School Days

Within four days I went to two renovated elementary schools. The school system in Iraq operates at roughly the same pace as in the states, so most schools are holding final exams now and preparing to let out for the summer. The schools are typically a collection of buildings in a horseshoe, with a courtyard or bare space in the middle. The classrooms have windows and ceiling fans, bench-style desks and white-boards at the front of the room. Boys and girls go to school together through the sixth grade, though the schools often have only one bathroom. They let out around noon, so there’s no cafeteria.

Like at the hospital, military commanders can spend money on refurbishing these schools. They write a contract that calls for fresh paint, new lighting fixtures, curtains, flooring tiles, furniture and even computer equipment. Commanders love to show off school projects to the press as a glowing sign of progress. The renovations can’t hurt. The projects employ local workers and improve the school grounds. It’s hard to know, however, how long the progress will last. It’s also hard to understand the timing. The commanders try to spend the money as fast as they can. But it means the schools are left full of new equipment and school supplies at the end of the year. At one school, I saw more than $20,000 in computers, screens, printers and speakers piled high in their boxes. It’s hard to believe that it will still be there three months from now.

Even the smaller gifts go to storage for the summer. A school east of Baghdad city, in the Abu Ghraib area, held its ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday. The man in charge of the project cut the ribbon in honor of his brother, who was killed because he won the contract from the Americans. Two military units and a community leader had brought cases of school supplies, toys and backpacks. A feast was laid out for the ceremony, with two cakes, fruit, sodas, jars of candy, baklava and another Iraqi treat made from yeast-dough, then fried and dipped in sugar syrup. The men and the soldiers ate the treats. The children stayed in their classrooms. One group of first-graders sang for the visitors, songs about being in the first grade and learning to read and write. The kids who snuck out of their classes snatched food and drinks from the table. As school began to let out, closer to 11 a.m., the children stopped at an outside spigot for a drink of water before walking home.

The woman who runs the school signed for the school supplies. She said they would be put into storage for the next school year. One boy managed to pilfer a soccer ball before the men locked up the trunks. Another finished off a Pepsi, then tossed his can into the clean courtyard. I later asked the commander I was with whether he thought the supplies would be there in the fall. He said he thought they would. But, he said, if a kid brings a backpack home full of pens and paper and the mother decides to sell the supplies at the market for $5, what can he do? At least the donations would make it that far, I said.

We finished the day at the home of the leading sheik in the area, a Shia leader who has family members who are Sunni. The beef in this tiny, rural area of Baghdad is more about turf and money, less about religion. “It’s like the Sopranos,” the commander said of recent murders in the area. Two Sunni men were killed in the early morning; a Shia-response brought the total number dead to three. The commander met with this sheik to talk about the killings and about finding the killers. They all know who did all three murders, and the sheik says he’s helping to find the retaliator. It’s an unusual move, a man turning in a member of his own tribe.

This sheik also has won many of the reconstruction projects in town, and he’s helping to hand out contracts to other members of his family, both Sunni and Shia. The commander who has the purse strings is all for it. The busiest the men are, the more money they make, the less likely they’ll be to kill each other and U.S. forces, the commander says. “Am I buying them off? No,” he says. “But I’d give every person $100 if I could just to keep the peace.” In the midst current war budget, he says, it would be money well spent.

The next day, I went out with a group of Minnesota Guardsmen to the same area. They had to go by a farmhouse to give a man a special rebate card for damage done by soldiers to his property. The exchanges are common. In this case, a flare shot by soldiers ended up in his field and burned some of his crop. The Army documented the case, admitted it, and gave the man the proper paper work to go to a nearby local office and request for reimbursement. He’ll probably get a couple hundred dollars.

As we were leaving the farmer’s house, a group of kids gathered to pester the soldiers for soccer balls, chocolate, whatever. Then the shouted in Arabic: the teachers stole our backpacks. The translator explained, and I told the lieutenant I was with about the previous day’s grand opening. Later, I told the commander about the exchange. The teachers didn’t steal the backpacks, he said. I figure, flip a coin. Lots of people in Iraq exaggerate, especially the kids. Still, three months till next school year is a long way away.