- Ahmed Abdul Rida points to his tiny, dilapidated water
pump which sits quietly on the ground in his small home in Sadr City, Baghdad.
-
- "We have one hour of electricity, then none for
8 hours. This pump is all we have to try to pull some water to our home,"
he tells me, "So whenever we get some electricity we try to collect
what water we can in this bowl."
-
- He points to an empty metal bowl that sits near the lifeless
pump.
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- When they do get water, most of the time it is brown
water from the Tigris. The volume of flow from the Tigris, due to all of
the dams upriver from Baghdad, has dropped from 40 billion cubic meters
in the 1960's to 16 billion cubic meters today.
-
- So, the water Ahmed gets for his two and a half hours
a day of electricity is a concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers,
heavy metals from ancient piping, and who knows how much Depleted Uranium,
raw sewage and other chemicals released from American and Iraqi munitions
from the í91 Gulf War, and the more recent Anglo-American Invasion.
-
- He points to a bottle of the last water they collected
to show me a sample of what his family has to drink. It has the color watered
down iced tea and smells like a dirty sock.
-
- No wonder he and his family are constantly plagued by
diarrhea, with many of them suffering from kidney stones. Yet these are
just the most obvious effects from the families in Sadr City who drink
the polluted/contaminated water. For heavy metals in their water also damages
the liver, brain and other internal organs.
-
- All of the houses I visited today in Sadr City had the
same problem-little or no electricity, no running water aside from 2-3
hours a day of the brown smelly liquid that sputters from their pipes when
their small pumps function, and raw sewage outside in the streets where
the children are playing.
-
- This was on a good day. The last rain was several days
ago, and not a big one at that. Ahmed tells me, as do several of the other
men I spoke with throughout the poverty-stricken area, that during most
rain showers there are literally lakes of raw sewage that fill the streets
and the nearby homes.
-
- Geographically, Sadr City is a low point in the region,
so most of the water flows towards it, carrying garbage and raw sewage
when the rains come.
-
- We walk outside and towards another home to see their
dismal pipe situation. On the way, children are playing catch with an old
piece of black rubber (from a tire?) until it lands in the greenish water
standing on the side of the small road between the two houses. A little
girl with dirt smeared arms picks up their ëtoyí and tosses
it back to her friend as sewage drips off it.
-
- "Our children are always sick here. We have tried
picking up areas so they have somewhere clean to play, but people always
throw their garbage there anyway. The government hasn't done anything to
help us yet, and we have asked them,"î a neighbor of Ahmed's
tells me.
-
- He goes on to say that they pay the government the monthly
electrical bill, even though they lack potable water and average 2.5 hours
of electricity per day. There is no sewage system, and pools of it are
standing throughout the neighborhood.
-
- The stench makes me pull my kefir up over my nose at
times. We walk to the end of a street where a large pond of greenish sewage
stands, flies buzzing madly about.
-
- Ahmed says to me,
-
- "The whole area is like this. We have over a million
people here, and all of us suffer. Sometimes we have to drink the sewage.
Yesterday our water smelled like petrol, because there is a station nearby
and we all know the benzene leaks into our water."
-
- I drive to another block of Sadr City and get the same
news from residents there. Constant diarrhea, nausea, and oftentimes kidney
stones.
-
- The usual green and brown streams of sewage line the
street, with children walking across it.
-
- As I walk back towards the car a man tells me,
-
- "Nobody from the Council (US Appointed Iraqi Governing
Council) cares about us here. We hear that companies are coming here to
rebuild, but we havenít seen anything rebuilt. We know they only
came for the oil. Our situation hasn't changed one bit since the Americanís
arrived here. We are still suffering just as we did under Saddam. But now
it is worse because there are fewer jobs, and it is even more dangerous
for us."
-
- Bechtel signed their infrastructure repair/rehabilitation
contract on April 17, 2003. One of the agreements of this contract states
that Bechtel is to repair or rehabilitate critical water treatment, pumping,
and distribution in 15 urban areas in central and southern Iraq within
the first 6 months.
-
- Sadr City, obviously, is not too high on their priority
list.
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