March 26th - The Girls’ Day Out
28 Mar 2004
Some issues facing girls and women in the Nasariya area, a former exile and a gruop fo actors and dramatists.
“This was a Baath party building. The girls have never been in this hall before,” Maha said by way of explanation for the ones who burst into tears and went and hid. “Only three girls come to the youth centre and they only come for sewing lessons.” For the last couple of weeks she’s been visiting the girls’ schools and talking to their parents, negotiating and reassuring for them to be able to come to see the show. Still she was surprised at how many were allowed to come.

“Some of these girls, I have not seen them smile since the war and today they were laughing. It makes me think there is still hope.” Maha is the computer teacher for the centre, which has two computers. She’s well respected in the community for her honesty which is why she was able to persuade the parents to let their daughters come to the show and also why she’s able to convince the manager to let the girls use the centre. Less popular with the staff and community, he’s known as “Little Saddam”.

The girls, like they always are, were excited to see a woman in the show, like the women who work there, mostly as cleaners and cooks, clustered at the back of the room. Maha is hoping today will be a precursor to more of the girls coming regularly. There’s nothing else for them apart from school. There’s some kind of plague that claims them around 11 or 12 years old. They disappear.

A lot of them have very poor coordination and spatial awareness because the physical side of their development is neglected. They don’t get to run around and become aware of their bodies and the space around them and consequently they have trouble even with things like writing, arranging things in a room, stacking stuff against a wall, convinced that it won’t fit in the space available. The kids in the kindergartens are developmentally delayed too by the lack of activities and materials. They just sit in rows with their hats on while the teacher talks.

There’s a youth centre in every town in Thi Qar province, around Nasariya, run by the Ministry of Youth and Sport, every one exactly the same, from the basketball hoops in the yards to the layout of the rooms and backstage area. The only difference between the stages in each of the identical theatres is the precise location of the holes in the floor underneath the standard burgundy carpet.

In each of the first two, Al-Nasur and Al-Rifa’ie, about 130 kids, mostly boys, use the centre each day after school. The director of Al-Rifa’ie came and whispered nervously to Rifaat, whose eyebrows shot up in alarm. “There is an important religious man here,” he said and launched into a list of things we mustn’t do in case we offended him.

They wee worried the kids might jostle him and make him angry, worried that a woman on stage with uncovered hair might provoke him. He crept out a little before the end, still laughing, leaving a message thanking us for coming, for making the kids happy: the official approval of the Sistani camp.


Qala Al-Suka has one sewing machine, two computers, a sparse library and, alongside the basketball hoop, a lone football goal frame, denuded of its net. War Child has just had a grant awarded for the youth centres in Thi Qar, so they’ll be able to raise the standards in all eight centres.

Maha said she’d been thinking of leaving because of Little Saddam but now that new resources are coming she’ll stay. Otherwise stuff will disappear. Besides, the girls might not be allowed to come back if she left. It’s not just about giving the kids something better to imagine than guns and bombs, it’s also about bringing hope to the adults who live and work with them.

Women’s Centres are the latest thing with the CPA. Since the US decided it was losing too many people and was after all going to hand over power when it said it would, all the funding is for ‘democratisation’ and if a project couldn’t remodel itself to include that then its funding was cut. Likewise there’s money for projects in the marshes because they’re politically hot but much less for the other towns and villages in the province where there’s more malnutrition and poverty.

Democratisation means teaching people, women particularly, about voting and why its important. The local women don’t use the centres, don’t feel they’re representing them, see them as Western-imposed things with no relevance to their lives. Meanwhile women’s rights are getting worse. Women have been receiving specific threats for being seen without abayas and hijabs, even for wearing a hijab that’s not black. [The hijab is the head covering and the abaya is the loose cloak over the body.] Conservatism and restriction are tangible and increasing.

People start off by only telling you the good things, giving you the positive. Anyone who’s been here a while will tell you that it only lasts until they’re sure you’re going to stay. After that they tell you about the problems, both those which have carried over from the old days and the new set. Nasariya was badly bullied and badly neglected by the old government. Sattar, our driver, spent two years and four months in jail for being part of the 1991 uprising against Saddam before being released as part of a general amnesty.

Azzam left Iraq for the US years ago and continued opposing Saddam through a group called the Iraq Foundation, a human rights group. His uncle used to get arrested every couple of weeks. His jailers would phone Azzam so he could hear his uncle being tortured, begging him to stop his political activity. Azzam refused. “I did not want to let them intimidate me and if I gave in then next, well, probably about 99% of people did give in and keep quiet.

“Now my uncle won’t speak to me. I have lost that relationship. But I had to carry on. I did not want to have to do everything under a pseudonym like some people did. Maybe that’s why he won’t speak to me because I did not protect him.”

He hates war but couldn’t see any other way of getting rid of Saddam. He said dropping sanctions would not, alone, have been enough to empower people to get rid of Saddam by this time last year. Arming the Iraqi opposition groups would, in his view, have led to more deaths. He talked about lightly armed people facing the Iraqi army, whereas the army just disappeared as the invasion happened. I suggested that, given support, given a population in revolt, the majority of the army would have turned against Saddam. For him, none of it matters now Saddam is gone.

He’s working now with an international group on the re-flooding of the marshes. An Italian consultant and a French engineer are among the experts training Iraqi workers to break the dams which were responsible for the draining of eighty percent of the marshes between 1991-97.

Nasariya’s press consists of a friendly group of men who are also actors, directors, film makers, academics and writers. What began as a press conference around a long table ended with an exchange of ideas and e mail addresses. Mr Yassir is a drama director and a founder member of the Nasariya Group for Acting, set up 12 years ago to produce drama in the city.

He wants to make links with drama groups and theatre companies in the UK, is setting up a puppetry programme for the children over the summer and hopes to increase the output of the Acting Group. Mr Ahmed is a cinematist and the only one with e mail, so he will be the intermediary for all the communications. Mr Amir is a translator. He translated the Acting Group’s 10th anniversary booklet into English and will help with translation for any link set up with acting groups overseas.

Also a linguist, interested in the relationship between words and democracy, his most recent article is about the need for people to use precise expressions, saying what they mean rather than using vague and emotive language as was favoured by the old regime.

Mr Haider is head of PR for Nasariya University which has just had a computer centre opened by the Korean ambassador, one of six new centres in the city courtesy of the Korean government. The centre makes it possible to establish links with universities in other countries for the existing colleges of education, science and arts and the two new colleges, of medicine and engineering, which will open in the next academic year.

Yassir said his seven year old son Ammar saw our show at his school. “He talked about you the whole day and he does not only talk. He tries to imitate the clowns. Always when you give the children things to draw with, their pictures have tanks and aeroplanes and guns in, but now he is drawing pictures of clowns.”

Our last show in Nasariya was at the old aluminium factory compound where War Child’s overseas workers and dozens of families live. Just before the show, an old man outside started haranguing Luis and the kids, trying to send the children home, telling Luis to go away: “You’ve got nothing to do here. You’re Jewish. You’re all Jewish. Go home.” It seems that’s the first assumption about every NGO and every foreigner.

The kids, though, loved the show and the parachute games that followed, despite being a bit squashed between the house and the empty swimming pool, the garden being off limits because of the aforementioned landmines, the road outside because of the grumpy old man and the football pitch because it was too dusty for shaking a parachute on.

There are thirty nine political parties in Nasariya now and a significant split between the followers of Sistani and Moqtada Al-Sadr, the former apparently commanding the more support; the latter, son of the revered cleric killed by Saddam, commanding a militia brigade. Sistani though is said to be an old man. “We will only have him for a short while,” Rifaat said. “It all depends who takes over from him.” Some of the possibilities are more moderate than others.

Already in Nasariya it’s sweltering by 9am, unbearable in the middle of the day, and it’s only the end of March. But I think I’m coming back. There’s something about the place and there’s something about Maha and all her girls. I think I’m coming back.