January 21st - Sparks
The circus in the squatter camp at Al-Sha'ala.
You drive out the far side of Al-Ghazalia into Al-Sha’ala [Flame], through a thoroughfare of listless sheep and squashed chickens, pied fruit and veg stalls and rancid shit, past the man blowtorching a cow’s head, for no reason that was obvious to me, over a concrete bridge and you follow a dirt track into the farm compound. You ask the teenage boys whether there’s someone in authority, because usually there is and it helps if you go to them first. Abu Ahmed, they tell you, without hesitation, and go to fetch him.
You tell him you’re a bunch of clowns and would like to play with the kids for a couple of hours. He leads you to a patch of cracked earth with spiky plants here and there. A few of the men get shovels and hack out the thorny patches, scraping them out of the way, while the kids cluster around you, then you get them to help you pull a big red parachute out of its bag.
Some of them hang back, bewildered, till the excitement sweeps them up and they grip the edges of the parachute, the littler ones lifted off the ground, bouncing with the shaking of the parachute, shrieking with glee as they help to turn it into a tent, rocking it and themselves and each other with the movement of their own bodies.
This was the camp I came to a couple of months ago (see November 17th – Asking the Fairies). Marwa remembered my name when we arrived. I haven’t stopped thinking of her since the last time, over two months ago, the bright, beautiful little girl who wanted to go to school and become a doctor. Things are a little better than they were then.
The clinic receives a visit from a doctor once a fortnight but it still takes another five or six days to get the drugs prescribed. There’s still no one with overall responsibility for them. The German organisation, HELP, gave them blankets and other stuff and the Workers’ Communist Party has been giving them gas and other basics, but they have problems with ‘the mafia’, as Abu Ahmed calls them, stealing some of what they’re given. He wanted to ask the military for protection while the goods were being distributed but the party opposed it.
Abu Ahmed explained how they’d built themselves a small temporary bridge to make it easier to come and go, by collecting 1500 D from each family and making it themselves. I don’t know how it operates in practice or how much say women have, for example, but there’s a meeting every other day in a reed house where everyone can participate in decision making.
120 families live there, many of them from near Amara, from Maisan province in the south, Shia who left because conditions were so dire under Saddam and before him, under the monarchy, but weren’t allowed by Saddam to settle in Baghdad. They returned to Maisan, jobless and homeless, but came back to the camp after the war. Some said they would be into going home if there were jobs and security, but there’s more chance of finding work in Baghdad and now they want the security of knowing they can stay in the camp.
For the first time in Baghdad we played the game where one kid lies in the middle of the parachute and the other kids lift them off the ground by leaning back and pulling it taut. The kiddie in the middle stands up and runs around on the parachute. I think it worked because they’re already used to co-operating with each other. One time they started bouncing the boy up in the air by shaking the parachute. It looked really fun but we had to stop them doing it because it’s not safe.
It was hard to get the girls to join in the games, where either parachutes or skipping, a change from the day before at Magreb, the Childhood Voice youth centre, where a small tribe of pre-teen girls kidnapped me and made me play basketball, which I’m astoundingly bad at. Some of the Sha’ala girls played at the edges of the parachute but wouldn’t be a cat or mouse or run around on the chute. Dads encouraged their daughters to try jumping the skipping rope but there are cultural factors at work that will take more than a circus to sort out.
So, after a while you go for a wander around, between reed houses, tents and breezeblock shacks, living spaces cobbled together out of junk and the pre-existing farm buildings, like all the other camps, into the courtyard where Jamila is feeding Ali. He’s 9 months old with no nappies and torn clothes. Everyone’s clothes are torn, the kids’ and the adults’. There are only three goats left in the courtyard, the others sold for essentials. None of the kids has toys to play with and some have parents who work, so they’re on their own in the day. The rumble of the explosion seems to echo in the sudden silence which cuts through the clamour and chatter of the kids.
Amal is making bread balls of dough, tossed and spun between her hands until they’re broad and flat and round and then puts them onto a round cushion-like thing and presses them against the inside of the oven, with flames in the bottom. When they’re done she reaches in and retrieves them. She hands you one, warm, smoky, soft and gorgeous. She asks you to come back and perform again at Eid, in early February, because there’s no money to give the children treats at Eid and it’s important to them.
The kids are getting a lot of diarrhoea and other illnesses because there’s an open lake of sewage in the camp. There are no toilets. They just dig pits and cover them over when they’re full. They need a drain to take the waste outside the camp. As with the bridge, they’ve got a plan, but it would cost half a million Iraqi Dinars to dig it, cover it and pay some of the men to work on it.
That’s more than they can collect by asking every family to contribute but it only translates to about $300 so we’re thinking we’ll give them a real present for Eid as well as the show. It means an income for some of the men, from building it, improved health for all of them, but especially the kids, and it’s their project not something being done to or for them.
Abu Ahmed brought us to the home of one of the Sheikhs and we went together to the reed meeting house to drink sweet chai and discuss things. The place filled with people but still these two did most of the talking. Elections, they said, were a priority. Bremer is wrong to talk about delaying them. They will support Sistani. Whatever his policies are, they will follow him, but they don’t mind who wins, even if he is not a Moslem, as long as he is elected by the Iraqi people, not chosen by the Americans.
Less than 200 of the camp’s 800 child residents are registered in school. ‘Child’ refers to those under maybe 13, 14 years old. None of them go when it’s raining because they can’t get out through the mud. School and proper houses are emphatically at the top of the list of needs.
They’ve talked to the Ministry of Education, who say they will provide teachers if they can get a school built, but it needs to be purpose built and a brick structure. We talked through some other possibilities: what about a reed house, like this one? What about just a big tent to start with, so you can get moving.
Peat talked about a community in Albania who had no school and lived, likewise, on state owned farm premises. He got them a tent, someone else got them a couple of teachers and, when another organisation came along a few months later, they were so impressed with what the community had already achieved that they built them a proper school.
They said they couldn’t deal with the extremes of weather in a tent or reed house and didn’t think the Ministry would give them teachers for such a structure. There are issues over the desirability of building a permanent structure in a squatted place which is without proper services. It starts to create a permanence which has positives and negatives.
They don’t know whether they will be allowed to stay or whether the government will demand they vacate the complex. They don’t much care whether they stay all together in that place or split up and move into housing elsewhere in the city, just as long as they’re housed. There is a feeling that a permanent structure like a school building will help their claim to stay.
But if they remain where they are then, like the Palestinian refugee camps, the slums might remain so for decades without anyone taking full responsibility for their welfare. Jamila pointed out the tap that supplies them with water, cold only, and the electricity cables, amenities brought in for the farm animals which used to be bred here. “We don’t have any facilities for the humans. We are living like the animals.”
Unlike the homelessness problem in the UK, there actually isn’t enough housing in Baghdad for everyone, so there genuinely is a need to build houses to accommodate the displaced people, in which case a drainage system and a school will be a good start. A horse drawn cart trundled into camp. Luis failed to escape being hauled onto it and galloped through the bumpy farm.
We managed to get the BBC World Service on the radio last night just in time to hear about the Peace Rights case about to be filed to the Attorney General and the International Criminal Court. Phil, Di, Juliet, Mark, and everyone else involved, for what it’s worth, I’m really proud of you.
You tell him you’re a bunch of clowns and would like to play with the kids for a couple of hours. He leads you to a patch of cracked earth with spiky plants here and there. A few of the men get shovels and hack out the thorny patches, scraping them out of the way, while the kids cluster around you, then you get them to help you pull a big red parachute out of its bag.
Some of them hang back, bewildered, till the excitement sweeps them up and they grip the edges of the parachute, the littler ones lifted off the ground, bouncing with the shaking of the parachute, shrieking with glee as they help to turn it into a tent, rocking it and themselves and each other with the movement of their own bodies.
This was the camp I came to a couple of months ago (see November 17th – Asking the Fairies). Marwa remembered my name when we arrived. I haven’t stopped thinking of her since the last time, over two months ago, the bright, beautiful little girl who wanted to go to school and become a doctor. Things are a little better than they were then.
The clinic receives a visit from a doctor once a fortnight but it still takes another five or six days to get the drugs prescribed. There’s still no one with overall responsibility for them. The German organisation, HELP, gave them blankets and other stuff and the Workers’ Communist Party has been giving them gas and other basics, but they have problems with ‘the mafia’, as Abu Ahmed calls them, stealing some of what they’re given. He wanted to ask the military for protection while the goods were being distributed but the party opposed it.
Abu Ahmed explained how they’d built themselves a small temporary bridge to make it easier to come and go, by collecting 1500 D from each family and making it themselves. I don’t know how it operates in practice or how much say women have, for example, but there’s a meeting every other day in a reed house where everyone can participate in decision making.
120 families live there, many of them from near Amara, from Maisan province in the south, Shia who left because conditions were so dire under Saddam and before him, under the monarchy, but weren’t allowed by Saddam to settle in Baghdad. They returned to Maisan, jobless and homeless, but came back to the camp after the war. Some said they would be into going home if there were jobs and security, but there’s more chance of finding work in Baghdad and now they want the security of knowing they can stay in the camp.
For the first time in Baghdad we played the game where one kid lies in the middle of the parachute and the other kids lift them off the ground by leaning back and pulling it taut. The kiddie in the middle stands up and runs around on the parachute. I think it worked because they’re already used to co-operating with each other. One time they started bouncing the boy up in the air by shaking the parachute. It looked really fun but we had to stop them doing it because it’s not safe.
It was hard to get the girls to join in the games, where either parachutes or skipping, a change from the day before at Magreb, the Childhood Voice youth centre, where a small tribe of pre-teen girls kidnapped me and made me play basketball, which I’m astoundingly bad at. Some of the Sha’ala girls played at the edges of the parachute but wouldn’t be a cat or mouse or run around on the chute. Dads encouraged their daughters to try jumping the skipping rope but there are cultural factors at work that will take more than a circus to sort out.
So, after a while you go for a wander around, between reed houses, tents and breezeblock shacks, living spaces cobbled together out of junk and the pre-existing farm buildings, like all the other camps, into the courtyard where Jamila is feeding Ali. He’s 9 months old with no nappies and torn clothes. Everyone’s clothes are torn, the kids’ and the adults’. There are only three goats left in the courtyard, the others sold for essentials. None of the kids has toys to play with and some have parents who work, so they’re on their own in the day. The rumble of the explosion seems to echo in the sudden silence which cuts through the clamour and chatter of the kids.
Amal is making bread balls of dough, tossed and spun between her hands until they’re broad and flat and round and then puts them onto a round cushion-like thing and presses them against the inside of the oven, with flames in the bottom. When they’re done she reaches in and retrieves them. She hands you one, warm, smoky, soft and gorgeous. She asks you to come back and perform again at Eid, in early February, because there’s no money to give the children treats at Eid and it’s important to them.
The kids are getting a lot of diarrhoea and other illnesses because there’s an open lake of sewage in the camp. There are no toilets. They just dig pits and cover them over when they’re full. They need a drain to take the waste outside the camp. As with the bridge, they’ve got a plan, but it would cost half a million Iraqi Dinars to dig it, cover it and pay some of the men to work on it.
That’s more than they can collect by asking every family to contribute but it only translates to about $300 so we’re thinking we’ll give them a real present for Eid as well as the show. It means an income for some of the men, from building it, improved health for all of them, but especially the kids, and it’s their project not something being done to or for them.
Abu Ahmed brought us to the home of one of the Sheikhs and we went together to the reed meeting house to drink sweet chai and discuss things. The place filled with people but still these two did most of the talking. Elections, they said, were a priority. Bremer is wrong to talk about delaying them. They will support Sistani. Whatever his policies are, they will follow him, but they don’t mind who wins, even if he is not a Moslem, as long as he is elected by the Iraqi people, not chosen by the Americans.
Less than 200 of the camp’s 800 child residents are registered in school. ‘Child’ refers to those under maybe 13, 14 years old. None of them go when it’s raining because they can’t get out through the mud. School and proper houses are emphatically at the top of the list of needs.
They’ve talked to the Ministry of Education, who say they will provide teachers if they can get a school built, but it needs to be purpose built and a brick structure. We talked through some other possibilities: what about a reed house, like this one? What about just a big tent to start with, so you can get moving.
Peat talked about a community in Albania who had no school and lived, likewise, on state owned farm premises. He got them a tent, someone else got them a couple of teachers and, when another organisation came along a few months later, they were so impressed with what the community had already achieved that they built them a proper school.
They said they couldn’t deal with the extremes of weather in a tent or reed house and didn’t think the Ministry would give them teachers for such a structure. There are issues over the desirability of building a permanent structure in a squatted place which is without proper services. It starts to create a permanence which has positives and negatives.
They don’t know whether they will be allowed to stay or whether the government will demand they vacate the complex. They don’t much care whether they stay all together in that place or split up and move into housing elsewhere in the city, just as long as they’re housed. There is a feeling that a permanent structure like a school building will help their claim to stay.
But if they remain where they are then, like the Palestinian refugee camps, the slums might remain so for decades without anyone taking full responsibility for their welfare. Jamila pointed out the tap that supplies them with water, cold only, and the electricity cables, amenities brought in for the farm animals which used to be bred here. “We don’t have any facilities for the humans. We are living like the animals.”
Unlike the homelessness problem in the UK, there actually isn’t enough housing in Baghdad for everyone, so there genuinely is a need to build houses to accommodate the displaced people, in which case a drainage system and a school will be a good start. A horse drawn cart trundled into camp. Luis failed to escape being hauled onto it and galloped through the bumpy farm.
We managed to get the BBC World Service on the radio last night just in time to hear about the Peace Rights case about to be filed to the Attorney General and the International Criminal Court. Phil, Di, Juliet, Mark, and everyone else involved, for what it’s worth, I’m really proud of you.