My new life in Baghdad

Greetings from Baghdad!

(This letter is coming to you ten days after I wrote it, due to internet
troubles). I have arrived safely and in good health, but after a pretty
exhausting trek. We have a suprisingly nice team apartment about the size
of our office in Hebron and fully furnished. We’re just off Abu Nawwas
St, about a mile from the Palestine Hotel which makes the news often, and
on the last block before a large park and the banks of the Tigris.

We have power about 1/3rd of the day, and are blessed with air
conditioning during those times. Otherwise it gets humid in the
apartment, and the air can be oppressive in mid-afternoon, but the summer
heat has broken. I was surprised even still at the climate change from
Jordan and the cool of the desert border crossing, where I wrapped up
double in my shawl not to let the almost-icy winds blow through.

On my way here, I had a stopover in Amsterdam which was fantastic. After
accidentally dozing through half my 13-hour wait, I joined a cheesy
minibus tour, and we visited a Gouda cheese-and-wooden shoe-making shop
(free samples and try-ons!); toured the canals; a windmill, all the
downtown historic architecture, and saw but didn’t have time to enter Anne
Frank’s hiding house and museum. The whole city was much more beautiful
and well-preserved than I’d heard or imagined. The air was incredibly
clean, and the people were friendly. I definitely plan to return.
Curiously, those years of studying German paid off once again and I didn’t
have any problems reading street signs or how to use the telephone. The
Dutch don’t seem to translate much.

[An American on our tour looked at the canals and said, “Wow. This looks
just like Holland….” I just hope comments like that are the result of
jetlag only].

I thought I might get lucky on the second stretch of the trip by having no
one else in my row of seats on the plane. Five minutes after I lay down,
though, an indignant Jordanian grandmother was nudging me. She wanted to
sit in my row because her grandchildren were in the row ahead of her. So
much for the nap. But I impressed her with my little Arabic and she
became a very pleasant seatmate. At one point after supper, she grabbed
my wrist and sprayed me with some expensive looking perfume, then doused
herself. Not bad, probably an improvement over my day-and-a half old
clothes. In the meantime, we were treated to a full-color-spectrum sunset
over the Alps and through southeastern Europe. Spectacular.

We spent the night in Amman, and headed out the next night at 2 am. We
crossed the border at sunrise. There were Iraqis working the border
again, some of whom I recognized from before the war, and two US soldiers
who were awfully chipper for standing around looking soldierly at sunrise.
The road to Baghdad was uneventful, but difficult to witness the
destruction. The first was gingerly negotiating the truck around a
missile crater which removed ¾ of the four-lane highway bridge. Debris
was scattered several hundred meters. Other highway overpasses were
removed after having been hit by missiles earlier. I also noticed many
rusty overturned auto and bus wrecks along the highway, which had likely
burned. I wondered, if they also had been hit by shelling, or if they
were rollovers like we’d had, only no government existed to remove them
from the roadsides anymore. And with every one of the hundreds of
disintegrated tire remains I saw littering the highway, I thought about
George.

I am surprised by how much is now open and that the main road, Saadoun
St., is quite active, though interrupted at regular intervals by US tanks
and Humvees. It reminds me of Nablus, where curfew is lifted but Israeli
military vehicles patrol the streets, and the Palestinians try their best
to maintain a normal routine despite their presence. We hear the tanks
rolling by our apartment throughout the day and night, just like in
Hebron. I am surprised by how much bigger US tanks seem than Israeli
tanks, which I had thought were pretty big themselves. They made our
Suburban feel pretty small by comparison. Occasionally we hear bursts of
gunfire at night somewhere in our neighborhood. Many buildings are
destroyed, or occupied by US forces. The building across from us is burnt
and pockmarked with shelling, and no windows remain; after the military
assault on it it was looted; now squatters (refugees likely from destroyed
other parts of town) are making a home of it. I see quite a bit of food
for sale here, though not necessarily staples, for those who can buy it; I
understand half the population who were employed before the invasion now
find themselves not. Someone has organized the young men into a sort of
civil conservation corps who I see cleaning the streets and moving debris,
which I understand fell to the wayside during the invasion. I’ve only
been around the neighborhood on foot here today, tomorrow I’ll venture
further. A few of the cities we passed through on the way from Amman had
little left untouched and many demolished buildings.

Our apartment comfortably holds six people. I’m in charge of
re-organizing to see if we can squeeze any more in, plus create a
serviceable office and reception/living area in the main room.

I went with Jerry Stein to Chaldean mass today. Later I learned I
couldn’t understand the liturgy because they were speaking in Chaldean.
Before that, I was quite worried. Someone gently reprimanded me about
crossing my legs while sitting in church, but I soon discovered it is much
cooler not to, anyway. Chaldean worship is a bodily and sensory
experience, much like Sufi worship (which I had the opportunity to try out
in Toronto, incidentally). The chanting by the men of the congregation
started before we arrived, a continual influx of sound that made the
moments of silence even more profound. Chaldeans genuflect (cross
themselves) multiple times throughout the worship, as well as bow on one
knee when entering and leaving the pew and bowing to the reading of
Scriptures and the transubstantiation. I kept looking out the corner of
my eye to keep up with the others. (Also like the Sufi worship). I
missed only one genuflection, I am proud to say (pretty good for a
Lutheran), but the lady next to me let me know it, too. I placated her in
Arabic by admitting it was my first time in a Chaldean church. It’s good
to know Arabic here.

I designed a curriculum for teaching new teammates Arabic today. We’ve
found a potential teacher who is actually trained as an engineer but is
willing to try. She lives a few doors down. The newbies can look forward
to at least two hours of instruction every day for at least two months.
Sure wish we could have gotten that worked out for Hebron.

It’s really exciting to be working on a new project. My enthusiasm is
growing hourly, and I think this is why I’m still up at 2 am writing right
now. It certainly couldn’t have been the three hour nap this afternoon!

We will be primarily working with detainees and the disappeared, helping
families find out if they are still alive, their health, where they’re
being held, and pressing for the release of those who were picked up at
random and have not been charged, etc., much like the situation in
Palestine. We’ve had a few successes so far. We’ll also be working with
and encouraging the dozens of local human rights and social welfare
societies which are springing up to fill in the void left by the
destruction of the government and the lack of an interim civil
infrastructure under the Occupation. I hear I’ll be spending a lot of
time with women and hearing about the changes in their situation here.
Much the rest of the work will be very similar to what we’ve been doing in
Hebron all along—listening to peoples’ stories and telling them to people
back home who need to hear them; being present in the streets;
accompanying those working for nonviolent solutions to the crisis. I will
write more in detail about all of these.

My own emails may not be frequent, but you are all able to access the
team’s reports either by going to the website, www.cpt.org and reading the
latest as they appear, or by asking via website to be subscribed to our
team’s own listserve (about as frequent postings as the Hebron team’s),
which you’ll receive as soon as we write them.

I should get on towards bed while it is cool and I can still rest enough
before morning. It’s good to get up early and finish our appointments
before the heat of the day overwhelms. Though, if we stay on past noon,
my teammates warn me that we get fed really well by our local partner
organizations and families we meet. We’ll see what the week brings and
when I’ll be able to write next.

Peace,

Le Anne