This email came from my friend Dave who facilitates the weekly Middle East Study group I participate in here in Oakland.
Short, interestig read. A snippet of life in Baghdad. His friend Anita has been in Baghdad the last 3 weeks. This is her second visit in as many years, under the auspices of something called Christian Peacemaking Teams.
If you are interested in the Middle East, I highly recommend Juan Cole's site. He is very intelligent and informed. Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Here is the link:
http://www.juancole.com/Here is Anita's email:
11 June 2005
More sand last night. It makes you mean.
Greg & I begin work on detainees, reviewing who remains imprisoned, who has been released, who remains disappeared. While it's something we try to guard against, it becomes a job of pushing paper, checking off columns. We have one new released person. We e-mail some families to learn if anything has changed and don't expect to hear back for some time. We forget to call a translator to call the other families. We forget to put names on the calendar for follow-up contact. We're nearly useless. It maybe an excuse but the heat & no electricity makes you flakey.
The rest of the afternoon Will and I spend searching the internet for Iraqi human rights, women's rights, & detainee rights organizations. We search for Iraqi organizations in the U.S. and humanitarian groups who can give medical/material aid to people who need medical treatment outside Iraq. Several hours later I turn to Will and tell him to stop. It occurs to me that the various ministries probably have these lists and we should make a trip to the relevant ones: the Ministry of Civil Society, Ministry of Healh, Ministry of Justice. I don't know which is more tiring, sweating over the computer (although we do find some interesting stuff we don't need) or oozing through Baghdad traffic. We will go next week.
Will has been invited to dinner at a local hotel. His host is an Iraqi Christian who learned of CPT through a member of a CPT delegation. I go with him. Our driver drops us off at the most armed (outside of the Green Zone) neighborhood I have seen. Not even the Ministry buildings are so bunkered in. We pass through a security check at the entrance to the neighborhood. It has been cordoned off by an extra ring of 12 ft. concrete barriers. We are surprised to see so many armed westerners walking around, so many expensive German sedans. Will calls it the "belly of the beast." And then I remember I was here last year. My neighborhood internet store manager asked us to help him and his neighbors get rid of the security contractors living in the hotels near his home. There were four private homes and two hotels on this small block. I recognize the house of a woman to whom I'd spoken last year. She'd told me about a rocket attack that had hit the roof of one hotel and how the other had received mortar attacks 3 times. She was worried about the effects of these attacks and the armed guards on her children.
The neighbors lost this tiny war. The area has become more militarized. Two of the homes are boarded up including the home of the woman to whom I spoke. One of the homes had it's door open and the garden has gone wild. I didn't see the 4th house.
