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Gifts By Kelly Hayes-Raitt Baghdad --"I told my children, if we are going to die, we should die together in the house," the solemn man said through an interpreter, describing early morning bombing in his neighborhood during the recent US "shock and awe" assault in Iraq. When I first visited Baghdad in February, just five weeks before the
bombings and invasion, I saw Iraqis preparing for imminent war by taping
their windows and stockpiling food and water. Urgent women stopped me
on the street, These were women who knew war. Even adults barely old enough to serve
in any army had already lived through two devastating wars, twelve years
of isolating sanctions and two decades of a political regime more brutal
than my In 1991, US forces dropped 90,000 tons of explosives on Iraq during 42 days of relentless bombing. On just the first day of bombing Baghdad this March, US forces dropped ten times that amount. We shocked; we awed. Every morning during my return trip in July, I got into a car with a new driver and translator and asked to visit a neighborhood that had been bombed. Every morning, without hesitation, I was driven to a new neighborhood pockmarked by bullet holes and engraved with terrifying memories. "It was a kind of destruction I cannot describe," said Isam
Hindi, gesturing to the decimated statues in the park across the street
from his home in Baghdad. "There were many dead bodies in front
of us. They were shooting fire (The attack, like so many others described to me, came at 5 am, while people prepared for morning prayers.) Isam Hindi is a soft-spoken, 28-year-old computer professor at Al-Mansour
University. As he cowered with his wife and two children in their living
room, an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) pierced his wall and set the
room on fire. Since the war, Isam has been out of work. His 9-year-old daughter, Sahar, and 6-year-old son, Ibrahim, still cry through sleepless nights. The foot-wide hole where the RPG intruded into his family’s life is covered with a temporary cloth. A painting perched against a wall. Isam turned to me; I watched warmth melt his wistful sadness. "I would like to show you the dignity and hospitality and honesty of the Iraqi people and give you this painting to remember us by," he said proudly. Through tears, I gazed at the darkly moody painting of a solitary man
walking through an empty souk. Isam’s outstretched gesture of friendship
provided a connection through this desolate painting. Perhaps we are
all connected "Old paint on canvas as it ages sometimes becomes transparent," Lillian Hellman wrote in Pentimento. "When that happens it is possible in some pictures to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again." Isam’s true gift to me was this opportunity to see – and then see again. Kelly Hayes-Raitt is a political consultant who traveled to Iraq in February and July and has been addressing audiences throughout California about the people she met. |
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