At sunset swallows dive among the washing lines and satellite dishes on the flat rooves across the town of Samawa, about 120km north of Nasariya, and the market comes to life, dead chickens lying in trays, the insides of half sheep hanging in doorways, pungent fish and bags of sour yoghurt and cheese curd, cages of pigeons, fruit and vegetables, a tea stall here and there between clusters of stalls or shops all selling the same thing, a whole row of trays of eggs, a few selling buckets and hoses, a few selling stationery.

The taxis are the same as everywhere, white with orange panels, and the fire engines with “Sides” printed on the sides so you wonder if they came in self assembly kits until you realise it says the same on the front and back. All the women are in black from head to foot, yet there are headscarves of every colour in the market. I stopped to buy a couple and talked to the man in the shop about what we’re up to. I don’t bother to bargain any more, just tell the shopkeeper about the circus and wait for the foreigner tax to be cut.

Peat got one of the black things that wraps around the head to hold the kaffiyeh, the men’s head covering. It only led to trouble though because when he and Luis went for a narghila later, they got arrested and dragged away by four police men with guns. Apparently someone reported that there were funny looking foreigners in town, one of them wearing his kaffiyeh like a terrorist.

Ali and I went to get them out of the police station, where there was also a big bucket of cold beers seized from “Ali Baba”, and he promised to show Peat how to wear the kaffiyeh the non-terrorist way. How considerate of the terrorists to adopt a different way of dressing so as to protect other people from suspicion.

It was the second time today that the police had come to take us away, the first being outside the Department of Youth and Sport, which has organised some shows for us. They took Peat and Fisheye because they wanted to watch the film on Fisheye’s camera, drove them to the police station, gave them tea, didn’t notice that Fisheye was still filming and let them go again. They have to check up on all the foreigners, find out who they are and what they’re doing.

Apparently kidnapping people is something of a habit with the police down here though. They once picked up three of the Dutch soldiers and kept them in the cells overnight. It’s impossible to imagine the Baghdad police doing the same with an unsuspecting group of US soldiers.

The Dutch soldiers walk around otherwise unmolested in small groups on patrol. The Japanese soldiers I’ve only seen in vehicles. Saad said as they passed, “They are afraid of the Iraqi people.” In Nasariya, the first guess on nationality is Italian. Here people ask if you’re Japanese or Dutch. In Baghdad, for some reason, the first assumption is that you’re Russian, then American. Either way, it feels much safer here than Baghdad, much quieter. There are no bombs here. A bit of gunfire earlier had everyone looking out of their front doors.

Our street is sectioned by ditches of dirty water, the kids hopping over them, the cars slowing down to bounce through. A footbridge across the Euphrates is partly collapsed and people pick their way carefully across. The main urban centre in Muthanna province, Samawa has only about half a million people, mostly Shia, as is the case throughout the south, and you’re quickly out of town.

On the road to the rural youth centres we’ve been to each afternoon are small groups of men carrying vivid green, red and black flags. They are walking to Kerbala from all over the south for the end of the mourning for the Imam Hussein. Tents of all sizes, surrounded by the same colours, offer food and rest for the pilgrims. Cars hoot in support as they pass. Mr Abu Zina tutted at the continued playing of the devotional music in Salam’s car on the way to a school: “Ashura is over,” he pointed out, apparently tired of the chanting and crashing of cymbals to mark the time for chest beating.

The youth centres are each used by about a hundred boys and no girls, with no facilities for anything except sport. Today about three girls, yesterday about nine, made little rows at the back of the theatre. A family of swallows had made its nest at the front of the theatre and a pile of turd on the stage, swooping in and out of the absent windows. The day before that there was no theatre, only a improbably hot tarmac games court with boys playing basketball barefoot and a crowd of non participants leaning in the shade.

There were coaches for basketball, volleyball, handball and football, one of them the sports teacher from the boys’ school, who volunteered the information that his father had died a month ago. The manager, one of three albino men I’ve seen in as many days in Samawa, who must suffer agonies in the heat of summer, looked shocked at my asking whether any girls used the centres.

The girls are in the fields either side of the road with the women, picking stuff in rows, carrying it down the dirt tracks. It was notable for its rarity when two women came into the internet and talked to Fisheye after he did some magic tricks while he was outside smoking a cigarette. Conservatism and fear mix thickly.

Yesterday’s first show was supposed to be in the big sports hall on the edge of town but there were no kids. The head of the Department of Youth and Sport in Samawa insisted that the heads of the schools knew about the show, but the heads said there was no way they could take their children there: they were too scared for the kids’ safety if they walked them through the streets.

Instead we went to them, to a girls’ school with about six hundred pupils. Through the gates, as we got ready in the headmistress’s office, came a constant stream of boys, two by two, holding hands, until the original crowd had doubled, the visitors packed into the balconies around the inside so it looked like the kids were all crammed into shelves around the yard. There were far too many of them, all edging forward as the ones at the back pushed to be able to see, like at Sadr City, so we had to keep stopping for the teachers to coax them all back again and make room for us to perform in, which makes it all a bit chaotic, but the kids loved it.

This morning we finally managed to do the stadium show, with a school full of girls’ packed into the stands. The headmistress told them before the show to be quiet and keep still. It lasted a couple of minutes before we got them shouting and laughing, all leaning forward together when they yelled.

Much quieter, in fact our quietest show yet, was the school for deaf and dumb children. We left out the ‘boomchucka’s but the advantage of a show that’s not based on language is that it’s quite easy to adapt for people who can’t hear you. They can still laugh out loud though and do the gasp of amazement when Fisheye shows them the multicoloured pictures that have magically appeared in the colouring book.

There are 71 pupils aged up to twelve, after which there’s nothing for them in Samawa, studying the same primary school curriculum as all Iraqi schools teach, using lip reading and sign language. The headmistress is keen to communicate with teachers of deaf children outside Iraq to improve their methods of working with the kids.

There are no other activities or arts, although the school’s in a better state than a lot we’ve been in, with pictures on the walls, running water and carpet. The Dutch military have embarked on a lot of school rehabilitation, but there are still no facilities for making food or for sick kids, which means there are a lot of deaf kids in the area who aren’t coming to the school because they can’t be looked after enough.

Saad has had four contracts from the Dutch military for school rehabilitation. He doesn’t have much time for the likes of Bechtel who take contracts at inflated prices and just siphon off the money and don’t do the work properly but he’s more irritated still with the translators working for the Dutch army, who are diverting the contracts to their own relatives and friends, he said.

Yesterday a contract worth $91,000 was given to the brother of the translator, a nineteen year old with no experience as a building contractor or engineer. The money is good on these contracts and the translators know they can get away with securing them for their own families, even when they’re not professionals. As a civil engineer with twenty years of experience, Saad felt aggrieved and decided to go and challenge the decision in court.

I was dubious that there were any processes through which he could challenge it, any system of judicial review for procedural impropriety, any appeals process. Sure enough, when I saw him later, he said nothing happened in court because the translator was a friend of the Dutch military.

But Saad says that everything is better now Saddam is gone. He doesn’t care how long foreign troops stay or what they take, he says, as long as the Baathists are gone. It doesn’t matter to him who runs the country so long as it’s not the Baathists. He spent four months in the jail in the security police headquarters in 1994, showed us the scar on his ankle where a cigarette was put out. He pointed out the jail where he was held. “I burnt it with my own hands, “ he said, miming striking a match. Bush, he said, is a gentleman.

The men and women in jail now without charge, trial, lawyers, without their families knowing where they are, he insists, are all from Falluja, Ramadi or Tikrit. Nothing will convince him that there are detainees from anywhere else in Iraq, nor that merely to be from those places is not a valid reason for internment. Everyone from the three towns was directly oppressing the people of the south, he says, every one, including the children.

Sometimes reconciliation seems a long way off.