Stuck

Monday night I left Basra, and after a couple of overnight flights and delays, I arrived back at Baghdad International Airport/Camp Victory on Tuesday morning. Since then, I’ve been waiting. And waiting. And trying not to eat too much, ‘cause that’s really all I have to do.

I’ve been stuck in between assignments. Part of it is my fault – I didn’t know where my boss wanted to send me next and wasn’t able to make the formal request until late Tuesday. These requests usually take two to three days. But for whatever reason, it’s been five days now and I just got word I’m going to FOB Loyalty, a base in eastern Baghdad. Because it involves a helo ride, that, too, will involve some waiting. I’ve wasted a week now, and I’m about out of good humor. (Dealing with blogger is not helping.)

I’m not the only one who’s stuck. A week ago, I went for a morning stroll in Shaibah, a tiny collection of stone-walled houses in between an oil refinery and a train station. It was about 7:30 a.m., already well over 90 degrees. (The highs in Basra last week were, for the most part, 120 or higher.)

As usual, as soon as we got out of the trucks boys appeared. The youngest came first, 5, 6, 7, 8, kids whose entire memories include U.S. or British soldiers going through their streets. The older ones met us closer to the train tracks. They were 13, 14, and all had the same text book. They were studying for a physics exam on their way to school. The younger ones persisted in asking for things: watches, cameras, guns, pens, paper, soccer balls. The older ones were too worried about failing their test. They probably know, too, the odds of getting free stuff from soldiers is worse than it when they were younger.

Shaibah itself is hardly a half-mile squared. It has two stores, selling drinks, cigarettes, plastic bins. There’s a taxi stand by one, which also seems to serve as the place to go to work on cars. It’s also the only place in town with a tree large enough to provide shade. There’s a school, a doctor’s clinic – which had a box outside from the United Nations – and at least one place where people can go to by a goat and have it killed. We followed the fuel man around town. He was selling tanks of propane for $4.50. It was enough to keep a family’s kitchen running for a week, one interpreter said.

People work in small farms or at the oil refinery, I was told. A few also work at the train station, which had four or five clean, green engines. One was pulling a car with backhoes. It all looked new. Nobody I was with knew who bought them or what any of the equipment was for.

But people did insist the tracks were still used, a north-south route that carries goods from Basra up to Baghdad. It was hard to believe, not because of the past six years of war. It was because of the trash. Like every other place I’ve ever been in Iraqi, the village was covered in filth. Rotting clothes, warped metal and, like always, plastic bags that float from one miserable pile to the next.

I’ve been told a couple of theories over the years about all this trash. One is that people here keep their own house clean but then just throw anything they don’t want right over the courtyard wall. It is true that the few Iraqi houses I’ve been in have been clear of trash, even the most sparse ones.

But why no one would gather that trash and put it in a pile outside of town – or even burn it now and then – still remains a mystery to me. Many soldiers I’ve been with over the years pass down the lore that Iraqis are dirty and don’t care. I think that comes from their own observations and from translators who speak Arabic but are from a different part of the world. I find this a hard thing to believe despite the heaps of evidence around me. Being messy is one thing. But choosing to live right next to the trash dump seems to make no sense. Still, there it is, and it’s hard to argue. And if there were no trash, then another interesting problem, I suppose. What would the goats eat?

The young officer I was with asked his interpreter about it. The Iraqi was from Basra, and the officer told him he should start the first garbage service in the country. “You’d be rich,” the officer said. The interpreter shrugged his shoulders.

In some towns, the violence was so horrible in the past few years that no one could think about something as common as trash. Ramadi and Fallujah come to mind. The village of Shaibah has been spared most of the direct violence, even though it’s only a few miles away from Basra. But it’s suffered in other ways – unreliable power, inadequate sewage, poverty.

And, of course, it has not been spared the trash. I suppose the best thing I can say is that at least it’s honest. I’m used to places that find it normal to hide refuse. For those 6-year-old boys, trash in the road is just about as normal as the soldiers they sometimes find there.