Passion ebbs, whether we are talking about love and marriage or movements for human rights, for peace and justice, a living wage or gun control.
Passion ebbs and then comes the long haul, the work to make things “work” as we envisioned it in those first passionate moments. Occupy, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gun control, the March for Our Lives and others I don’t know about go on after the initial explosion of attention, kept alive by dedicated and determined people who “shall not be moved.”
My passion, beginning in 1998, was Iraq and Iraqi children. I joined the movement to end the sanctions, then to stop the war. Both failed.
Indeed, March 20 marked the 15th anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The war began despite the historic protest of millions and millions of people around the world on Feb. 15, 2003. United Nations sanctions continued until 2017.
What can one do, really? This is what so many continue to ask themselves: What can we do? My answer was to take a very narrow, one-issue focus, to work in collaboration with a team of pediatric oncologists in Baghdad. I was there in January, visiting for 10 days, accompanied by local photographer Ellen Augarten. This story is about the visit and the long-term challenges still facing Iraq and internationals who want to “help.”
Friday, Jan. 26, was a sunny, spring-like day in Baghdad. We took advantage of the weather, the weekend and improved security to be tourists, accompanied by our Iraqi friends and hosts of this visit, Dr. Mazin Al-Jadiry and Dr. Hasanein Habeeb Ghali.
Our destination was Al-Mutanabbi Street, a cultural, literary and intellectual hub famous for its print shops, bookstores, and book stalls. We fell in with the crowd browsing books, drinking fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice and enjoying street food, steaming bowls of lablabi — chickpeas cooked in lemon oil. Then we headed for the Al-Shabandar cafe.
There was a crowd around the door. As we stood waiting outside, a 60ish Iraqi woman coming out of the cafe stopped in front of me. “Are you Miss Bell?” she asked, looking at me through square, brown-framed glasses. She wore a red beret and a gray and red checkered scarf underneath her faux fur-lined coat.
The woman was unusual, not only for her dress but for being on the street where the majority of people we’d seen were men. And most women we saw were in hijab — full length dresses with head scarves — or wore abayas, long, black head-to-toe garments. This woman was a bit unusual and so were we — foreigners with gray, uncovered hair and western clothes.
The Shabandar cafe is legendary, not only because it is 100 years old, but because it was destroyed by a car bomb that targeted Al-Mutanabbi Street on March 5, 2007. Thirty people were killed, including four sons and a grandson of Mohammed Al-Khashali, the cafe’s owner. Another 100 people were injured.
Car bombings were common in those terrible and terrifying years of instability and sectarian violence in Iraq. According to The New York Times, the bombing at the Shabandar was only one of “… a half-dozen major blasts aimed at civilians in the capital …” An estimated 220 people were killed in one three-week period in late February and early March that year.
But it wasn’t this ongoing tsunami of death and destruction that caught the attention of the international media or the public in the U.S. It was the storied cafe and the renowned street. It was that the bomb targeted culture, words and books, freedom of expression. It struck a nerve.
People — maybe especially activists, artists, poets and writers — took notice. San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil responded by organizing Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, an ongoing project calling on writers and artists around the country and the world to respond on the anniversary of the bombing each year.
Dr. Mazin and I gave a talk as part of the Mutanabbi Street project at Hampshire College in 2015 . And, now we were on Mutanabbi Street, waiting to enter the historic cafe which Al-Khashali rebuilt and reopened for business in 2008. It seems unbelievable, almost impossible to imagine rebuilding given the enormity of his losses. But, he told reporters, he didn’t want to “dwell on the past.”
Time, as everyone knows, doesn’t stop for these tragedies, it moves on. Evidence of death and destruction is cleaned up. Rubble is removed, people’s bodies are buried and put to rest. Buildings are rebuilt, order is restored. Life returns. Indeed, the cafe was bustling that morning as I stood outside in eager anticipation, surprised and delighted by the quick wit of this Iraqi woman who asked if I was “Miss Bell.”
Gertrude Bell was born in London in 1868. She was a brilliant scholar, an adventurer, a writer and photographer who traveled to the Middle East — to Persia — for the first time when she was 23.
Captivated by the land, culture and people, she traveled extensively and lived there throughout her life. She learned Persian and Arabic. Over time, she became a knowledgeable, self-taught expert on the culture, politics, art and archeology of the region. Many people think of her as a female counterpart to T.E. Lawrence, known as “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Gertrude Bell is described by historians and revealed in her voluminous letters as a charismatic woman who seems to have engaged easily, energetically and equally well with “the people” —tribal leaders and her fellow countrymen and women in the Middle East. She was deeply attached to the land and people and it seems she won their affection and respect as well.
Her legacy is mixed. She was an outsider, someone from a completely different world, a more powerful “developed world” where people thought they knew what “was best” for people in the less developed world. She held an influential position in the British administration in Mesopotamia, serving as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner for some 10 years during and after World War I. The policies Bell and her British colleagues promoted helped set the stage for what would be a problematic future.
Gertrude Bell was a prolific letter writer — 16,000 letters, 16 diaries, seven notebooks and 44 packets of miscellaneous material are archived at the Newcastle University Library in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
“Miss Bell?” the woman asked. In some sense I am guilty as accused: another generation, another iteration of Miss Bell. Like her I am an outsider, a western woman who thought she could “help” in Iraq.
I found an opportunity and generosity of spirit in Baghdad that enabled me to work with a dedicated and talented medical team over the last 17 years, most intensively over the last eight. Earnest and perhaps bold are words that come to mind when I step back to contemplate our partnership, our commitment to work honestly across disparate histories, language and culture and across the power imbalance created by the privilege of the first world over the developing world. We have tried to stretch ourselves across these divides, but ideas and strategies develop from one’s own experiences and the social/political/cultural context that frames and informs those experiences.
And so, like Bell, I realize I have promoted my own ideas and strategies to address their problems. Sometimes it works, and other times it has created problems.
Things were very bad on the pediatric oncology unit of Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital when I first visited in January 2001. The 1991 Gulf War and more than 10 years of harsh U.N. economic sanctions had already devastated the country, creating a humanitarian crisis. The health care system, like every other public service was in ruins.
Iraqis living through this unraveling and internationals seeing and understanding the depth of the crisis at that time could not imagine things could get worse. And, because we could not imagine that, we allowed ourselves to dream of improvement, of achieving things.
On their side they dreamed of restoring their first-class health care system and facilities, and of quality care on the pediatric oncology unit. On my side and together we dreamed and worked toward securing help — financial and human resources — from the global health community and from international cancer institutions and organizations. We dreamed of reparations to rebuild hospitals and clinics that had been damaged or destroyed by the U.S. and its allies.
I was the lead dreamer on this side, a first-world woman with a comfortable life who acted on the belief “… that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world…” (Margaret Mead).
And on the other side, across the world, the primary dreamers were the senior oncologists on the unit, Dr. Salma Al-Hadad and Mazin. When I ask Mazin, he tells me Salma is the lead dreamer, the one who inspired him, and who continues to inspire others on the unit to believe in what they are doing. I met her, he writes, and saw her working in Iraq at the time of the embargo and that convinced me that there are still human beings working in an honest, dedicated and professional way.
Some say that as many as 50 percent of Iraqi doctors were killed or have left the country in the last decades. Newly trained doctors also want to go abroad, for better conditions and higher salaries. But Mazin and the other pediatric oncologists stay — and they stay together on this unit, in this hospital — because of Salma.
Some years ago, Salma told me she had never thought seriously of leaving, even when she was working alone without Mazin. “If I left,” she said, “who would take care of these children? I determined that even if I could not improve their survival, at least I would share their suffering. And this has been my policy until now.”
The doctors work tirelessly in Baghdad, doing the best they can with limited facilities and without adequate financial and human resources, while I work here, reaching out to first-world institutions and organizations. Despite our efforts which have been significant — theirs over decades, and our joint efforts over the last eight years — very little has changed. Indeed, the patient load continued to multiply, but their capacity to take care of more and more seriously ill children did not improve significantly.
We are a transcultural project. English is a second language for the doctors and I have no Arabic. We are always working in translation. This is my interpretation, then, of what transpired some weeks before our scheduled trip.
I received an email from Mazin saying the doctors had been taking stock of their situation and after some serious consideration had decided, in a certain sense, to abandon hope — hoping for outside help — as a strategy. It was too much effort for too little reward, he said, and there had been too many disappointments. They needed to concentrate whatever energy they had on strategies and improvements they could accomplish on their own. They had to face reality — outside help was not materializing. We were dreaming, he said to me when I was in Baghdad. It was a statement of fact, not an accusation.
And so, to the question: “Miss Bell?” Like Bell imagining “her own Iraq into being,” I tried to forge disparate narratives and connections, to imagine “my own pediatric oncology unit into being.” Not by prolific writing, but by proliferating hopes and dreams.
I hoped. I believed as fervently as any true believer. I put enormous effort into sharing the narrative of the hospital unit, revealing the enormous human suffering and need as well as the strength and resilience. I shared it with the media, with individuals, institutions and organizations in the first world thinking this would ultimately bring help, and that our dreams for improving care and outcomes would be realized.
But it didn’t work out that way. And now the years of living and working in Baghdad — decades of exhaustive work on this hospital unit — are taking their toll on my Iraqi colleagues.
For my part, I could go on trying to forge connections, but I’m not in Baghdad, they are. And they’re worn out. They don’t have the energy, they don’t have the mood, Mazin would say, for dreaming. They hope to stay the course and make it through each day. Other dreams must be put aside. And other dreamers?
We go on, prisoners of hope. This is not my phrase, it comes from Zechariah 9:9-13.
It doesn’t seem fair to leave a story about lost hope hanging on a phrase explaining why hope continues. One wants closure. But, I cannot say what will happen to the dreamers, whether hope will find new legs to stand on, whether there will be new opportunities for dreaming. We must wait and see.
Claudia Lefko, of Northampton, coordinates “Baghdad Resolve: An International Collaboration to Improve Cancer Care in Iraq.”