Redeployment(27)

“Small?” said Bob. “A water treatment plant?”

“It’s probably the best thing we could—”

“I’ve been here longer than you,” said Bob.

“Okay.”

“If you want to succeed, don’t do big ambitious things. This is Iraq. Teach widows to raise bees.”

“Raise bees?” I said.

“Beekeep?” he said. “Whatever. Grow honey. Get five widows some beehives—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got an Iraqi who can sell us the hives, and an Iraqi local council saying they’ll support the project—”

“Bob,” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The embassy likes completed projects supporting Lines of Engagement.”

“Which has what to do with getting five widows beekeeping?”

Bob folded his arms and looked me over. He pointed to the opposite wall, where we had a poster outlining the LOEs. “Give someone a job. That’s economic improvement. Give women a job. That’s women’s empowerment. Give a widow a job. That’s aiding disenfranchised populations. Three LOEs in one project. Widow projects are gold. With the council supporting it, we can say it’s an Iraqi-led project. And it’ll cost under twenty-five thousand dollars, so the funding will sail through.”

“Five widows with beehives.”

“I think it’s called an apiary,” he said.

“Beekeeping,” I said, “is not going to help.”

“Help what?” said Bob. “This country is f*cked whatever you do.”

“I’m going to focus on water,” I said. “Let’s get that plant running.”

“Okay,” he said. He shook his head, then looked up and smiled amiably. He seemed to have decided I could go to hell my own way. “Then we should get you to one of the companies at Istalquaal.”

“Istalquaal,” I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.

“I think that’s how you say it,” Bob said. “It means freedom. Or liberation. Something.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“They didn’t name it,” he said. “We did.”





? ? ?


It took six weeks to get to the plant. Three weeks alone trying to get Kazemi, the chief engineer, on the phone. Another three trying to nail down the specifics. Kazemi had an annoying habit of answering questions about dates and times the way a Zen master answers questions about enlightenment. “Only the mountains do not meet,” he’d say, or, “The provisions for tomorrow belong to tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Cindy’s women’s health clinic took off. She set it up on the Sunni side of the highway, and the number of patients increased steadily each week. I didn’t have much to do on the water front, and sitting around waiting for Kazemi to get back to me was enough to drive me insane, so I decided to get myself personally involved in the clinic. I didn’t really trust Cindy with it. I thought she was too earnest to handle something important, and the more she told me, the more I thought the project was genuinely worthwhile.

In Iraq, it’s hard for women to see a doctor. They need a man’s permission, and even then a lot of hospitals and small clinics won’t serve them. You’ll see signs reading, “Services for Men Only,” sort of like the old “Irish Need Not Apply” signs that my great-great-grandfather had to deal with.

Health services were the hook to draw people in, but key to the broader functioning of the clinic were Najdah, a dogged social worker, and her sister, the on-staff lawyer. Every woman who came in was interviewed first, ostensibly for the clinic to find out what health services they needed but actually to allow us to find out what broader services we could provide. The problems of women in our area went far beyond untreated urinary tract infections, though those were often quite severe—women’s problems were usually not sufficient pretext for a man to allow his wife or daughter or sister to go see the doctor, and health issues we think of as minor in the United States had a tendency to snowball. One woman’s UTI scarred her kidneys so badly, she was risking organ failure.

The clinic also helped women needing divorces, women suffering domestic violence, women not getting the public assistance they were entitled to, and women who wanted to file claims against Coalition Forces to get compensation for relatives they’d accidentally killed. One girl, a fourteen-year-old victim of gang rape, came in because her family planned to sell her to a local brothel. This wasn’t uncommon for girls whose rapes destroyed their marriage prospects. It was actually a kinder option than the honor killings that still sometimes happened.