After the carnage of the bomb, after the much smaller bomb in the electricity box in the next street, our feet drew us to the Mother Teresa orphanage, maybe more for our sanctuary than for their entertainment, to a small group of children who are mostly, I am sure, unaware of the blood and screaming that daily happens outside their walls.

Sanctuary it hardly seems when you walk into a barrage of screams from three rows of cots, but they’re screams of glee. Only one of the children can walk, though Yasser can climb out of his cot and crawl after you. They called out our names, asked where was Donna, where was this or that person.

But I knelt down by Nana’s cot and waited. First her eyes widened and then she moved her body to the side of the cot where I was. Her hand began the journey, reaching for my face. Her small strong fingers arrived at my forehead and stroked, an odyssey from centre to temple, brushing my hair across to the other side and it was then that the smile started, spreading until it was as wide as her face, as wide as outstretched arms, wide enough to blot out the sight of the cracked walls, flooded craters and mangled metal as her hand made its way back to my forehead to stroke again.

Yasser came to be picked up, no longer able to walk on the braces on his legs but still at a crawling advantage over the others in attention scoring. When I put him down to hold Melaak’s bottle for her, the newest and tiniest of the kids, he sat beside me on the floor, undoing the Velcro on my sandals, shaking his head as I closed it again. After I left it undone a while he closed it himself, tutting as I undid it again and the roles reversed. He and Omar hoover up phrases of other languages, talking to me in English, throwing in bits of French and German.

The door flew open and a young Iraqi woman shouted, “Marhaba, atfal!” The kids bellowed and shrieked a welcome and she bounced from child to child, lifting Hussein out of his cot and over her head while he giggled, the same for Noor, an eighteen month old girl born without arms and legs, who uses the stump of her left shoulder, the closest she has to a limb, to point at the person or place she wants to go to.

We tickled, blew bubbles, made balloon dogs, elephants and giraffes while Maisan took one child after another to be cleaned and changed. A small girl called Zaineb sat quietly in her cot until it was her turn. Unable to look straight at me she played with the hand I offered, weaving fingers and weighing the touch.

Undoubtedly the children there are loved. They’re clean, healthy, happy. Omar and Yasser have some tuition. There are toys in their cots, a blue doll for the boys, a pink one for the girls and Winnie the Pooh hanging onto his balloon and Humpty Dumpty. But the fact remains that Omar, at twelve, spends most of his time in a child’s wooden cot because he can’t walk. The fact remains that Yasser has to crawl on the floor because he hasn’t got the right leg braces and crutches to prop him up.

The place and the people who work there do an extraordinary job in the circumstances but there are no wheelchairs, no physiotherapists, no specialists in helping children with perhaps only mild cerebral palsy to fulfil their potential. There are no materials, no spaces for them to come out of their cots and wriggle and roll on the ground, no art activities.

In a few years, perhaps four, Omar’s going to be too old for the orphanage. The only two places for him to go are the street or the mental hospital. On the street he will be unprotected and destitute in a country where it’s thought best to throw stones at anyone who seems ‘subnormal’. In the hospital he will be a child with enormous capacity to learn, to love, to grow, locked up, stopped up, halted in the company of old men who have been there a lifetime, no teachers, no future.

Anyone thought of setting up Physiotherapists Without Borders? Iraq needs you.