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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,
imploring me to "please go home and tell Mr. Bush not to bomb us."

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
imagination allows.

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
randomly from a helicopter. I was frightened and saw many dead bodies -- and body parts, hands, legs. Helicopters were dropping rockets. These were the hours of death."

(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.
" They shot my picture of Mohammed, our prophet." Shrapnel tore into the middle finger of his right hand, leaving a gash black with infection. He cannot get antibiotics.

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
through our desolation. I shook Isam’s injured hand and humbly accepted his gift.

"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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