brain by centimeters, and he got to the hospital in time to stop the bleeding. Now, three months later, he is back in the United States, gaining strength for some of the many surgeries he will need to rebuild his face.
Avery had gone to the West Bank as a member of the International Solidarity Movement, an activist pro-Palestinian group. He said soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces shot him.
An IDF statement sent in response to a request by The News & Observer said that initial reports indicated that Avery was caught in crossfire during clashes between Palestinian terrorists and IDF forces. The incident is being investigated by the army’s senior field commanders, according to the statement.
Some say he is a hero; some say he should have stayed out of the middle of an armed conflict. Either way, after everything he has been through, Avery is now in a strange limbo. Everything that drove him into activism — the sense of injustice, the violence, the need to speak out — he feels more strongly than ever. But he is forced into inactivity.
He is facing at least six months, maybe a year, of surgeries and recovery.
He is 25 years old and living in his parents’ Chapel Hill home, a big brick house on a hill, surrounded by flowers and trees.
So here in this quiet, peaceful place, his shattered face is a symbol of that long conflict, a reminder.
He doesn’t feel sorry for himself. That would be selfish, he said, given how many people have died, how many people have been injured, how many lives have been interrupted, put on hold by the violence in the Middle East.
Some people would want only to escape that world. Not Avery.
He wants to go back.
Scars for peace
The bullet went in just below his right eye, through his nose, and blasted out the left side of his face.
The path of the bullet is easy to see: There’s the scar where it entered, and a mass of scars traced out on his gaunt cheek, where Israeli doctors sutured his face back together. Sometimes people tell him those rough scars remind them of a map; most are thinking of the “road map” to peace, the plan to try to stop the violence in the Middle East.
He lost a lot of bone in his face; his jaw will have to be rebuilt with bone from his hip. He will need new teeth implanted, and the muscle and skin of his cheek reconstructed. He will need surgery on his left eye; the retina was damaged.
When Julie Avery saw her son in the hospital in Haifa, she didn’t recognize him, all shattered and swollen and unable to speak. The boy who graduated from Chapel Hill High School, once a football player, often a drummer in a rock or jazz band, always a voracious reader — that face was gone .
Brian Avery spent nine weeks in the Israeli hospital, going into operations and eating through a tube, his jaw wired shut, feeling angry. By the end he was wandering around the hospital grounds, in pajamas and robe and floppy white hat, listening to local peace activists who set up a support network for him, trying to get his strength back.
His parents were with him part of the time, then they went back to work through diplomatic channels to try to get all his medical care paid for.
The medical bills will be hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Averys believe, as doctors slowly rebuild the bone and muscle in his face.
He doesn’t have health insurance.
On June 14, a small crowd of about 60 local peace activists gathered at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, carrying signs, wearing T-shirts with doves, waving Palestinian flags.
“Brian nearly gave up his life for peace,” said Hassan Safvi of Chapel Hill. “I just came to honor him.”
He was one of three ISM protesters, they said, to be injured by Israeli forces this spring, including Rachel Corrie, an American student, who died when she was crushed by a bulldozer. Because of media bias, some said, Americans only read about suicide bombings by Palestinian terrorists.
Not everyone would honor his role as peaceful.
“I am very sad to know that this person is injured,” said Judah Segal, executive director of the Raleigh-Cary Jewish Federation, in a phone interview later. ” Certainly the feelings and sympathy and caring of people in the Jewish community are with him that he may recover fully and quickly.
“As for the political motives behind it — it leaves a great area of concern. I would certainly discourage people from singlehandedly trying to fix a situation as dangerous as this, by putting their own bodies in the way of a currently violent conflict.”
The crowd at the airport cheered: They could see Brian Avery coming down the escalator.
He looked small — he had dropped to less than 125 pounds after so much time on a feeding tube — and his face was crushed and stitched up. But he spoke briefly, moving his shattered jaw as little as possible, and his father, Robert Avery, repeated his thanks to the crowd.
A place to rest
He feels lucky to have a quiet place to rest and heal, so close to such good medical centers.
But he never expected not to go back to his life in Albuquerque, where he was working on a sustainable community farm and playing drums, working at a health food store, following events in the Middle East, writing and protesting war.
Now he is back at home, with his father, a career naval officer, home in the evenings and his mother tripping around the house during the day in Bermuda shorts and a bright bow in her hair, urging him to eat more or reminding him of things, as mothers do.
It has been an adjustment for her, too. She wasn’t expecting to have her grown son back, or to be thrown into Middle Eastern politics.
Brian Avery reads, despite blurred vision in one eye, books about history and foreign policy, newsletters on the Internet, e-mail messages from friends and supporters. He walks, going early to avoid the summer heat, trying to get stronger.
He can’t eat solid food; he has to put liquid into a big plastic syringe and stick that into his mouth through a gap where his teeth are missing.
A line stretches from behind his ear up over the top of his head, through the fuzz of brown hair growing back, where they took bone from his skull to begin repairing the area around his eyes and nose. Next week he will meet with a surgeon from UNC Hospitals to plan the surgeries he will need; he had three in Israel, and needs time now for the bone to heal before another operation.
His voice is getting stronger. Now he can answer the phone and be understood, though he has to suck the saliva back into his mouth frequently, and his voice echoes strangely (to him) through his head because the roof of his mouth and his nasal passages are gone.
He is already used to his new face, he said, and to people staring at him. That doesn’t bother him much. And he is not too worried about looking just like he used to, either. He is more worried about being able to talk well, see clearly, eat normally. He would like to be able to bite into a piece of pizza again someday.
And he wants to go back. Even though it is increasingly dangerous there for activists as well as for residents, he wants to go back.
“There was so much stuff that I hadn’t done or hadn’t seen when I was over there, both in Palestine and in Israel,” he said.
The injury left him more committed than ever.
It has changed him in ways more subtle than extreme; given him a heightened awareness and greater empathy, and strengthened the feeling that individuals can make a difference.
When he sees people in the street now, he said, he looks at their faces, wondering what experiences they have had. So he rests, and heals, and waits to go back to the Middle East.
“It’s an amazing place,” he said, “for and despite all its complexities.”
