Keeping the Faith

The caregivers we met seemed most enmeshed with one another by their unwavering and sometimes exasperating belief in God or a higher power. Some commodified this belief into spiritual labor (McGuire, 2009). As one woman explained, “When my brother went to Al Awir, we got closer to God... We started believing in ‘wolf magic,’ then at night, we would get up and chant all these things. I do not know what all we were doing. Someone would say, ‘You stick that,’ we would stick that. Somebody would say, ‘You do this,’ we would do that. Somebody would say, ‘You light this lamp,’ we would light that. It was madness.” From private prayers whispered under bated breath to public rituals in temples, mosques, and churches, the caregivers devoted a significant amount of their time to practicing their faiths, steadfast in the belief that God would bring their loved ones home. They could not sleep, so they would pray. They could not eat, so they would pray. They could not rest, so they would pray. Prayer became elixir. When the men in suits and kanduras count the country’s labor hours, (how) do they compute years of ardent resolution and hours spent cross legged or on bent knees searching for an intangible light in an infinite darkness? Faith thus emerged as a source of hope in a context where there was none. And after all, hope is a discipline. Where liberation seemed dim and impossible, God and hope by extension, permitted the effervescence of freedom.

Perhaps this is why the caregivers we spoke with attributed their little successes on the freedom path, to God, regardless of the labor they had invested into securing their family members’ release. “By God’s grace,” one caregiver’s brother was released, she explained. “It is okay, I am thankful to God. Who wants [this experience]? I was only praying to God.” While we are in absolutely no position to validate or negate someone’s faith, we noticed that it appeared as a sort of rejection of their own work and contributions. These were not performances in humility; they were, rather, resolute convictions that the value they added as women was not borne out of their own endeavors but through the force of an invisible and almighty hand. 

Faith also factored into conversations about who was to be held accountable. Were their family members responsible for their own criminality—or was it divine intervention? And if it were the latter, if God created the criminal, could this higher power love them too, as fervently as their mothers, sisters, and wives did? “For the things that have happened to me, I will say that it is the fault of destiny,” one caregiver, who was jailed for her husband’s actions, shared. “I do partially hold my husband responsible. If he had cared a bit more, perhaps it would not have happened to me. But now, it has happened, it was in my destiny. Let us move forward. May this not happen again, may something better happen. May there be a better life.” Her husband has since been jailed, and their lives continue to spin indefinitely on the hamster wheel of courts, police, and lawyers’ offices. We are left wondering if there is any God at all.