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Payam, 18, a student in a multimedia journalism course, interviews her subject for a final project.

Walking along the street near the Sulaimani Bazar, something in front of courthouse caught my eye. I paused. It was an old man with a cane, seated on the sidewalk beside a low table packed with bundles of elastic, dusty packs of gum and other odds and ends. I’d never seen him before, but I knew many things about this man.

His name is Shekh Osman, and he lost his leg to a land mine during the first Gulf War while escaping to Iran. He has nine children, but knows no work to support them aside from selling what he can on the street, which he’s been doing for seventeen years. Business isn’t good, and no one is helping him. “Only God,” he says.

I knew all of this because earlier that day, I was helping one of my journalism students, Payam, with her final project, which happened to be about this very man.

Payam is a small but exuberant 18-year-old girl who knows where to buy anything at the Sule bazaar and will haggle with taxi drivers until they agree to her price. She is working on starting a radio show, and teaches English to younger children at a language institute. Payam seems completely impervious to the limited freedom for girls in Kurdistan, a place where people click their tongue in disapproval at the very mention of a girl walking alone on the streets, which is aiba, or shameful. Her plan for the future is to become a neurosurgeon.

Payam is one of a kind, but she’s not alone. There’s Amanj, a university student who teaches a class about the environment and plans on getting an an advanced degree in environmental engineering abroad so he can come back to Kurdistan and improve things. There’s Broosk, a high school senior who leads a group of other young students in projects like cleaning up the city and raising awareness for kids who work on the street. This week they purchased $400 worth of new clothes to give to the dozens of boys who sell on the street and wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy a new outfit for Eid.

I’ve been very frustrated at times during the past month over what feel like deep-rooted, intractable problems that plague Kurdistan and much of the Middle East. But these thoughts have no traction when I’m in the presence of Payam and her peers.

They couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time. Six university newspaper editors from America visited Israel for the first time last December, and the already planned trip happened to coincide with the first week of the recent Gaza Conflict.

In a reality style documentary, the young Americans had their week-long visit taped by a camera crew hired by Project Interchange, a Washington-based organization that develops seminars for Americans and international guests in Israel. The film is being screened tomorrow at Georgetown University.

In Israel, the editors, including Georgetown’s The Hoya newspaper editor Andrew Dubbins, met with a wide range of leaders and citizens in an attempt to get beyond the headlines to learn the complexities of the Middle East peace process.

(Vadim Lavrusik, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher, The Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota)

The documentary was written and directed by Patrick Ryan Morris from Project Interchange, and features Dubbins, along with other editors who were in Israel from December 30th to January 5th.

“I was an editor of a newspaper in college,” says Morris. “From that experience, I know that you cannot bring journalists to Israel, or anywhere for that matter, and force an ideology on them or a version of 
the truth.”

He hopes to screen the film at campuses throughout the United States.

Project Interchange brings new delegations of “influentials” to Israel twice 
a month from around the world. Muslim leaders from France came to a seminar
 in Israel in December, meeting Israeli President Shimon Peres and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. In November, women 
executives from the U.S. construction business enjoyed a week-long seminar. 
Before that, European environment leaders were in Israel. Each group of 
guests enjoy tailor-made trips, adapted to their interests and expertise.

The world premiere of the The Editors, the film, will take place tomorrow evening – April 20th at 8:00 pm, at Georgetown University’s ICC Auditorium. The screening will be followed by a wrap party at Cafe St. Ex.

For more details and a map of how to get there, see The Editors on Facebook.

For more about Project Interchange, see the ISRAEL21c feature story on the organization.

This story was first post on the blog ISRAELITY.