" Abbiamo fatto un giro in macchina oggi, per vedere le aree in cui sono cadute le bombe. Non abbiamo conferme di quante persone siano state colpite. Gli edifici governativi, i ministeri sono stati completamente distrutti.
La corrispondenza da Baghdad di un insegnante volontario dell'Iraq peace team.
Se qualcuno può tradurre parti del racconto, può metterle sotto come commenti.
Grazie

A Letter from Baghdad to America E-mail this
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Bettejo Passalaqua, Iraq Peace Team

24 March 2003

Hello to everyone. I hope all is well with all of you. I wish I could say things are well here in Baghdad. In fact I and my fellow team members are doing Okay. But things are not well at all. Things are very wrong here. War is so very very wrong and to see its
effects, increasing daily, rips a hole in my heart which seems as big as the holes ripped in the structures I visited today. I haven't even been to the hospitals to meet the injured yet.

We took a drive around the city today to see some of the bombing sites. I don't have any reliable information on how many people were injured or killed in these bombings. Most of what we saw were government buildings: ministry of planning, ministry of trade,
ministry of information, etc. Regular staff had been evacuated when the threat of bombing became imminent, but there were guards on duty and people nearby (some buildings were in the center of the city) that were injured or killed.

For some reason, the loss of life was not what struck me so heavily. It was seeing the shells of the buildings, buildings which represent the ingenuity and creativity of human beings, the human desire for beauty, and the honor we feel for the beauty we create. The destruction of buildings is to me the antithesis of the things which make us authentically human.

A little later we went to a home that had been bombed. I assume this bombing was a mistake, and (thank God) there were not serious injuries even though there were eight people in the home at the time. The house was a two-story home in a residential neighborhood. The missile came through the roof and landed in what appeared to be a bedroom on the second floor. There was a picture on the wall of some female pop star, so I assume the room belonged to a teenager.

We were not able to meet any of the family who were in the home at the time - they went first to a shelter and are now staying with family members. A brother of the owner was there and gave us an acoount of the attack. Much of it was recorded (in Arabic) and will be translated for us by a friend. All I got was that it happened about 7:30 PM on Saturday as the family was eating dinner, or getting ready for dinner. Several neighbors were present. I asked one man if he was afraid a missile would hit his house. He admitted no
fear, but indicated his children were indeed frightened.

Then I met up with a group of children who live nearby. They were so incredibly casual about it all. I asked them if they were afraid that a missile would hit their house. One little boy shrugged and said, "I will go to paradise." He couldn't have been more than eight years old.

As we were leaving, the brother of the owner of the bombed house wished us all peace, with total sincerity.

I do not have the right words to convey my perspective of these experiences. And perhaps this is as it should be. We relate to one another on a human level through the medium of words, but words are insufficient to relay our deepest feelings. What I witnessed today is stuck in the deepest part of my being. War is inhumane. Our sacred language, born of human relations, will never fully describe the scourge of war and its denial of everything it means to be human.

Bettejo Passalaqua is a teacher from Omak, Washington, and an advocate for justice among indigenous peoples in the United States. She is living in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team, a group of international peaceworkers - organized by Voices in the Wilderness - remaining in Iraq through the war, in order to be a voice for the Iraqi people in the West. The Iraq Peace Team can be reached at info@vitw.org




Page last updated: 24 March 2003, 13:16 CST