We Meant Well (23 page)

Road to Nowhere

After deciding a paved road would increase commerce in a particular area, the Army hired a contractor. By the time anyone checked on progress neither a paved road nor the previous rutted dirt road was there. The contractor took the money and laid down only gravel. The gravel made the road more passable, and so insurgents started to use the road as a transit route at night. The local residents appealed to the police, who set up barricades, closing off the road entirely, ending what little commerce the original dirt road had sustained. Cost: unknown.

Tarmiyah Hospital

The hospital was a major construction project. The Army finished ten rooms but did not put a roof on the facility before abandoning it for security reasons. The hospital had no power from the grid. The Iraqi Ministry of Health refused to accept the building because it did not have the staff, budget, or supply systems to open the facility—which had no roof. Cost: no one will ever know, but in the millions.

A Newspaper

When you get tired of poor media coverage, you buy your own newspaper. The Army has paid for and distributed its own newspaper,
Baghdad Now
, for years despite its having a readership of near zero. Soldiers would be tasked with handing out copies while on patrol. Costs continue to accumulate and are now in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. My ePRT paid local lawyers to write articles for the area newspaper promoting a free press without disclosing that the writers were funded by the United States. Cost: $25,000, including two generators stolen from the lawyers' offices.

*   *   *

There were almost too many failed projects to document, though SIGIR tried. What SIGIR called a “legacy of waste” in an August 2010 report included a $40 million prison that was never opened, a $104 million failed sewer system in Fallujah, a $171 million hospital in southern Iraq that Laura Bush “opened” in 2004 but that still has never seen a patient, and more, totaling $5 billion. Although some corruption was found, it did not account for a large amount of squandered money. Audits resulted in the restitution of only $70 million worth of embezzled funds, practically a rounding error given the $63 billion spent overall on reconstruction.
44

Back at the old Saddam-era sports facility where we had just watched our nascent NGO training project collapse in a heap of fraud in front of our eyes, I thought about this litany of projects I had known and the money that had been spent. My thoughts were interrupted when the head of the NGO who had taken our money swept into the room and scooped us up, leading the charge out into the hallway. She took us into a room stuffed with sewing machines. Dust covered the machines and several were in pieces. The head of the NGO explained that one of my predecessors had given her $25,000 the previous year to conduct sewing classes, but unfortunately she did not have enough money to pay a teacher, so the classes were on hold. There is an Arabic expression, “A rug is never fully sold,” suggesting negotiations never need end as long as one side sees money to be made. Without missing a beat, she swept her arm over the industrial waste, announced her next venture would be to teach meat processing, and asked us for another $25,000. This time we passed on the opportunity.

Promises to Keep

We not only knew the formula by now, we excelled at it. Receive LOE, create project, spend money, move on. Had we wanted to learn, we would have seen that it wasn't that hard to identify the elements of an effective project: work locally on an issue, spend money on demonstrated need, solve people's problems in a visible way. This was stuff any community organizer or humanitarian aid worker could have told us, had we set aside our hubris long enough to just ask. It was possible that the women's clinic we sponsored in Zafraniyah just might have shown us the way.

Zafraniyah was a usually violent, mixed rural and urban zone on the outskirts of Baghdad, squeezed between the Diyala and Tigris rivers. The area was now mostly Shia, with a Sunni presence. Zafraniyah was something of a case study of postinvasion Iraq, having seen a significant amount of sectarian violence after 2003 and then renewed fighting during the 2007 Surge. Its largest mosque, with a huge green dome that overlooked the main highway into town, was once Sunni. It had allegedly been taken over by the Shia Jaish al-Mahdi militia and was rumored locally to be one of their largest bases outside Sadr City. It was no surprise that in the span of ninety days there had been more than forty significant violent acts nearby.

In the midst of all this wreckage, we were approached by a local women's group looking for a way to help. What women lacked, they said, was even the most basic medical care. Facilities were sparse, and even those designed as full-spectrum medical centers failed the needs of female patients. Most women in Iraq could not see a regular doctor without the permission of a husband or father or older brother, and permission was often denied for “woman problems.” It was often difficult to ensure an appointment with a female medical professional. Many hospitals and especially smaller clinics posted signs reading “Services for Men Only.” We gave $84,000 to the local women's group, and the grantee opened the Al-Zafraniyah Women's Support Center.

The goal of the center was to do a small, good thing: provide a women-only option for medical care right in the community, along with creating a place where women could meet and talk about their lives. The area women were clear that they liked their veils and they liked raising their kids, and they worked hard to make sure their daughters grew up the same way. Few of our efforts acknowledged this, and many times we proceeded into failure believing the Iraqis wanted to be like us, sustained in our vision by locals who had learned that goodies would flow if they said the things we wanted to hear.

At our center, a social worker was on-site five days a week. She was available for one-on-one counseling sessions and she also met with groups of five or six women to discuss shared problems. Her meetings addressed such issues as displacement, lost and damaged property, child rearing, and the once taboo topic of domestic violence. Two lawyers on staff offered free legal advice and presented cases to local councils or courts. A legal assistant helped women collect documentation for claims and provided other administrative support as they sought to secure public assistance. The cases primarily involved obtaining social benefits from the government and the transference of pensions from deceased relatives (typically husbands killed in post-2003 violence) to the client. One woman wanted a divorce (a few years earlier, she had married a relative who had two children by his first wife; shortly after she gave birth to a daughter, the husband returned to his first wife), and another needed to legitimize her four children from an unregistered relationship, the father now dead, so that they could attend school, should schools ever reopen in the area. Another woman, fired from her job because of her political affiliation, hoped for redress from the Ministry of Industry.

A female medical doctor came to our center twice a week to see patients. She also taught first aid and led health workshops. One session covered breast cancer awareness, infections, and hygiene. The doctor began with a question-and-answer session in which some participants spoke openly for perhaps the first time about family members who were victims of breast cancer. At the end of the session, the doctor examined women by request, referred some who could afford it to hospitals, and provided limited amounts of free medicine to others.

In a typical week the doctor saw several instances of emaciation, delayed growth, and hair loss in children—all signs of malnutrition. Most of the clients were from low-income families. And because women were afraid or unable to get medical attention, small things like minor urinary infections often were not treated until they became quite serious. A typical roster:

Age 28, urinary tract infection

Age 40, untreated old tonsillitis

Age 38, kidney stone

Age 19, urinary tract infection

Age 43, arthritis

Age 43, urinary tract infection

Age 38, emaciation

Age 42, hypertension

Age 40, hypertension

Age 28, emaciation

Age 11, emaciation

Age 13, growth retardation

Age 21, delayed puberty and hair loss

Age 60, breathing difficulty

Age 60, old untreated burns affecting movement

Age 18, urinary tract infection

Age 36, lipoma in the thigh

Age 55, old untreated bone fracture

More than a hundred women and girls visited the center in its first month, though concerns about security no doubt kept many away. The project, at least, delivered on its promise, helping women in genuine need. Nevertheless, it was closed down after six months. The initial funding had run out, and US priorities had moved on to flashier economic targets. Women's centers, the Embassy announced, were not a “prudent investment.”

Dairy Carey

Given the scope of the problems we confronted in Iraq, one person really could not make a big difference, though it was still possible that one person could make a small difference, and that was often worth the effort. With the slow-motion failure of our expensive milk-collection facilities on our minds, we decided that one path toward a solution lay in increasing the amount of milk farmers produced. This would give them an incentive to sell to our centers without having to abandon the existing system of selling just in the neighborhood. As luck would have it, a sister PRT was trying to get rid of someone they labeled a bit of a troublemaker, Dairy Carey. She had made up the nickname herself, having been raised plain old Carey on a dairy farm. Carey was over sixty years old, a grandma back home, and a retired employee of the US Department of Agriculture. She was rumored to not be able to stick to a plan, often balking at what she felt were dumb ideas that fell from the Green Zone and angering her team leader.

We worked with the people we could get, not the people we might have wanted in Iraq, and so, troublemaker or not, Dairy Carey was our newest ePRT team member. Despite the importance of dairy farming to the one million people in our province, we would have to make do with this single employee. She knew she could not directly reach many farmers, so Dairy Carey's plan was to train other trainers. The classes would teach them how to take better care of cows, and our new experts would then go forth and preach their knowledge. Grateful cows would in turn produce more and better milk, which the farmer could sell. Everyone would do better economically and folks would have no reason to become terrorists. We would select only female farmers as potential trainers, to secure easy funding. Eight years into the war our success now depended on cow happiness.

The problems started right as we walked in the door on the first day of class. The room was full of women, aged seventeen to about fifty-five, and only a few claimed to have ever tended to a cow. There were also lots of men milling about. While it all seemed a bit odd, a quick roll call made things worse when it turned out almost none of the “students” were the female farmers we had been told would be there. It seemed the local sheik had taken it upon himself to substitute the wives and daughters of the men in the room, all of whom were related to the sheik, in an effort to skim off a bit of the $200 salary we were going to pay those who completed the course. An attempt to generate a roster by passing around a sheet of paper demonstrated that five of the twelve students could not read or write.

Dairy Carey waded in, shooing the men out of the room and pairing each illiterate woman with one who could read and write. With the chaos sorted out, our teacher started with what seemed like some pretty commonsense tips: feed the cows better quality food and give them lots of water and you'll get more milk. Easy for us to say. For thousands of years, the handful of actual women farmers present told Dairy Carey, Iraqis had fed their cows stale bread. It was cheap to buy and bulky enough that the cows did not eat much of it. The farmers could keep feed costs low, and the bakers were happy to have a place to dump old bread. Water was a problem, too. It was hard to find and heavy to carry, and so the cows generally got water only twice a day. The cows adapted by lying around and not producing much milk. But that was all right with the people in the room, as they were not interested in getting more milk. They had no cars or trucks to transport it, no pool of employees outside the family to take on more work, and no refrigeration, and so whatever milk was produced each day was drunk at home or sold next door. Our American goal, to help Iraqis produce more milk, was irrelevant. They had a system in place that predated our idea by approximately five thousand years. More was not better.

Our agricultural grandma was undeterred. What about quality? Iraq, sadly, led the world in the transfer of tuberculosis from animals to people via unpasteurized milk. The local technique of throwing feed on the ground for the cow ensured each meal would be contaminated by the usual Jackson Pollock–like splatter of animal urine and manure. Thus Iraq also led the world in cow diseases. Some udder infections were so bad that pus came out of the teat instead of sweet creamy milk.

Ah ha! The crowd sat up. Ready to throw us out the door for proposing to increase their milk yield, they were definitely interested in producing milk that was not deadly. Dairy Carey explained that simple tests for bacteria (similar to home pregnancy kits) could detect bad milk slightly less savagely than feeding it to babies and seeing if they lived. She gave a quick overview of germ theory, segueing smoothly into a brief history of pasteurization, followed by some slides showing basic vet tools for keeping cows healthy. In the span of minutes she had this group in rural Iraq enthralled. The rising noise level brought the men, almost all of whom were farmers, back into the room. There weren't enough chairs and from the back of the space I lost sight of Dairy Carey, surrounded now by energized men and women.