Children of War (5 page)

I told you about the bullet. She also has headaches a lot from the beating
they gave her. My grandmother is a very kind woman who doesn't hurt anyone. Why
would someone do these things to her? Bad people can do what they want, and good people
get punished. The world is wrong.

My family has applied to go to Australia. I think I would like it there.
I've seen pictures, and it's very beautiful, with open spaces and rocks, and
also with trees and gardens and ocean. I think there are a lot of different people in
Australia, too, so if one group doesn't like us, maybe another group will.

Things are not good for us here. People don't like us, maybe because
we are Iraqis and we are living here without permission. Many people in Jordan are kind,
but some are mean. It may be the same everywhere.

When my brother and I were a bit younger, we were outside our house,
walking in the neighborhood. We came across a big wedding celebration. I think it was a
wedding. Maybe it was a religious celebration. We stood to watch because it was
something to do. Also, there was a lot of food there, and who doesn't like to look
at food?

“Go away,” some men shouted at us. We didn't leave right
away because we weren't bothering anybody. We weren't in the way. We were on
the outside looking in.

But they yelled again, “Go away! Get out of
here!”

I was smaller, and they were big and loud and angry. I held my
brother's hand and should have run away, but I guess I was surprised that they
would be so angry at two little kids.

Then two of the men grabbed a pot of very hot water and threw it at
us.

It hurt. I got burns on my legs from where it splashed me, and my brother
got burns on his back. There are some scars on my face, too, where the water landed.

We ran home, and my parents took us to the Italian hospital in downtown
Amman, which is a very kind place for Iraqis.

Something bad happened to my mother and sister, too, when they went out
one day. My sister needed glasses for her eyes, to help her to see better. My mother and
sister went out together to get the glasses. A group of young men blocked their way and
decided to beat them. I don't know why the men did that. Were they bored? I will
never do such things when I am a man. I cannot even think of doing such things.

So, from the beating and from the way we live, my mother has high blood
pressure, and both she and my sister have nervous problems. They're afraid to go
out of the house, and they get very, very sad.

There are eight of us living in two small rooms. We are too crowded, and
because we don't feel safe outside, we are in here together too much. We're
always on top of each other, and that's fine when we're all getting along,
but terrible if we're not. One person waking up in a bad
mood
soon means we are all in a bad mood, and then it's terrible.

It's not a healthy house, either. My mother cleans and cleans, but
it still smells bad from the sewer, and when it's cold and rainy outside,
it's cold and damp in the house.

At least I am back in school this year. I want to be an engineer. My
sister wants to be a doctor. I don't know if we'll get what we want. Mostly
I would like us to not feel so gloomy all the time.

My brother and I have a small courtyard to play in, and there's a
wall that divides the courtyard from the street. We have contests to see who can climb
over the wall the fastest. I'm bigger, but he's pretty fast.

And my mother likes things to be pretty. We have a sort of a shrub growing
in the courtyard that she and my sister and grandmother have decorated with artificial
flowers and fake fruit they found in the street. They like to make things look
beautiful. My mother also puts pots of daisies and other flowers around to cheer us all
up.

I know my parents worry, about money, about what will happen to us, about
how to keep us safe. We cannot go to the police when bad things happen to us because we
are here illegally, and they could ship us all back to Iraq. We feel we are on our
own.

To make the world better, every town and city should have places where
only children can go — all children. It doesn't matter if they are Iraqi or
Jordanian or what. They could go there and be safe and play all they wanted, and just be
happy.

Depleted uranium is waste from nuclear power and from the
manufacturing of atomic weapons. It is radioactive, and very dangerous. There are
more than a million tonnes of this waste in the world, and it's very expensive
and difficult to store. It tends to eat through the containers where it is
kept.

One way to get rid of it — or at least get it out of our own
backyard — is to sell it cheaply to arms manufacturers, who attach it to
conventional weapons to make them stronger and more deadly. During the First Gulf
War in 1991, US and British forces sent depleted uranium ammunition into Iraq
— ammunition that was toxic not only to the Iraqis, but to the soldiers who
fired the weapons as well.
In November 2007
New
Internationalist
reported that between 1990 and 1997, cancer rates in a
Basra hospital increased dramatically. Both the children of American soldiers and
children in Iraq have been born with birth defects.

Haythem was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that causes fluid
to build up in the brain. His condition was made worse in 2005, when four masked
gunmen stormed into his home in Baghdad, startling his mother and causing her to
drop him. He hit his head on the hard floor. He has had surgery to try to repair the
damage, but one side of his head is still badly swollen.

The gunmen kidnapped his uncle and demanded a large sum of money
for his release. The family scraped together what they could, paid the ransom and
fled the country as soon as the uncle was returned to them.

Haythem's parents suspect that his initial illness came from
the weapons that have been used in and against Iraq, but they are unable to prove
it. His mother lost two other babies before they were born. When Haythem's
uncle was kidnapped, his mother chased the kidnappers out onto the street to try to
rescue her brother, but they turned on her and beat her badly. She was seven months
pregnant at the time and lost that baby as well.

Haythem lives with his mother, father, uncle and grandmother in a
small but sunny apartment on the side of one of Amman's many hills. They have
a
magnificent view from their courtyard, where Haythem's
mother grows pots of herbs and flowers. His father was a soldier and suffers from
the trauma of war and from not being able to properly provide for his family.

Haythem likes to read, but he has trouble remembering things, and
he has to read them over and over. He can't control the movement of his arms
and legs. His father is a silversmith, and he is sad that he will not be able to
pass down the art of jewelry making to his son.

The family have been accepted by the UNHCR as refugees, but so far
no country has stepped forward to let them in.

I like to play with little cars, and to play games with my father.
We set the games up on my tray, and we play.

Sometimes by cousins come over, and we play together. My cousins can
understand me when I talk, and they don't laugh at the way I look. The children in
the neighborhood can't understand me.

I love to go out into the streets and see what's going on. I like to
see people working and playing and doing different things, and I like to look at cars.
Sometimes my father takes me out. The hills are very high, and it's hard to push
my chair up and down them. People look at me because I look different, and I don't
like that.

My mother takes good care of me, and my father plays with me and helps me
with my reading. I'd like to go to school, but there is no school for me.

An article in
USA Today
reported that Iraqi
psychiatrists are worried about how children there will cope with the long-term
effects of being exposed to war and violence. A survey by the Iraqi Ministry of
Health found that seventy percent of students in Baghdad are suffering from war
trauma and are showing signs of stress like bedwetting and stuttering. Many have had
to pass dead bodies on their way to school. Many have repeatedly heard explosions or
seen acts of violence on others. There are not enough mental health professionals in
Iraq to help them deal with this. “Some of these children are
time-bombs,” Said al-Hashimi, an Iraqi psychiatrist, said.

Widian and her brother are orphans living with
their uncle and his family. They were in Iraq during the heavy bombing. The large
extended family lives in three small rooms in the Jebel Amman section —
another poverty-stricken area of the city. Mats line the walls of the main room,
which are flaky and dark with mold. Their belongings are piled up under
blankets.

We live in Amman with my grandmother, two aunts, two uncles and
five children, plus my brother and me. The rain comes in when it's raining
outside. But at least we are alive.

My father and mother are dead, and so are two of my uncles.

Before the First Gulf War, we were living in Kuwait. Then, when that
happened, we moved to Basra, because Kuwait no longer wanted Iraqis in their
country.

I have damage in me from the First Gulf War. I wobble when I walk, and I
fall down a lot. My muscles and nerves are damaged, they say from the weapons that were
used to make Saddam leave Kuwait.

My father was the first one to die. He was captured and murdered. He was
tortured to death by electricity. That sort of death leaves marks on your body. When my
mother saw him after he died, it was clear what had killed him.

Still, she wanted to be sure, so she had people who knew about such things
examine his body and give her papers to say that yes, he had been tortured. She had all
these documents with her when she was kidnapped. We heard
nothing about her for three months. Then my grandparents got a phone call telling them
where to find my mother's body.

My older brother hasn't gone to school for many years because he is
afraid of also being kidnapped and killed.

Sometimes I am afraid of that also, and there are other times when I
don't care if it happens or not.

We left Iraq in 2004.

When the Americans first came, we all hoped democracy would come, and
everyone would be able to live together and be safe. But religious extremists and
terrorists took over, and everything became very bad.

We were in Iraq for the heavy bombing. I remember that there was no water
or electricity. There were just bombs. It seemed that the big British and American
forces were trying to squeeze through our small area. They dropped heavy bombs on us.
Not just regular bombs. Heavy bombs. Why are any of us still alive?

We tried to go to sleep early some evenings, thinking that if we managed
to fall asleep, we would stay asleep through the bombing. It was foolish thinking. Who
could sleep through such things? My head was always cloudy from being scared, and from
headaches, and from never getting any rest.

Before the bombing, the people around me, the adults, would talk about how
worried they were about what would happen with Saddam no longer in control. They worried
that all the tribes and religions would go to war against each other, and that's
exactly what happened.

The thing that finally made us leave was when the
uncle we were living with got beaten. Gunmen wearing masks over their heads and faces
came right into my uncle's house and beat him right there, in his own home. They
ordered him to pay them ten thousand dollars or they would come back and kill him and
also destroy the house and his shop so that the rest of the family would not be able to
eat.