Frustration and delight, and lots of chay

I think my first full day in Baghdad was pretty typical. I'm a wanderer at heart, and there are few places in the world more interesting at the moment. Change and stagnation. Hope and despair. Wealth and poverty. So many juxtapositions.

The day started very slow. Two people were meant to come by my hotel at 9am, and after two and a half hours of very pleasant waiting and chatting with taxi drivers, I decided to take a stroll over to visit my new friends in Bayt Al Bacher. I wandered along the river bank, a couple of hundred meter wide strip of greenery and rubble, next to the beautiful river full of reeds (see picture below). Apart from myself, a few stray dogs and some kids swimming among the reeds, there was no one about - on the Baghdad equivalent of the South Bank of the Thames. I imagined the rubble being cleared and the gardens replanted - a faint echo of Eden still hangs around despite all blood that has been spilt.



I took an hour to make a ten minute trip, stopping to accept the welcome of the many people who greeted me. One old man recalled when he was a boy in the 1940s and a British soldier gave him some oranges and cigarettes - Camel, he even remembered the brand! I discussed the idea of elections with another guy, who explained "For 30 years under Saddam we had no options, and now people are saying we have to choose a leader. It's too early, we don't recognise any of the names (of the people in the political parties), we need maybe two years to get to know them before choosing." This was interesting because my gut response had tended to be that elections should happen soon rather than later, but I can see his point.

With my stomach's perfect sense of timing I managed to time my arrival at Bayt Al Bacher with lunch, and after some classic American style chicken soup started out on my project with Hathan Salam, a lovely English student who's missing a year of university because of the war, and is using it to write for newspapers and guide NGOs. We've had a really hilarious day together and got a surprising amount done, given that we only started at about 2pm, after most politicians in Iraq go home for the day. We had a meeting with the Assyrian Democratic Movement, learning a few words of Aramaic in the process, and fixed meetings with the two main Communist parties (ICP, IWCP), the Independent Democrats and the Union of the Unemployed. We drove around a large part of central Baghdad, including the wealth Mansour area, beside the giant unfinished mosque (straight out of Star Wars) which Saddam was building to get an entry in the Guiness Book of Records.

In the evening we met up with Christian Peacemaker Teams, who gave us some good contacts with Iraqi human rights groups and the major Baghdad religious leaders. Last week they'd helped marshall a pilgrimage of maybe a million or more people to a Shia shrine in northern Baghdad, to diffuse potential tensions between the US forces and the pilgrims. Their other main work is to help families get information about relatives who have been detained and argue the cases of those who have been treated unjustly.

So many other little conversations, observations and thoughts today. But it’s late and I need to sleep, and you probably do too, so “tisbah ala Khayr.”