Headmaster Mohammed looked out at the horde of kids outside the school gate and mused that quite a lot of them might come back now they’d seen the circus. They wouldn’t want to miss it if it came back again, he said. Loads of kids dropped out because of poverty in the family, the dangers and difficulties of getting to school or the poor conditions of the school itself. Kids from other schools have been kidnapped for money or attackers have come into the school. There’s nothing to keep anyone out, Mohammed said, looking at the feeble gates.

Part of Mohammed’s problem is the lack of text books. They’re still working with the old ones, with Saddam’s picture in them and they haven’t got nearly enough for all the kids, so the teachers can only lecture. Unicef was close to giving contracts for the printing of new books to local Iraqi printers, who had started buying the inks and materials, before Unicef pulled out leaving nothing but ill-feeling between the different companies.

They’ve got no other teaching materials at all. There are a thousand boys in the morning shift and a thousand girls in the evening shift so there’s no time or space for any sort of training for the 30 teachers. Each child is allocated twelve pencils per year, an average of one and a half per month of school. “But the children do not keep a pencil for a month. They keep a pencil for a few days and then it is broken or lost or finished.” It goes without saying that there are no art materials in the school.

Mohammed has a masters degree in education and was studying for a PhD but the programme has been stopped so it’s on hold for now. To me, in pigtails, face paint, a silver dress and extra-long green, purple, yellow and orange trousers, he asked, “What are the latest methods and systems of education in the UK?” I did a few modules of education in a degree I finished almost eight years ago but that’s my limit. Part of Mohammed’s problem is that he’s so starved of professional support that he’s got to ask a clown.

Then there is the lack of running water, so that even the single hole-in-the-ground toilet is unsanitary. Classroom furniture is scarce. But Mohammed’s problems don’t end there. The teachers are only just, in mid March, being paid their salaries for February, which has left them broke for the last couple of weeks. As headmaster, working full time, with a masters degree, he is paid only the same as the cleaner; all the teachers struggle to live on their wages.

We talked about Unions and he said there have been thoughts of setting one up but nothing is yet established. I promised to bring more information and we talked about the kind of support he would like from teachers outside Iraq. “We need a teacher exchange with other countries, especially the UK, for a few Iraqi teachers to visit the UK and spend time with teachers there, spend time in the schools and learn about the latest methods and curricula. Those teachers can share the information with others when they return. It will be more effective than bringing teachers from the UK to Iraq because we need to see the way they work.” At the moment he does not even have internet access to communicate with teachers abroad.

We hadn’t expected to do a second show, hadn’t realised a second shift of children would be coming, but Adnan came in laughing, telling us the departing boys were all talking about the very tall woman and the men who made things disappear. We checked with Saba, Mohammed’s counterpart for the girls’ shift and began a second show.

The girls were incredibly loud. The noise of them shouting “Boomchucka” was immense, a huge buzz, a thousand little girls happy and excited. In the end they got a bit too manic and we cut the show short. The ones at the back, standing, were pushing forward, the ones sitting at the front and those squeezed in the middle looking likely to get hurt.

I thought the teachers would be furious with us but they weren’t at all. “They have never had anything like this, something happy, something fun in this yard. In this yard they used to have to sing songs praising Saddam. They are especially happy to see a woman in the show. They have never thought a woman can do this,” Saba said.

Bremer, she said, is not at all interested in women’s rights. He hasn’t done anything for women and nor has the Governing Council, overturning women’s paper protections. Too many groups have only lobbied for 40% representation of women on the Governing Council rather than taking on grassroots work with women. All urban schools have been segregated since 1999 when Saddam was trying to appease religious leaders. There’s no sign of that law being dropped under the new leadership.

She also talked about attacks on the school straight after the fall of the old regime, armed men storming in, making threats, accusing her and other teachers of being Baathists. Like Mohammed, she has seen a high drop out rate among her pupils because of security problems, both on the journey to school and within the building, which is unprotected. They would like an armed guard, one who could escort the pupils to school and mind the place while the kids are there. With a thousand children coming from a wide area of narrow streets, a school bus is impractical.

The “Green Zone” is the name given to the part of town occupied and fortified by the coalition forces and the accompanying civilian-military administration, the only place they feel safe and most commonly heard in the sentence, “They’re attacking the Green Zone.” Our contacts were unable to tell us whether there is or is not an Amber Zone but the Red Zone constitutes most of the rest of Baghdad and Sadr City is the wilderness, the Black Zone.

It’s not because I’m fearless or have some idea of my own invincibility that I’m so flippant, but just because it’s ridiculous. The people who are making the decisions and guiding the policies do so from the far side of a dozen checkpoints from Sadr City, or any other civilian district. Constantly under attack and barely allowed out of their own Zone, a lot of the people in there start to fear the Iraqi people.

And if our contacts were right, that Sadr City is really known as the Black Zone, then it’s a measure of how twisted this situation has become. Densely populated, entirely Shia, extremely poor and persecuted by Saddam, this district might reasonably be expected to be called the “We Love America” Zone but apparently it’s not.

Monday’s school in Afdhalia, likewise, had no windows, nothing at all to work with. A tank is graffitied on the playground wall. Teachers say the 800 or so kids won’t listen to anyone except the headmaster. They carry little blue Unicef backpacks, presumably given out to get them to come back to school if their parents couldn’t afford a bag for them to carry their books in. A woman in an abaya stood watching the show with one of the backpacks on her head. A dog barked in the school and small crowds of kids gathered at the ends of the corridors to look out over the barriers, high enough to see over the crowd. As I took off my stilts a boy came down the steps carrying a colourful cockerel to show me.

As we arrived at the school in Diyala Bridge on Tuesday, a teenage boy wheeled a barrow past full of neon squeaking things. I took them to be fluffy toys that squeak when shaken till a younger boy picked out a handful, paid a little money and left with his dyed chicks. It must make good business sense to colour them for the young ones who get sent out to fetch the chicks for the family.

As with the last two days there were dozens of primary school age kids on the way there, not in school. Skinny dogs scavenged in the rubbish heaps, the pickings still not rich enough even among all this debris. The toilet here had running water; constantly running, so the toilet was overflowing. Several of the women teachers had tiny babies like six month old Zahra in Soulav’s arms, her four year old brother Abdullah leaning on their mum’s knee. The English teacher has no choice but to bring them to work.

Away from the schools, a thousand bank clerks, mostly women, have been threatened with arrest over the money that’s been lost in the currency changeover. When the old Saddam notes were being phased out for the new money - Bremer’s money, as everyone called it in Kurdistan - the clerks were told to exchange all the notes, even those they suspected were fakes. In any case there was no real way of knowing which were fake because it was all just printed on ordinary paper without security marks of any kind.

Sixteen clerks have been arrested, fifteen women and one man. There’s no suspicion that they stole money or committed any fraud but there is a discrepancy between the amount of genuine money received and the amount of new money given in exchange. Now the clerks are to be forced to pay for the difference. Some have already, under threat of arrest, signed papers agreeing to ‘pay back’ the money in instalments from their wages.

The families of the jailed women and man have been trying to get all the papers signed, all the procedures fulfilled for bail. A Baghdad traffic jam prevented them getting the papers to the judge in time the day before yesterday, the judge was on holiday the next day, nothing has happened today either so they’re still in prison. Arrest, however wrongful, is shameful for a woman. Their families are devastated.

The Minister of Finance is a close associate of Ahmed Chalabi. His deputy is Chalabi’s driver, a former associate of Saddam. Chalabi is the man with the proven track record of embezzlement, defrauding Iraqi people of millions through the Petra Bank, convicted in his absence when he refused to attend court in Jordan and now a member of Iraq’s Governing Council.

Faleh Maktuf, the lawyer acting for the arrested clerks, says the legal procedures for bail are nearly done but it’s a tortuous process. There’s no legal basis whatsoever for the arrests but the still flimsy framework, without real laws and guidelines, allows police, ministers and judges almost unconstrained power to do as they like. Many, especially the judges, were part of the old regime.

Several of the squatter camps are under threat of evicition. There was a rumour that Shuala is one of them so we went to find out. Abu Ahmed at first said there was no threat at all but then told us a contractor came but they didn’t let him near the camp, threatened to kill him or his colleagues if they came back. He said they will fight for the place, they won’t leave just because they’re told to.

He said the man was from an animal welfare dept of the Agriculture Ministry. He believes the land belongs to the Ministry of Finance but is operated by the Ministry of Agriculture. Abu Abdullah, at the Workers’ Communist Party which has been supporting the squatter groups, explained that the land, which used to belong to Saddam’s son Uday, has now reverted to the Iraqi government, under the auspices of the Government Lands Department, part of the Ministry of Finance.

Abu Abdullah agreed there was no specific move to evict the camp though all the camps are under a general threat. The people at Al-Sheikh Nasser al-Sa’adi camp in Thawra were given till 10am on March 16th to leave. The building on Mudhafa Square used to belong to the Fedayeen. Hamed Selman Majid, a 33 year old father of ten, went out looking for alternative accommodation for his family but couldn’t find any. He came back, collapsed and died of a heart attack.

Proper housing, a legal framework, justice, security and schools with windows, sanitation and teaching facilities have still not been established.