Teams of veterans will pay their own way to Iraq and work as volunteers alongside Iraqi laborers. The commencement of our two-month sojourn with Iraqi families in Basra has been bittersweet. The joy in our hearts inspired by the hospitality of our Iraqi friends is sadly tempered by the sight of their grand nation reduced to a state of decrepitude. As in the rest of lraq, everything in Basra is in disrepair. Formerly sturdy structures now seem as if they would collapse into rubble at the touch of one's fingers.
Cars sputter and clunk along as if gasping their last breaths.
Everything down to toilets and door handles is jerryrigged for lack of spare parts. Indeed, as far as the eye can see are signs of a nation that has been cruelly cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for itself. The streets of Al Jumhuriya, where our group of five has taken up residence, are like none one might find in the US, nor for that matter in Iraq before 1991. Garbage rots in heaps in the middle of the street, where goats forage for food, and children for anything that might be saleable. Because sanctions restrict the repair of Gulf War damage to Iraq's water systems, the gutters flow with a ghoulishlygreen waste water, the stench of which permeates the air and makes one wonder if the lesser of two evils is to breathe through the nose and thus smell it, or inhale with mouth open and perhaps face worse.