Small hands held out four, five, six coloured glass balls, picked a prize piece for the contest, lined up the rest of the marbles, flicked one from an open palm at the row on the road by the stone wall. Crouching between puddles on the crumbled road, Fatima directed play, a feisty, dark skinned twelve year old girl.

Hanging over the wall they watched Fuad and Mustafa from the Happy Family kids’ theatre project teaching us a dance for the show in the National Theatre in a few weeks. Fuad was jailed for a year for refusing to join the army, then conscripted anyway. When the war started he did a runner, hiding out in Safa’s house till it was all over.

Safa’s house doubles as the group’s base, their logo in English and Arabic on the wall, a concrete patio with a canopy serving as a stage in a garden with chickens pottering between tall straight palm trees, a busy main road just visible beyond the house, the only sign that we weren’t in the middle of nowhere. A screen hid the part of the garden that was all puddles and bits of dead cars and a curtain marks the border between the office and storeroom and the rest of the house.

The group started a few years ago. “We were the first group to perform in the burnt out remnants of the Al-Rasheed Theatre in the days after the war. It was a kids’ play with the fox and the rabbits, no lighting, heating, décor or anything. Safa was the fox.” Raed translates, as the only member who speaks a significant amount of English. He runs a music and sound recording shop and does all the music for the performances. There’s a video disc of their show in the National Theatre. The lighting was poor and again there wasn’t much decoration but the kids were loving it.

I like that we can join up with Iraqi groups trying to do good stuff for themselves and each other and the country with minimal resources. Of course, like most of the grassroots groups, they’ve got no funding other than what they earn themselves and most are students and workers at the fine arts college. They’ve got a Tweetypie costume and one of Sylvester the cat and they wanted to know if we could get them any “muppets”, i.e. any big cartoon costumes.

We’re swapping roles, joining in their ghost play and including them in our clown routines. I’m slightly concerned about the dancing thing: I want to do it in clown costume so if I spin in the wrong direction it looks like I’m just being daft, instead of incompetent. They’re really into it though and I know 1000 kids are going to have a wicked time.

We’ve encountered a child psychologist by the name of Dr Ali who’s more or less a one man operation, trying to train child care workers and teachers and raise awareness in parents around the country about the symptoms of post traumatic stress in children. He thinks play therapy is the best, if not the only, way of diagnosing and treating their problems. He doesn’t know the exact extent of the problem but it’s self-evidently enormous, with bed wetting, nightmares, inability to concentrate and behavioural problems endemic among the child population. He’s coming to see us soon so I’ll write more about his work then.

The lads walked us over, between cracked houses and more marble playing kids among the roadside rubbish heaps, to the Kurdish House where the boys are, the ex- and the not-so-ex-street children. Five left last night and went back to the basement where they used to sleep. Adapting isn’t easy. Peat and Donna went to Bab a-Sherji to look for them. One refused to go back at all to the house. Four agreed to go back but one of those was talked out of it by the gang that supplies their drugs and solvents.

The three who came back were told they weren’t welcome by the child psychologist there because they said “nasty things” to him last night before they left. He was persuaded though. I know, I know, it’s difficult for the workers too, taking on a group of very troubled and needy boys when they’ve no experience of working with kids in a practical setting.

Good things are happening too though. We played parachute games with the boys, went through all the familiar ones and there was still some running under it when they’re not meant to and scrapping and stuff, but we gave them a try at lifting each other up on the parachute to run around on top of it and it worked. I got goose bumps, remembering them that first time in the crisis shelter.

They have to work together; they have to trust each other and look after each other, because all the kids round the outside, holding the parachute, have to keep it taut or the one running on it will fall. For sure, it was hard to keep them there, holding it for another kid after they’d had their own turn but Baghdad wasn’t built in a day.

The older Ahmed – Gypsy Ahmed, they call him – is learning karate at the Magreb youth centre. He showed us, a bit shyly at first but glowing with the attention and praise and his own achievement. It was wicked. Little Laith from Abu Nawas Street has a new haircut, really short all over and big tuft at front like a very small punk. Imad, they still remember the game you taught them with the hand clapping.

From there we walked to the main road for a taxi, bouncing and kicking the football with the kids we passed. On every street, every verge and every piece of waste ground there are boys playing football. There’s something sad about the dirt football pitches with metal goalposts and yet more rubbish piles stacked all around them. We picked up a grown up too, a man in his forties, or thereabouts, his amble home with shopping brightened and delayed by the meeting, absorbing a second man, in his dishdasha (the long garment some of the men wear) whose eyes twinkled as he abandoned his reserve and joined in the bouncing.

We went to Uzma’s “family”, who have adopted her. Mum’s in hospital for a hip operation after she broke it in a fall. She’s only 58 but looks about 80, deeply depressed since her three sons were detained by the Americans. I first met Yasameen and Baba (Dad) on the march for the rights of detainees. The first son, Younis, was taken in a raid on the house. When the troops burst into the house they came into the women’s room where Yasameen and Stobruk had been sleeping. They went to get their headscarves and the soldiers pointed guns at them. They said very firmly, no, we’re going to get our scarves, and they did it.

The second son was seized from his workplace and the third was detained when he went to enquire about his brothers. Though Younis has never left Iraq, the ostensible reason for his arrest was “plotting to kill Tony Blair”. Stobruk was back from work in the bank, but Yasameen was staying overnight in the hospital with Mama. The Americans promised to release a thousand of the people jailed without charge but so far only a hundred have been let out. Eid starts in the first couple of days of February. They’re still clinging to a hope the boys will be back with them for the holiday

The last few days have been busy. We went to perform in Hilla, invited by the National Association for the Protection of the Environment and the Child. About a dozen kids and maybe 60 adults filled the theatre – not the ideal ratio. The grown-ups got into it in the end but it was the least inspiring show we’ve done here – an unfortunate coincidence as it was also the one that Reuters came to. We weren’t let into Babylon, the ancient site itself, now occupied by the Polish and US troops. “They will shoot you.”

The Human Rights meeting was interesting: a recently formed coalition of Iraqi human rights groups and international organisations and individuals was joined by 25 – 30 relatives of detainees and shooting victims. It took a while to get through all the anger and emotion and make them understand that all the ten or so foreigners in the room already knew the situation, knew dozens, if not hundreds, of similar stories of random shootings, house raids and property thefts, detentions without charge, etc, and to move on to what we were going to do about it.

Someone talked about the way photos were used in Central and South America during the disappearances there and the families decided to bring photos and other affected families to the next meeting to plan weekly demonstrations. The hope is that there will be a similar weekly protest outside US embassies all over the world. Most of the people searched or jailed and then released still have the bags that were put over their heads during the raids.

There was an earth shaking bomb last night as we walked to a friend’s place, then another a bit later, followed by the weirdest sounding sirens that made the air vibrate, which turned out to be from the CPA, or the green zone somewhere, though I’m not clear whether the complex was actually hit or not. The streets rattled with intermittent gunfire. The calm after the storm of new year seems to be over these last few days although here, at least, it’s not as intense as it was then.