Final Days

Typhoid, an early concern, was rearing its feared head around Karbala and Najaf. It wasn’t an epidemic yet, but we knew we had to get medicines and, more importantly, clean water on line here. It was the children who were suffering.

One tiny, stick-thin little girl I saw in a clinic hallway was suffering from typhoid, and there were no antibiotics yet to treat her. All the clinic could offer was IV fluids, and she lay quietly as the fluid dripped into her arm, her eyes open wide, her lips dry and cracked, her skin ghostly pale. Her mother rose, her hands held out toward me as if I could drop the antidote into her hands. “We’re working to get the medicines here,” I said. That much was true, but Customs in Kuwait was holding up our supplies. If only we could get the bureaucrats to see what we saw, maybe then they’d release our equipment and medicines without the required song and dance.

There were still assessments to complete in Najaf, decisions to be made about exactly which clinics we would support. I spent many of my last days in the long, hot commute to Karbala, revisiting the clinics there. Karbala, home to the mosque from which we’d been shouted away, had suffered further in the weeks since I’d been there last. The unrelenting heat, the lack of running water, reliable electricity, and city services all seemed to conspire to make Karbala a desperate place. Trash was everywhere, rotting food lay in the streets, buzzing, disease-infested flies covered sides of beef strung up in open butcher shops. Weary, bent, abaya-clad women picked through the rotted food, looking for edible scraps to take home. People had been too long without. Karbala was a desperate province in desperate need of relief. We struggled to get our programs on line, set up priorities, decide what was urgently needed, and determine what we had available to meet those needs.

Our WHO Emergency Health Kits had made it through Customs in Kuwait and to us in Iraq and we had delivered them, each carrying enough medicines and supplies to treat ten thousand people for three months, to the medical warehouses in both Najaf and Karbala. There, the kits would be broken up and supplies and medicines would be distributed based on consumption history and current need in the area. Finally—we were delivering help instead of ideas and promises.

We also managed to find the village of Aufi again, in search of Halia, the Karbala University professor we’d met there. I’d hoped to speak with her about the possibility of working with us occasionally as an interpreter. A young neighbor directed us to the “professor’s” house, and Halia, fully clad in an abaya, shyly emerged and invited me in for tea with her family. She lived in a typical, one-story, Eastern-style mud and plaster home furnished sparely with a carpet and floor pillows.

Her female relatives and two small children joined us. They sat perfectly still and expressionless, all eyes on me until the quiet was broken by one fussing child. “Don’t be nervous,” Halia said, touching my hand gently. “They have been afraid of being too near Americans, but I convinced them to meet you and see one for themselves. Understand?”

I nodded. Halia poured tea for all of us and we sat. The children ambled about, coming closer to me. A tiny girl plopped down next to me and smiled, and with that simple gesture, the women seemed to relax. “Please tell them,” I said, “that I’m very happy to meet them.”

Halia translated for us and served the tea in tiny porcelain cups. “My cousin,” Halia said, motioning to one of the women, “says you are very nice, very friendly.” I smiled. One small victory, followed by another. Halia was going back to her position at the university. She’d have no time to work with us. Classes would be starting soon, a bit of normalcy finally returning to at least one small piece of Iraq. We sat and shared the sticky sweet tea, and then it was time to say good-bye, though I expected that I’d see Halia at the university, where some of the soldiers still worked.

Other solders lived and worked in an old, abandoned, and now crumbling school building. There was no electricity, though they were getting generators for their computers. They slept in the sweltering heat of the closed-in rooms and bathed in makeshift showers outside. I stopped there occasionally to get information on areas and roads to avoid. The soldiers worked long hours, wrote long reports, and gave me short weather updates.

“It’s one hundred and fifty degrees today. Can ya feel it?” a cigar-chewing sergeant asked me one day.

“Jeez, are you sure?” I knew it was hot, I was bathed in sweat, but one hundred and fifty degrees seemed more than I’d imagined.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he answered, fanning himself with a sheaf of papers. Another soldier, dressed in layers of camouflage and protective gear and guzzling water, piped in. “It sure feels about that to me,” he said in a cool Southern drawl. I suppose it could have been one hundred and fifty, at least for them. Clad as they were in layers of military-issue clothing and gear, the heat wove itself into everything they carried and wore—a reminder once again that I had nothing to complain about.

I was back on the road, running from the hospital to clinics to offices to Dr. Sayed, who would be our interim health manager once I left Iraq. There was so much to do and so little time left for me here. I was polishing up my final reports and handing over details of our work to Dr. Sayed. In the meantime, Adam had been looking for a small house for us to move into, and he announced, shortly after the incident with the soldiers, that he had found one. He had been eager to get out of the rooming house, but I felt safe there, certainly safer than I would in a house with just the three of us. I accompanied Adam to have a look at the house. My shoulders sagged at the sight. Though it was a perfectly acceptable-looking place from the outside, there was no running water and only intermittent electricity. The two squat toilets were really just outdoor latrines placed inside the house. Without a flush mechanism, we’d have to pour water in after use. Since there’d been no running water for a while, the rank smell of the toilets permeated the house; the heat of the day baked the scent into the very walls.

There was a generator, but none of us knew how to use it. There was an ominous warning the day before we moved in. Someone had painted anti-American slogans on the gate and outside walls. It seemed clear that we weren’t welcome here. Reluctantly, I packed up again and said good-bye to the family who ran the rooming house. They’d tried to convince Adam to let me stay there, but to no avail.

We moved into the house. Adam and Azad chose the only two downstairs bedrooms, so I climbed to the second floor to find a habitable room. As hot as it had been on the first floor, the second was worse. The heat seeped in through the roof and was inescapable. Even the toilet smell was worse up there. I went back downstairs and claimed the floor of the common room as my own.

That first night was to be my only one in the house. Although we had no water, we did have electricity for a time, and it seemed that it might last. I slept on the floor, an overhead fan turning, taking away some of the day’s heat, the whir of the blades lulling me into sleep. I was jarred awake by the sweltering heat of the night once the electricity died. The silence was broken by the barking of dogs, and then by the unmistakable sound of gunfire just outside.

“Shit,” I murmured.

Although the volley of gunshots had become common night sounds here, they seemed more sinister now that we were in a house without protection, without communication, hidden behind great walls where anything could happen. The gunfire finally slowed and then stopped, but the miserable heat lay heavy in the night air. I lay with a loose shirt covering me and desperately tried to sleep, but I finally gave up and rose for the day at 4:00 A.M. The propane tank for the stove was empty; there would be no coffee this morning, and no food either.

I washed my face with bottled water and sipped the warm water as I dressed, but it was coffee I needed. My eyelids were as heavy as the air, my brain fried, a jumble of loose wires and poor connections. I wrote some final reports by flashlight and sat, waiting for the house and the city to wake.

Finally, Adam, who so required the jolt of coffee and a cigarette in the morning, appeared and brought the last of the propane to life. He boiled some water, and we shared blissful hot coffee.

We piled all of my stuff into one of the SUVs. Today was Friday, the holy day, and our only day off. Azad would remain in the house alone for a day or two until Adam returned; he was not the least concerned. I worried for him, especially after the gunfire of the night before, but he insisted that he wanted to stay there. We said good-bye, and Adam and I headed to Kuwait.

The ride was another hot, dusty one. We were caught several times in the midst of US Army convoys, and we struggled to get around or avoid them. We knew even then the dangers of being caught up in an attack on a convoy; they were such easy and obvious targets, though they at least had the resources to fight back. If we were caught with them in an attack, we were doomed. We darted in and out of the single-file convoy on the single-lane highway and finally broke free, only to run into still other convoys later.

We arrived in Kuwait to beds, electricity, plumbing, heaven. I made some final preparations, finished up reports, and packed my suitcase for the trip home. We got word the next morning that eight armed men had tried to break into the Najaf house. Azad was fine but was moving back to the rooming house until Adam returned.

Security would only worsen in the coming days and weeks, and the tension we’d felt would erupt into further and unimaginable violence just weeks after I left. A car bomb exploded at the Jordanian embassy, killing eleven. Najaf, too, would be the site of a horrific suicide bombing at the central mosque that killed over eighty-five, including the Shi’a cleric Al-Hakim. It would later become the site of heavy fighting with forces loyal to yet another cleric, Al-Sadr.

The car bomb, the popular tool of terrorists, was introduced into Iraq. That summer of 2003, a car bomb exploded at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-three. Seamus, my friend from the Balkans who had guided me around Dublin en route to Bamiyan, was in Baghdad at the time, working with the UN. It took several nerve-wracking days before we learned that he was fine but that many of his coworkers and friends had been killed.

In April 2004, an IRC staff member from Canada was kidnapped from the Najaf house and held for ten harrowing days, threatened again and again with beheading before he was finally released. IRC closed its Iraq programs shortly after that incident. For the first time ever, I felt the fears of what if. What if I’d been there? What if it had been me? What if, what if, what if? But I wasn’t there, it wasn’t me, and I quickly shook off my what-ifs.

Once IRC left, there was no way to know how Dr. Sayed, my interpreter Amir, and so many others fared, or if they’d even survived the last agonizing years, when death hovered so closely.

But there was some good news. Not so long ago, I received an email from Halia, the Iraqi professor, who’d been so determined not to marry. She had met and married an American and was living in Virginia.

The world really is growing smaller by the day.