Cold Shoulders

Over the past two years, here in Amman, Jordan, I've regularly visited the family of Umm Hamdi, an Iraqi woman forced out of her native Iraq four years ago by terrifying death threats after her husband, very likely prey to that same threatened violence, disappeared. Although often met with the proverbial "cold shoulder" when trying to improve conditions for her family, she persists,--in the daytime she does child care for another family and, in the evening, she knits, sews, and makes handicrafts to sell in a local market.