'Go Home'
Even in the sheltered walls of an upscale Baghdad preschool, tragedy and loss are everywhere. A teacher's tale.
The preschoolers in Ban Ibrahim's classroom have never lived in anything but a war zone. All born in 2003, the 5-year-olds have grown up with the occupation. And that, says Ibrahim, makes them unlike any children she has taught before. Some are particularly aggressive, routinely kicking their classmates and acting out the violence they have seen in their short lives. Others, exposed to satellite television and the Internet, are much more keenly aware of the world outside their country's borders than those who grew up under Saddam ever were. And none of them like to go home at the end of the day. "In school, they're allowed to forget everything," says teacher Bayder Al Khalil.
When the Coalition troops first arrived, Ibrahim--a Shia who wears a black headscarf and long abaya--says she had high hopes for the future of her country without Saddam. From her parents' home, she watched as American tanks rolled by, and she greeted the troops by shouting "salaam aleikum" as they passed. She hoped for the best. "We thought we would be like Dubai," she told NEWSWEEK outside of her classroom at the Tekamul School in one of Baghdad's wealthiest neighborhoods recently. "We have all the wealth, the oil wells, land for farming and our people are more educated than the people in the U.A.E.
Civilization was founded here."
<skip>
But as the war continued, it soon began to take its toll. The school's 300 children often came to school visibly stressed, and at least five of them have lost a parent to the violence. "I tried to comfort them by telling them that their parents had gone to heaven, to a very peaceful place, to try to make them forget all the violence," she says. But it was impossible to protect them from the reality of the deteriorating situation across Baghdad. One day, when Ibrahim was teaching a class on drawing, she showed the children a picture of a car and asked them to tell her what it was. To her surprise, they all responded, "a bomb." And when they see U.S. soldiers, she says, some of them shout, "Don't stay here. This is our country. Go home."
Click Here!
<skip>
"We're disappointed," says Ibrahim when asked whether she will ever look back and consider the war to have been worth it. "At the beginning, we thought the Americans were coming with flowers in their hands to save us from the depression we were living in. We had big dreams about what would happen. We thought they were our friends, but now we feel they are our enemies and they must go," she says. Her advice to America now to bring about the best possible outcome? "You should go home and let us live our life."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/123389
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
