Baghdad Journal

Of mobs and men

We did many things today, but two things stand out especially. 1) We went to yet another hospital and this time we were mobbed by angry Iraqis who thought as Americans we might be able to talk some sense into L. Paul Bremer and 2) met the inventor of the inflatable penile implant (who also happens to be the newly appointed Iraqi Minister of Health). He's clever, this inventor/doctor person. Adam says he defused my line of questioning with his teeth, which he'd show us in a wide Cheshire grin at the end of every answer. This may be true.

I was still chuckling about the penile thing when I should have asked him the hard questions. This clever man even set us against each other. I got miffed at Adam for mentioning I was a softy in the interview and brooded in the back seat as we drove to our next assignment. It took some really bad dijej shwarma from the Spinich for us to move on as a team.

The Spinich is a trendy, Popeye-themed restaurant close to the Bab al Muadham district which, oddly enough, has no spinach dishes to speak of. They only have Iraqi kebabs and shwarma, like the kind we eat -- and then immediately swear off -- every lunchtime. Shwarma comes in two varieties, lehem, meat, and dijej, chicken. Adam and I, we do the dijej. But with the food-spoiling heat -- cooler today at about 124 degrees -- and the electricity being cut every three hours, meat and chicken doesn't stand much of a chance staying fit for human consumption there on the rotissery spit for too long. We invaribly arrive at a restaurant just when the dijej, or chicken, decides to get funky.

At the children's hospital, we try to give the parents some candy -- Skittles along with other individually wrapped hard stuff -- for their sick little ones. I give the bag of candy to one lady in a black hajib who looks the most matronly.

But the others in the ward immediately swarm around us saying they didn't need any stinking candy, they needed faloos, money, al-kehreh , electricity and Detol, a kind of detergent to clean the filthy puddles on the floors of the hospital. What could we do for them, they asked Abu Abdullah. These American journalists. What could we do? They wanted us to bring their complaints -- and there were many in that stiffling hot, airless ward -- directly to Ambassador Brahmur, as they called him. They had waited for the "mother of nations" to get the country set on the right course, they said. And they waited, for one, two, three, four months. And so far, leshay, nothing, but this bag of crappy candy. I wondered, as we made our escape, how widely the Cheshire cat man, the newly appointed Minister, this inflatable penile implant inventor, would smile in front of the people in that ward.

Posted by Brandon Sprague at August 11, 2003 10:31 PM | TrackBack