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 Iraq, everything in Basra is in a state of disrepair. Formerly sturdy structures now seem as if they would collapse into rubble at the snap of one's fingers.
Cars sputter and clunk along as if gasping their last breaths.
All of the cars in Iraq are tired. Everything down to toilets and door handles is jerry-rigged 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.