Garbage is piled high in the streets. Children play in open gutters filled with raw sewage. Unemployment is
              high. Power failures are frequent in the
              100-plus temperatures. With no fans operating, people often sleep on the roof at night to stay cool.

              Such are the conditions in Basra in southern Iraq, according to two Minnesotans who spent seven weeks
              living with families there before returning home this month.

              "My conviction about the injustice of the [economic] sanctions has been redoubled," said Lisa Gizzi of St.
              Paul, the editor of Mizna, a Minneapolis literary journal. "Clearly, the people are suffering."

              Said Mark McGuire, a beef farmer who lives in Homer Township, 2 miles southeast of Winona: "I came
              back feeling the urgency, more than ever, that [the sanctions] have to be lifted to give these people a chance
              to rebuild their lives and their country."

              Gizzi, 32, and McGuire, 49, were among six Americans who lived in Basra this summer with permission
              from the Iraqi government. Their trip was sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based
              organization campaigning to lift the Iraqi sanctions.

              The United Nations imposed the sanctions in August 1990 after Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait. The
              sanctions ban international trade with Iraq. After the Gulf War, the Security Council made lifting of the
              sanctions conditional on Iraq destroying its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

              Gizzi and McGuire say conditions of ordinary Iraqis are grim.

              McGuire said he lived in a four-room house with a family of 10, including a husband and wife, their
              daughters and grandchildren, where there are no beds or tables. Only the husband worked -- as a guard at
              an oil refinery where he earned $22 to $25 a month. McGuire said they were slightly better off than the
              poorest families he met.

              When the 10 family members were not sleeping on the roof they slept in a single room on pads on the floor
              that were lined up in front of a small drum that blew air cooled by a pan of water, he said.

              "The disintegration was a lot further advanced than I realized," McGuire said. "There was raw sewage in the
              streets; the smell was always there. So many were out of work. ... They don't really have an organized
              economy."

              He said he ate what the family ate -- rice, lentils and homemade flat bread, and every so often they would
              be able to buy a watermelon or an eggplant.

              "What was most impressive was the inner strength which they are still able to muster up after living so
              harshly for 10 years. I don't think I would be able to keep that up," McGuire said.

              Gizzi said the heat was "excruciating," with temperatures as high as 120 or
              130, which made the wind feel like a hair dryer blowing on you. But no one had fans because of the
              frequent power failures "due to the deterioration of the electrical infrastructure since the Gulf War and the
              inability to import spare parts under the sanctions," she said.

              Both Gizzi and McGuire said that several times a week, U.S. planes flew overhead, but no air
              confrontations occurred near them. An area was bombed about 75 miles away, which they said they visited
              three weeks later. Gizzi said planes bombed a rail station and several homes and businesses.

              She said they saw a man who worked at the station with shrapnel wounds and a
              4-year-old girl in a state of shock, unable to move or speak.

              According to BBC News Online, the U.S. Defense Department said U.S. warplanes hit two anti-aircraft
              sites on Aug. 12 in response to Iraqi fire. The BBC quoted Iraq as saying a train station was hit, wounding a
              number of civilians. An official from the British Ministry of Defense was quoted by the BBC as saying, "We
              do not target civilian areas."