I can’t believe that nine years have already passed since we left our house heading to our farm in a small village, about 60 km north of Baghdad. The house there was built in a way good enough to spend a day but not to host 36 people for almost one month.
It had four rooms and a toilet that we modified into a bathroom, but don’t ask me “HOW?”
We spent the whole war period there; a time full of hard work, fear and worries about the future.
Hard work in a way that we had to do things the way they were done 70 years ago: heating water on an kerosene heater for bathing, cooking and washing dishes. Washing our clothes in a big bowel sitting almost on the floor and then hanging them on the ropes we span on the palm trees. Digging holes to bury the sewage coming out of the WC and a lot more things I only knew from the stories of my grandmother. But still this was the fun part of that time. Now I’ll tell you about the second part: The feeling of fear. A feeling I knew well from the previous wars but I experienced it in a new way, having two little children.
I used to sleep between them trying to keep our heads close together, so in case that any thing happens it would happen to all of us. The fear of loosing someone or keeping someone behind was the greatest.
I still recall that moment when a loud sound came from the sky as if something was falling, a sound that could only end with a big BOMM tearing all of us in pieces. I was outside and my children were in the house. I only knew that I ran as fast as I could to be with them and put our heads together, but thank God nothing happened. The sound ended with nothing. On the next day we learned that this sound had a name; “Sound Bomb” as if the horrible sounds of the real bombs falling all over the country was not enough.
Well, should I really say something about the least part, the one about the worries? Actually it has never ended ever since. It has just changed: first they were about when the war will end, and when we will be able to go home and what will happen after. Now I know that what came after was just what we were afraid of at most.
We made our way back to Baghdad. “The war has stopped” they said, but the streets were saying something else; The burned-out military vehicle on the road side, the mud covering the streets, the damaged check points on the gates of Baghdad and the chaos were telling a sad story of a country that fell. Nothing looked the same, not even the people. Something was missing in their faces. They were all strangers. I never really went back home. A home is where everything is safe and familiar, and that was taken away from me the day Baghdad was killed. I left Iraq with eyes full of tears to offer my children a safe and stable life. But I’ll keep telling them not to forget that once our home was the land of one million palm trees and 25 million citizens, who were just trying to get up from a long history of war and embargo to start live in peace.