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Americans Experience Life in Iraq BASRA, Iraq (AP) — A horde of small children rushed to greet five American activists Sunday as the activists went to clean a primary school in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of this southern Iraqi city. ``We love American children,'' sang the barefoot children. After six weeks in Basra, the activists from the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, which opposes U.N. sanctions against Iraq, have become household names. The Americans came to Basra in mid-July intent on experiencing firsthand the discomforts of a country that has been under siege from sanctions for a decade. They chose the low-income al-Jumhouriya neighborhood, where nearly 200,000 residents live on meager food rations and deal with regular power cuts and sewage problems. The activists are Kathy Kelly of Chicago; Lisa Gizzi of St. Paul, Minn.; Mark McGuire of Winona, Minn. and Tom Jackson and Lauren Cannon, both of Dover, N.H. A sixth member, Ken Hannaford-Ricardi of Worcester, Mass., was unable to tolerate life in al-Jumhouriya, a labyrinth of mostly one-story crumbling brick houses bisected by open sewage and dotted with dumps of uncollected garbage. He stayed for only two weeks. Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, bore the brunt of Iraq's 1980-1988 war with Iran and then the 1991 Gulf War. The wars devastated its infrastructure, and the sanctions imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait have made rehabilitation almost impossible. U.S. missiles slammed al-Jumhouriya on Jan. 25, 1999, killing 11 people, injuring 59 and demolishing dozens of houses. U.S. officials have said it was likely that U.S. jets targeting Iraqi air defense installations as part of a southern no-fly zone misfired. The U.S. activists have become a familiar sight in al-Jumhouriya. Like the Iraqi families they are staying with, they sleep on the roof at night to escape excessive heat during power cuts that last up to 14 hours, bathe by dumping bowls of water over their heads and use fans to cool their faces and drive off insects. In the morning, they meet for their Arabic class. Kelly, Cannon and Gizzi have picked up enough colloquial Arabic to communicate with the locals. Because two of them have already contracted diarrhea, the Americans now drink bottled water — their only luxury. Many families come to the Americans for help, but there is little Kelly and her group can do. Umm Mohammed wants medicine to alleviate her arthritis. University students visit them for books, newspapers or magazines. Such items are banned by the sanctions. ``I have only seen a few old books in this neighborhood,'' Cannon said. After they end their mission in early September, the activists plan to stage a demonstration outside the White House and auction hundreds of fans on the Internet to highlight the plight of the Iraqis. They also plan to give fans free of charge to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the U.S. presidential candidates and State Department employees who staff the Iraq desk. For Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the activists will take a mat sewn by teen-age girls made of small plastic bags. They are the same bags in which rationed powdered milk is distributed. ``The propaganda in the United States tells the American people that there is only one person (President Saddam Hussein) who lives here,'' Kelly said. ``The Americans do not know that here in Iraq are 22 million people deprived of education, employment, clean water, power supply and other essential services.'' Voices has led more than 30 delegations of U.S. citizens to Iraq to see the effects of the sanctions. Their tours include visits to pediatric wards of dying children and inoperative water treatment plants.
Bad water has created an epidemic of dysentery and infectious diseases, resulting in thousands of child deaths. UNICEF says the number of infant and child deaths in Iraq has doubled in the decade since the sanctions began.
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