An old man slumbers on a rotten and stinking sofa as a malnourished scruffy child in rags bats around a ball in the dust and flies buzz through the decay. In Baghdad the homeless live hand to mouth.
Left with no income after her son was killed in the war, and with her husband old and helpless, Salwa Lifan Salman had to leave her working-class home and move into a squat at the bombed-out Iraqi air force headquarters in the centre of the capital.
Her family of 13 -- 10 of them children -- is today crammed into the small room she rents for 50,000 dinars (40 dollars, 30 euros) a month from an alleged landlord who probably has no legal right over the public building.
"He told us he was the owner, that he had bought the ground. We're frightened he'll kick us out if we don't pay," said Salman, enveloped in the black abaya. She is 43, but already she looks like an old woman.
Surrounded by other families in a similar predicament, Salman picks a living amid the ruins left when US warplanes bombed the base in 2003. There is no electricity and only a single tap outside on the pavement for water.
Frightened about being turfed out by the council, she prefers not to make problems. "If we don't live here, there's no where else to go," she said.
Her family is so poor that none of her children goes to school.
Four of the children had a rudimentary education when they lived in the Shiite slum district of Sadr City. Tuition may be free, but Salman cannot afford to clothe her children or buy the necessary books and pencils for their schooling.
So they run wild.
"We looked for work but there isn't any," she said. In Iraq, where war and insecurity are the primary concerns, reconstruction is limited and funds are short. It goes without saying that her family receives no help from the authorities.
"We sell on a little rice or flour from food packages that are handed out" by charities or social services, she said. Some of her fellow squatters sell oil on the black market to customers too impatient to queue at petrol stations.
"We are trying to live on 10,000 dinars (eight dollars, six euros) a day for the whole family. There are days when we don't even manage that," said Salman.
The United Nations sets the poverty line in Iraq at living on less than a dollar per day per person.
Former builder Faik Hasun, who through illness lost part of his sight in one eye and also now needs crutches to get around, is someone else who survives hand to mouth, camping out in a workman's hut in the bombed compound.
Originally from Jadida in northeast Baghdad, he says he left his family in order not to be a burden to them. Today he exists in near total destitution.
From time to time, restaurant or cafeteria workers give him things such as crackers to sell on the street.
Hasun has access to neither running water nor electricity -- just a little stove for winter. But temperatures are already rising, and before long the squatters will be hit by the merciless Baghdad summer and 50-degree Celsius (122-degree Fahrenheit) heat.
"The situation is going from bad to worse. We have never been so badly off," he said. "Our only chance is if the violence stops and the country recovers some stability. Then there will be a little work.
"Economically things will get better and people like me will have a chance to live a bit better."
Crashing from a thriving economy in the 1970s and 1980s, a third of Iraq's population of 27 million now lives in poverty, according to a recent study by Iraq's planning ministry and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
For Salman, Hasun and the rest of Baghdad's poverty-stricken homeless, hand-outs are the key to their survival. They are the living statistics whose only hope is that one day things will improve in the aftermath of war.
No comments:
Post a Comment