March 24th - The Southern Tour
26 Mar 2004
The circus comes to Nasariya, gets asked silly questions by policemen, does shows in schools and avoids the land mines in War Child's garden.
A sign on the wall opposite says “Idle Association Thi Qar”. Thi Qar is the southern governorate which includes the city of Nasariya and the road in front of the Idle Association is closed off every morning by a couple of vehicles of Italian troops, dark blue carabinieri in tight trousers and sunglasses, smoking cigarettes out of the roof hatches, a few more on foot and some Iraqi police, while hundreds of men gather outside looking for work.

Next door on the other side of the hotel is the police station. Within a minute of the front door we were accosted by an Iraqi police officer and told to come and speak to his superior who told us we couldn’t walk down that road. Why not? Because it’s dangerous. OK, no problem, we’ll go the other way. No, the officer said. Go back to your hotel and stay there. Don’t walk anywhere.

Less than an hour in Nasariya and I was already being sent to my room. Disobediently we carried on past the hotel door and into town. The hotel manager said it was safe to walk anywhere in Nasariya. As ever, people were curious, friendly, protective, asking were we Italian, what were we doing here and did we want chai. In the streets of Baghdad you don’t see a lot of foreigners but here we’re properly rare.

Another time police came over to the bench we were sitting on outside a tea shop and asked what we were doing. I held up my glass of tea and stated the obvious. They demanded our passports. “It’s in the hotel,” I lied, because otherwise they’d wander off with it, pass it around, find things to ask pointless questions about. “Is there a problem?” No, the first one conceded, eventually, there was no problem, except that by now his colleague was eyeballing the men on the bench and had to be coaxed away.

In Baghdad people told us not to go to Nasariya. It’s dangerous, dirty, full of Ali Babas and all the rest, but everyone in Erbil told us not to go back to Baghdad, for precisely the same reasons. Nobody’s fighting the soldiers down here, Rifaat says. It’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say about them – in fact I haven’t managed it yet - but people just want to get on with things, to live in peace now Saddam’s gone

Over tea and narghila, Yusef said things are better now Saddam’s gone but he doesn’t trust Blair and Bush either and doesn’t like the Italian troops. He thinks they’re arrogant, rude and treat people harshly. Worried about offending me, he added that he was sure the British soldiers in Basra were better.

In the playground between here and the shops there’s a hand-turned big wheel with all its pods hanging off at awkward angles, a peeling eagle standing guard in the entrance. The streets are filled with heaps of rubbish, festering in the heat, emitting clouds of black flies when a child or a flock of sheep tramples through. A small boy stood in one, picking at the bits and pieces, raising a piece of pipe to his open mouth as he gawped at our passing. Like everywhere, there are children traipsing between the cars selling things.

Mustafa claimed us and is very particular about who he will admit to our company. We’re his friends, he says, but still there’s a point in the road when we’re nearly home where he starts asking us for money. He waves at the troops as their vehicles pass but then tells me all the things he doesn’t like about them. He just waves because then sometimes they give him sweets. Even the young boys here, from about nine or ten years old, start out by shouting sexual insults and suggestions before they find out I can speak a bit of Arabic and then they come and chat.

The big roundabout in town is surrounded with tea and narghila shops where the men sit smoking and playing dominoes. You don’t see the women unless they’re hurrying from shop to shop, fully covered. They stare as if they’ve never seen a woman smoking a narghila before and in all probability they haven’t, at least in public. Rifaat says about a million people live in Nasariya, but he calls it a small town where everyone knows each other.

Certainly everyone knows Faisal, a man with Down’s Syndrome. Delighted to meet strangers, he stopped to say hello while the young man with him tugged at his hand, a bit embarrassed. Another time we were smoking a narghila on the roundabout and he stopped, in kaffiyeh and dishdasha, no one to chivvy him along this time, and sang us a song. People tease him a bit but I haven’t seen anyone being cruel to him as so often happens to people in Baghdad.

Everyone knows us too now. The first couple of shows were in the schools in the centre of town and we were also on that evening’s local television. Plenty of the kids are not in school, like Duha and Wafaa, two wild haired little girls in sparkly frocks who accompanied us to the internet, but they’ve heard the stories from the other children.

The first school was all girls, really excited girls. Most of the teachers were women and also really excited. I was bombarded with questions, trapped in the toilet while they all asked at once about the circus, England, me, everything. It’s getting too hot to have kids sitting in the playground watching the show. It’s getting too hot to be out in the playground doing the show. A couple of the bigger girls crept away from the audience and peeped around the door where I was getting ready for my next bit and sneaked me away to their classroom upstairs, from where you could sit in the shade and see over the crowd.

The second school was all boys. It was looted after the war and though things are better there’s still a bit of a void where the chairs and tables and books ought to be. We had to cut the show short because the parents were outside waiting to collect the kids. They come even if it’s only a short walk home because of security worries and equally the women were scared to be standing waiting.

The third school was very poor, a few kilometres out of town, the playground guarded by armed police for the duration of the show, no pictures on the wall except Sistani, the religious leader who advocates separation of church and state whom most of the people here seem to follow. It’s a strange gap. Some people will tell you there are no problems even as they stand among a load of armed guards who they will also tell you are necessary for protection.

Rifaat is one of these. He’s a water engineer who teaches English to subsist. His wife, Rafaa, teaches at the fourth school we worked in, where his eight year old daughter Zaineb is a pupil. While I was off stage, Alia, the PE teacher, came in to talk to me. There were bits I couldn’t understand so later I asked Rifaat to translate for me the problems she was talking about.

“No, no,” he said smiling. “There are no problems in this school.”

Alia contradicted him with a litany of difficulties much the same as every school faces. There are not enough books, they are the old text books, there are no teaching materials, no art materials, no pictures on the bare walls, there is not enough furniture, there is no running water at school so the children bring water in bottles from home and the teachers bring flasks because the children can’t carry as much as they need for a hot day.

She does the security patrols around the school. “In front here, always I get bad words shouted at me, even here.” A lot of teachers have been attacked, threatened and killed throughout the country. “Because they are free now they can do anything. If the school says we do not have room for your child, or if the child fails the exams and has to stay another year in the class, sometimes the family come with the gun and make the teacher change it.”

Rifaat said it’s safe to walk on the streets. Alia said no, women don’t go out on the streets unless we have to. Rafaa agreed with her colleague. Rifaat said there were no health problems. Alia told me she got typhoid from unclean water. A lot of the children are depressed, she said, and the women are very very tired. Again Rafaa agreed. Passing two bits of grafitti addressed to Paul Bremer, he told us that “We will rise up” was not the prevailing feeling in the city. He wants to focus on the positive, to show other people the positive. Saddam is gone and that, for him, is enough to outweigh any other problems.

Alia explained that she doesn’t expect or want the rights of women in other countries, just security, just a government. “We are religious,” she said. It’s difficult to discuss things like that through a male interpreter so we didn’t go into that fully. Rafaa, though, when there are no men around, likes to take off her hijab and abaya and do cartwheels.

The only international NGOs working in Nasariya are War Child and the International Medical Corps. There are a couple of others in Amara and a few in Basra. War Child organised the shows for us and also runs a bakery which employs several people and bakes bread each day for thousands of people through a couple of hospitals, some orphanages and other avenues for reaching poor people. They’re soon going to open a street kids’ drop in centre, as well as a whole pile of other projects.

Nasariya is much more conservative than Baghdad, Alex says, tangibly so. Before coming here she worked in Haiti, where the infrastructure was less developed. Among other things, they brought physiotherapists over to do short courses of training for those working with disabled people. She said all the alcohol shops in Nasariya were targeted and closed down so now the wine supply depends on the schedule of meetings in Baghdad.

She also said watch out for the landmines in the garden which, as much as the manic workload, explains why the lawn is so overgrown.