January 30th - The Workhouse
The circus in a girls' orphanage, in a squatter camp in Rajdiya and rehearsing for the big show with Happy Family.
“Workhouse for Orphans and Parentless Children” is scrawled in spray paint in English on the wall outside. Uzma was melodramatically bawling her eyes out when Afra tiptoed past her, pig-tails bouncing, picked up the broom and started doing Uzma’s sweeping, possibly the cutest and most charming act of solidarity I’ve ever seen. She’s seven and a resident of the Dar al Banaat [Girls’ House] orphanage a few minutes’ walk from our house.
There are 85 girls, babies up to 18, living there but today there were only about 20 of them because some go to their families or other relatives on Fridays. Eid starts in a couple of days, so these were the ones who have absolutely nowhere else to go or are completely unwelcome there, which made it all the more important to go and bring them some laughter.
Some have lost their mothers and their fathers can’t cope with bringing them up. Some have lost their dads and their mothers are too poor to keep them. Some are rejected by the new step parent when one remarries. Of all the agonising stories of the war, there are girls who were raped in the post invasion chaos, who were thrown out by their families as unmarriageable, a source of shame. We didn’t ask the girls their stories but there was one, a beautiful twelve year old, who wanted to marry Peat. She hated Iraqi men, she said.
A crowd gathered to hold the make up for Uzma and me in front of the mirror in the corridor. The girls’ rooms either side had posters of boy bands and Shakira and pretty knick knacks hanging on the walls. One of Uzma’s stilts has got a screw loose so she was on the ground blowing bubbles while Afra clowned for me, taking pictures from my stilts. I am Tawila [tall lady] in multi-coloured extra long trousers and a silver dress.
A new act was born yesterday when I stole Luis’s hat off his head during the “boomchucka”s. He jumps up, trying to reach it, picks up a child to try and reach my head, puts another one on his shoulders, staggers about, fails again, begs, pleads. I strut about, taunt him with the hat, pulling it away as he grabs for it, fanning myself with it, raising it on and off my head, out of the reach of the kid on his shoulders. Eventually he bursts into tears, howling and wailing so the kids and I start feeling sorry for him and I give it back. We’re mates then and dance together, off the stage or out of the semi-circle of kids.
The girls became part of the show, warning Uzma when the Boss clown was coming, nipping around the corner to check he was still out of the way, skipping over the rope. I think I’ve said before how hard it can be to get the girls to join in with stuff. Here the only boys were a couple of workers’ sons. The older girls were in jeans and close fitting tops or long straight skirts and heels. None of them was wearing a headscarf. I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t got families to tell them what to wear, because nobody expects them to marry so there’s no reputation to protect or because the managers prefer to let them make their own decisions but that’s how it was.
Parachute games with them were a joy. They worked as a tribe, they laughed a lot, they played parachute football with the passion of a world cup tie, held the fabric with all their might for each other to run around on. When, at the end, one of the juggling balls was missing, they came and told Peat none of the girls was an Ali Baba. They wouldn’t tell on the boy, the manager’s son, who had it, but while we were out of the way getting changed, they got it back from him and passed it back.
Back in normal clothes, Uzma and I were singing with them. We didn’t know any of the Backstreet Boys / N-Sync / Shakira songs that were their favourites and could only manage the chorus of “We Will Rock You”, which they requested over and over. Heba started dancing, Arabic dancing with the wild hips and swaying that I couldn’t get at all, till Heba took my hips and moved them in a figure of eight motion. Oh yeah, that was funky.
We were already buzzing when we got there from the kids at Happy Families’ base. We went for a rehearsal for the gig at the National Theatre and the kids from the street outside the other day were playing in the garden. The lads were taking turns to entertain them. We told Raed about the “boomchucka” part of our show because we wanted to include it. Even the thought of a thousand laughing kids yelling it back at us gives me goosebumps.
He was sceptical. “I don’t think the children will join in.”
“Oh, yeah. They always do.”
He wasn’t convinced. Come on then. We took him outside to the patio stage where a couple of dozen children were lined up. Peat started: “Hello.”
“Hello” came the echo.
A few times over, then all four of us shouted, “Wo-oh.”
“Wo-oh,” all the kids yelled back.
“Boomchucka.”
And all the kids repeated it, loud and gleeful. Raed was so excited he came with us to the orphanage in the afternoon to see if it would work again. It always does. He had a wicked afternoon. Yesterday in the IDP camp in Rajdiya, the children from the marsh villages and nearby towns were probably the loudest yet.
There are about 400 families there, from the Maisan and Amara areas, living in an old army base. It was a bit of a timewarp for Husni, having been based there for three years in the army. Crushed buildings and barbed wire, reed houses, donkeys, cows and chickens knocked about the place.
There are a few different stories: Eman moved up from the south when her husband was sent to Baghdad with the army. Layla came north when her husband, the sheikh, started being abused by local government officials. The mayor, a relative of Saddam, burnt 65 houses which were alleged to belong to people resisting Saddam. Mohammed went to Saddam to complain. Investigators, headed by another relative of Saddam’s, found it was true but the mayor gave out a few irrigation pumps to influential individuals and the matter was hushed up but local government officials started persecuting Mohammed.
Informers accused the Sheikh of supplying weapons to the resistance and he was arrested, jailed for two months, questioned, denied blankets, denied food except bread and beans, mistreated, his family not knowing where he was. A lot of the tribe were fighting Saddam, retreating into the marshes for cover. The marshes were drained so there was nowhere to hide. The fish and birds died.
All those reasons, plus a lack of work, electricity, facilities, drove people from the south to Baghdad but they weren’t allowed to settle here. Unless you were registered as a resident of Baghdad in 1957, or a descendant of someone who was, it wasn’t legally possible to buy land or property. Of the squatters, some were evicted from rented houses having stayed in Baghdad; others returned to the south and came back after the war. Here they have next to nothing. In Amara, they said, it was worse, but still there is no hospital or secondary school, electricity is a rare commodity and they don’t know how long they will be allowed to stay before the new government demands the land back.
Layla looked away when I asked about the women’s health. To the floor, she said, “For myself, I feel very tired. I do not feel that I am settled here because it is not our land. It is hard to find the energy to do things around the house when we might have to leave. Most of the women feel the same, depressed and without purpose. The children are sick, especially now that it is winter, with flu and diarrhoea. I just want a place to settle, to know that we can stay on this piece of land and make our home here.”
“We have seen nothing so far,” her husband adds. We had hope before the war that things would improve but nothing is better. We are jobless, unemployment is high, there is so much crime and more religious division than we have ever known. Divisions existed before the war but they were limited. Now they are encouraged by the Americans. We need elections. Wee need to choose a government that reflects Iraqis. The Governing Council reflects different denominations, which is unjust, because we are all Iraqis.”
He and all these people are Shia so this is emphatically not the bitterness of a member of a formerly powerful group. “The Governing Council is weak and the US wants it this way. It’s imposed. We want elections, for a real government that will stop the suffering , give us security, food, give our children a future after the sanctions they imposed on the people. Those never affected Saddam, only the people. We refuse the occupation. They cannot stay here.”
On the wall of Layla and Mohammed’s house are an elaborate drawing of a tree, each leaf bearing the name of a male member of the tribe, Al Bou Mohammed, the branches depicting the family tree, and a painting of a man called Faisal Ibn Khalifa firing a cannon. The grandfather of the sheikh, he was known as Abu Tuwab – Father of Cannons. He made them to fight the Ottomans. After he died his son used the same cannons to fight the British occupiers.
Ali Kamel, a grey haired retired school teacher, lived in a rented house in Hoseinia, a wave of his arm indicating an area nearby, again because he was not allowed to buy a home in Baghdad. Several of the squatters were evicted from houses in that area after the war when they couldn’t pay the rent. He’s now headmaster of the site school for about 250 – 300 of the residents, aged 6 – 11, with seven teachers, all squatters from Hoseinia. The kids wanted to take me to see their school but it was closed for the day because they were all at the show, organised by Fadhil’s group.
Ali Shalan is a doctoral student in Baghdad University mechanical engineering college. His studies are more or less on hold at the moment: “I have become lazy,” he said, clearly the wrong word for the man who is constantly refining his system of distributing emergency humanitarian aid in the camps. Formerly an assistant in the Internally Displaced Persons team at Premiere Urgence, he founded Malath Relief to help.
“We make the assessments by going to the houses and then request the goods from IOM, the International Organisation for Migration. Food comes from the ration, although we are working on providing more fresh food as well. Today we are giving blankets and plastic tarpaulins. I record in the book what is to be given to each family and then I write out tickets for each household.
“We used to have the head of each household come and collect the goods but yesterday we tried giving them to a representative from each part, so they take the goods, and we go with them to see that they go to each household, so it works more as a web instead of everyone having to come and queue for their things. It involves the people more and it’s less chaotic,” he explained, while juggling questions from half a dozen directions at once.
Then Emad and Odai came round to take us to be entertained by someone else at the theatre in Al-Wazeria. Two rows of immaculately dressed young men, arranged in a semi circle, played the oud, a stringed instrument not unlike a guitar except that the body is oval and there’s a ninety degree angle at the other end. The second half was a group of women in long extravagantly embroidered dresses, a couple in headscarves, several wearing cream headbands, playing oud, hand drums, something I’ve never seen that makes tuneful twanging sounds when struck and an incredible sounding stick-like thing playing with a bow. It was gorgeous.
There are 85 girls, babies up to 18, living there but today there were only about 20 of them because some go to their families or other relatives on Fridays. Eid starts in a couple of days, so these were the ones who have absolutely nowhere else to go or are completely unwelcome there, which made it all the more important to go and bring them some laughter.
Some have lost their mothers and their fathers can’t cope with bringing them up. Some have lost their dads and their mothers are too poor to keep them. Some are rejected by the new step parent when one remarries. Of all the agonising stories of the war, there are girls who were raped in the post invasion chaos, who were thrown out by their families as unmarriageable, a source of shame. We didn’t ask the girls their stories but there was one, a beautiful twelve year old, who wanted to marry Peat. She hated Iraqi men, she said.
A crowd gathered to hold the make up for Uzma and me in front of the mirror in the corridor. The girls’ rooms either side had posters of boy bands and Shakira and pretty knick knacks hanging on the walls. One of Uzma’s stilts has got a screw loose so she was on the ground blowing bubbles while Afra clowned for me, taking pictures from my stilts. I am Tawila [tall lady] in multi-coloured extra long trousers and a silver dress.
A new act was born yesterday when I stole Luis’s hat off his head during the “boomchucka”s. He jumps up, trying to reach it, picks up a child to try and reach my head, puts another one on his shoulders, staggers about, fails again, begs, pleads. I strut about, taunt him with the hat, pulling it away as he grabs for it, fanning myself with it, raising it on and off my head, out of the reach of the kid on his shoulders. Eventually he bursts into tears, howling and wailing so the kids and I start feeling sorry for him and I give it back. We’re mates then and dance together, off the stage or out of the semi-circle of kids.
The girls became part of the show, warning Uzma when the Boss clown was coming, nipping around the corner to check he was still out of the way, skipping over the rope. I think I’ve said before how hard it can be to get the girls to join in with stuff. Here the only boys were a couple of workers’ sons. The older girls were in jeans and close fitting tops or long straight skirts and heels. None of them was wearing a headscarf. I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t got families to tell them what to wear, because nobody expects them to marry so there’s no reputation to protect or because the managers prefer to let them make their own decisions but that’s how it was.
Parachute games with them were a joy. They worked as a tribe, they laughed a lot, they played parachute football with the passion of a world cup tie, held the fabric with all their might for each other to run around on. When, at the end, one of the juggling balls was missing, they came and told Peat none of the girls was an Ali Baba. They wouldn’t tell on the boy, the manager’s son, who had it, but while we were out of the way getting changed, they got it back from him and passed it back.
Back in normal clothes, Uzma and I were singing with them. We didn’t know any of the Backstreet Boys / N-Sync / Shakira songs that were their favourites and could only manage the chorus of “We Will Rock You”, which they requested over and over. Heba started dancing, Arabic dancing with the wild hips and swaying that I couldn’t get at all, till Heba took my hips and moved them in a figure of eight motion. Oh yeah, that was funky.
We were already buzzing when we got there from the kids at Happy Families’ base. We went for a rehearsal for the gig at the National Theatre and the kids from the street outside the other day were playing in the garden. The lads were taking turns to entertain them. We told Raed about the “boomchucka” part of our show because we wanted to include it. Even the thought of a thousand laughing kids yelling it back at us gives me goosebumps.
He was sceptical. “I don’t think the children will join in.”
“Oh, yeah. They always do.”
He wasn’t convinced. Come on then. We took him outside to the patio stage where a couple of dozen children were lined up. Peat started: “Hello.”
“Hello” came the echo.
A few times over, then all four of us shouted, “Wo-oh.”
“Wo-oh,” all the kids yelled back.
“Boomchucka.”
And all the kids repeated it, loud and gleeful. Raed was so excited he came with us to the orphanage in the afternoon to see if it would work again. It always does. He had a wicked afternoon. Yesterday in the IDP camp in Rajdiya, the children from the marsh villages and nearby towns were probably the loudest yet.
There are about 400 families there, from the Maisan and Amara areas, living in an old army base. It was a bit of a timewarp for Husni, having been based there for three years in the army. Crushed buildings and barbed wire, reed houses, donkeys, cows and chickens knocked about the place.
There are a few different stories: Eman moved up from the south when her husband was sent to Baghdad with the army. Layla came north when her husband, the sheikh, started being abused by local government officials. The mayor, a relative of Saddam, burnt 65 houses which were alleged to belong to people resisting Saddam. Mohammed went to Saddam to complain. Investigators, headed by another relative of Saddam’s, found it was true but the mayor gave out a few irrigation pumps to influential individuals and the matter was hushed up but local government officials started persecuting Mohammed.
Informers accused the Sheikh of supplying weapons to the resistance and he was arrested, jailed for two months, questioned, denied blankets, denied food except bread and beans, mistreated, his family not knowing where he was. A lot of the tribe were fighting Saddam, retreating into the marshes for cover. The marshes were drained so there was nowhere to hide. The fish and birds died.
All those reasons, plus a lack of work, electricity, facilities, drove people from the south to Baghdad but they weren’t allowed to settle here. Unless you were registered as a resident of Baghdad in 1957, or a descendant of someone who was, it wasn’t legally possible to buy land or property. Of the squatters, some were evicted from rented houses having stayed in Baghdad; others returned to the south and came back after the war. Here they have next to nothing. In Amara, they said, it was worse, but still there is no hospital or secondary school, electricity is a rare commodity and they don’t know how long they will be allowed to stay before the new government demands the land back.
Layla looked away when I asked about the women’s health. To the floor, she said, “For myself, I feel very tired. I do not feel that I am settled here because it is not our land. It is hard to find the energy to do things around the house when we might have to leave. Most of the women feel the same, depressed and without purpose. The children are sick, especially now that it is winter, with flu and diarrhoea. I just want a place to settle, to know that we can stay on this piece of land and make our home here.”
“We have seen nothing so far,” her husband adds. We had hope before the war that things would improve but nothing is better. We are jobless, unemployment is high, there is so much crime and more religious division than we have ever known. Divisions existed before the war but they were limited. Now they are encouraged by the Americans. We need elections. Wee need to choose a government that reflects Iraqis. The Governing Council reflects different denominations, which is unjust, because we are all Iraqis.”
He and all these people are Shia so this is emphatically not the bitterness of a member of a formerly powerful group. “The Governing Council is weak and the US wants it this way. It’s imposed. We want elections, for a real government that will stop the suffering , give us security, food, give our children a future after the sanctions they imposed on the people. Those never affected Saddam, only the people. We refuse the occupation. They cannot stay here.”
On the wall of Layla and Mohammed’s house are an elaborate drawing of a tree, each leaf bearing the name of a male member of the tribe, Al Bou Mohammed, the branches depicting the family tree, and a painting of a man called Faisal Ibn Khalifa firing a cannon. The grandfather of the sheikh, he was known as Abu Tuwab – Father of Cannons. He made them to fight the Ottomans. After he died his son used the same cannons to fight the British occupiers.
Ali Kamel, a grey haired retired school teacher, lived in a rented house in Hoseinia, a wave of his arm indicating an area nearby, again because he was not allowed to buy a home in Baghdad. Several of the squatters were evicted from houses in that area after the war when they couldn’t pay the rent. He’s now headmaster of the site school for about 250 – 300 of the residents, aged 6 – 11, with seven teachers, all squatters from Hoseinia. The kids wanted to take me to see their school but it was closed for the day because they were all at the show, organised by Fadhil’s group.
Ali Shalan is a doctoral student in Baghdad University mechanical engineering college. His studies are more or less on hold at the moment: “I have become lazy,” he said, clearly the wrong word for the man who is constantly refining his system of distributing emergency humanitarian aid in the camps. Formerly an assistant in the Internally Displaced Persons team at Premiere Urgence, he founded Malath Relief to help.
“We make the assessments by going to the houses and then request the goods from IOM, the International Organisation for Migration. Food comes from the ration, although we are working on providing more fresh food as well. Today we are giving blankets and plastic tarpaulins. I record in the book what is to be given to each family and then I write out tickets for each household.
“We used to have the head of each household come and collect the goods but yesterday we tried giving them to a representative from each part, so they take the goods, and we go with them to see that they go to each household, so it works more as a web instead of everyone having to come and queue for their things. It involves the people more and it’s less chaotic,” he explained, while juggling questions from half a dozen directions at once.
Then Emad and Odai came round to take us to be entertained by someone else at the theatre in Al-Wazeria. Two rows of immaculately dressed young men, arranged in a semi circle, played the oud, a stringed instrument not unlike a guitar except that the body is oval and there’s a ninety degree angle at the other end. The second half was a group of women in long extravagantly embroidered dresses, a couple in headscarves, several wearing cream headbands, playing oud, hand drums, something I’ve never seen that makes tuneful twanging sounds when struck and an incredible sounding stick-like thing playing with a bow. It was gorgeous.