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Baghdad Burning... I'll meet you 'round the
bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend... By riverbend Back to Blogging...
It has been a long blog vacation I've taken. There have been several reasons behind it but the main one has been that I simply have not felt like blogging. Technically, it's the summers end But realistically, we have at least another month of stifling heat ahead of us. It's almost mid-September and the weather is still hot and dry in Baghdad. There are a few precious hours in the very early morning when the sun seems almost kind. If you wake early enough, you can catch a solid hour of light breezes and a certain summer coolness. The electrical situation deteriorated this summer in Baghdad. We've gone from a solid 8 - 10 hours daily to around six. During the winter, we have generators in the area providing electricity when it goes off. In the summer, however, with the heat and the heavy electrical load from air-conditioners AND the fuel shortage, many generators have to be turned off for most of the day. We're also having water difficulties, though people have grown accustomed to that. You can tell first thing in the morning that the water is cut off. I woke up this morning and knew it even before I had gotten out of bed. The house just sounds dry. You strain your ears for the familiar house sounds and they aren't there- there's no drip-drip-drip from the faucet in the bathroom down the hall. There's no sound of dishes being washed in the kitchen downstairs. There's no sound of a toilet being flushed, and certainly no sound of a shower. The house is dry. The dryness and heat are a stark contrast to the images we see on television of Mississippi and Louisiana. Daily, we watch the havoc Katrina left in its wake and try to determine which are more difficult to bear- man-made catastrophes like wars and occupations, or natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis. Many areas in Baghdad seem almost shrouded in black these last two weeks- ever since the A'aima Bridge tragedy. There's a mosque a few kilometers away from our house and the last two years we've been accustomed to seeing the large black banners draped across its outer walls. On each banner are carefully painted words in elaborate Arabic fonts announcing the death of another Iraqi and notifying people that the male members of the family would be receiving condolences inside the mosque for the next few days. Now, the dusty beige surface of the mosque wall is nearly invisible under the black of death announcements. The eye can barely take it all in. The most disquieting thing about the banners is that many of them no longer carry a single name- after the bridge stampede, the banners now announce the deaths of two, three, four members of the same family. I've been reading and re-reading the draft constitution. It's alarming. At times it feels like only a summary of what a constitution should be with articles that don't seem very well thought out - a cut and paste job if there ever was one. It doesn't seem complete and while in some places it comes across as too vague, in others it comes across as disturbingly elaborate. I'll have a whole blog about the draft constitution tomorrow - or at least what I've understood of it. - posted by river @ 1:48 AM riverbend Archives 321gold Inc |
