How does one get from Chicago’s South Side to Iraq?

For activist Kathy Kelly, a three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize who speaks on the island July 11, the journey has merged decades of personal growth with geo-politics.

Kelly, who began her career in the late 1970s as a teacher in a Jesuit high school in Chicago, is co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a national campaign to end UN/US sanctions against Iraq.

For bringing medicine to Iraq in open violation of the sanctions, Kelly has been threatened with 12 years in prison. She spent part of the 1991 Gulf war and the recent Iraq conflict in the country.

But her upbringing, she says, hardly encouraged the global view that sent her around the world.

“In my family of origin, there was a fear and a sense that you’re only responsible for ‘your own kind,’” Kelley said. “When I was growing up it was: ‘If you think you can do something about it, then you’re too big for your britches.’”

Kelly grew up in a working class family on Chicago’s South Side. While her own family didn’t endorse negative stereotypes, the social context was racist, and Kelly was troubled by it.

Her personal awareness was fostered in an experimental high school in the 1960s, where nuns and priests emphasized the teachings of Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the liberalizing influence on the Catholic Church of Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II. But there were still hypocrisies that bothered the young Kelly.

“What I remember are students running through the hallways yelling, ‘Kill the (blacks).’ The algebra teacher just kicked the door closed and kept on teaching.”

Kelly had imagined that she would become a nun, but – put off by the comfortable lives they seemed to lead – she opted in 1974 to enter Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit school, to study history and theology.

A brief stint teaching in a Catholic high school convinced Kelly she needed to learn more about her subjects, so she enrolled in scripture and theology at the Jesuit School of Scripture in Hyde Park, an affluent section of Chicago.

“So then it was writing about poverty without seeing any poor people,” Kelly said.

Finally, she accompanied a friend to volunteer at a soup kitchen.

“I just remember exhaling with relief,” she said, “because I knew this was where I belonged. People were energetic and fun and kind of ‘clued in’ to awareness of social issues without being academic.”

Within two days, she felt at home.

“It was clearly the place for me,” she said, referring to her niche in on-the-front-lines-activism. “The grass has never looked greener in another yard.”

Kelly’s growing activism led her, during the 1980s, to protest United States aid to the Contras, the Nicaraguan resistance against the leftist Sandinista regime.

She became a “war tax refuser,” withholding taxes on the grounds that the money was supporting unjust intervention in Central America. She spent a year in jail for planting corn on a nuclear missile site.

Kelly was still focused on Central America in 1991, but was accepted by a peace team headed for Iraq as the Gulf War broke out. She joined 72 people from 18 countries who spent the first two weeks of the war on the border with Saudi Arabia.

In the wake of the war and the advent of sanctions, Kelly joined an international group trying to use their status as Westerners to protect the road from Amman to Baghdad – the only route for refugees to leave Iraq and relief to go in.

“We didn’t get it about sanctions,” Kelly said. “We tried to take in a truck full of powdered milk. But we were told, at the border, ‘the U.N. is not going to let you in.’”

After returning to the states, Kelly “became distracted” with other causes, until, in late 1995, she heard reports that more than 500,000 Iraqi children under age 6 had died because of the sanctions.

“I said ‘I’m sorry, I just got back from Sarajevo, I’m sorry, my dad is living with me,’” she said, “but finally in 1995 a number of us sat down together at my house and said ‘we won’t walk away from the kitchen table until we put something together.’”

The group, which became Voices in the Wilderness, issued a letter in January 1996 declaring their intent to bring supplies into Iraq. A week later, then-Attorney General Janet Reno issued a stiff warning threatening the group with $1.25 million in fines and 12-year prison terms.

“We were just people trying to bring medical relief, and our travel was seen as criminal,” Kelly said. “We knew we couldn’t be governed by laws that were punishing children.”

Kelly did travel to Iraq, making 20 trips between 1996 and this year. She organized numerous delegations to travel there; the trips educated Kelly about the need for official Iraqi approval to be effective.

“Our first visits were very awkward until we figured that out,” she said, “because people were afraid to talk with us.”

It was only when an Iraq ministry official who had been employed in that country’s mission to the UN realized that Voices could influence American public opinion that the group were officially welcomed.

“He got us permission to visit sites and people,” Kelly said. “That was the point, after seven or eight delegations, when the big US peace groups like American Friends Service Committee and Peace Action began to take notice and say ‘we’re going to start an Iraq desk.”’

As the Bush administration’s campaign for war in Iraq gathered steam, Kelly was paying close attention.

“It was so clear that there wasn’t a single reason to go to war,” she said, “but I think that, since World War II, we’ve always waged wars against smaller countries whose resources we want to control. And we need to look at the widest context, the underlying subtext that it’s our culture waging war against the earth.”

Last October Kelly joined delegation members in Baghdad. The peace team stayed throughout the invasion. While protest didn’t stop the Iraq war, Kelley holds out hope in the growing network of protestors worldwide.

“People came closer to that critical mass we talk about,” she said. “Even populations in countries like Turkey and Iran took significant risks to protest.”

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Kathy Kelly speaks at 7:30 p.m. July 11 at Eagle Harbor Congregational Church. Doors open at 7 for the free event. For more information call (360) 479-8899.