Its frustrating trying to do anything in Baghdad without regular electricity or a functioning telephone system, amid constant traffic jams, worsened by road blocks, checkpoints, petrol queues, walls and coils of razor wire which squeeze the already huge volume of traffic into even smaller spaces.
At the same time its amazing how much can be done with a few people, a little money and a big idea.
Happy Family (Aila Saida in Arabic) is a group of young Iraqi actors and dancers working with children on arts projects. It is based in the family home of Safa, one of its members. The patio, covered with a canopy, serves as an improvised stage; the space in front of it is separated by a curtain from a boggy landscape, the preserve of chickens and rusting car parts that the group cant yet afford to turn into a library, dressing room and proper garden.
More on Iraq in openDemocracy:
- Caspar Hendersons Globolog,
Barefoot and Pregnant (March 2004)
- Paul Rogers: Americas Iraq predicament (March 2004)
- Raeid Jewad, Return to Baghdad (February 2004)
In a street more mud than tarmac, the house and garden are always alive with children. Founded in 2000, the band used to have twenty-five members but is now down to ten because the rest had to leave to find paid work. Raed, the sound engineer, runs a music shop. Mustafa makes a living as a professional singer and dancer. Fuad was in jail for a year for refusing military service. Conscripted anyway on his release, he escaped from the army at the start of the 2003 war and hid out at Safas house until it was over.
For me, the road to working alongside Happy Family began in March 2003, just after the start of the war, with a four-year old boy called Mohammed. He was sitting silently in his grandmothers lap, the last family shelter after a missile strike that had ripped apart his home, his sister, his aunt, his cousin and some of the skin on his face. When he put out his hand, touched a bubble in front of him and popped it, the small upturn of his mouth and creasing round his eyes came as if he was just remembering how to smile.
Then, months later, the road became a circle. It started to come together at a summer festival in England, with the figure of a man blowing giant bubbles over a circus field. I walked towards him and started imagining. Over the next few months, I had to learn to transform the wildest dream bringing a full travelling circus and funfair to Iraq into something realistic and achievable: finding four enthusiastic, talented performers to join me on the road to Baghdad, then chasing around the city collecting the required pieces of paper from ministries. This last part was easily the most difficult.
The shock of the new
The crisis shelter for street kids was in a bad bit of town - grubby, smelly and falling apart. The boys who gravitated there had been unable to settle elsewhere in the city, and seemed starved of affection. They all ran to throw their arms around us, and at the sight of our bright red parachute, started laughing, shaking, lifting and crawling over and under it turning it into a big rose-coloured dome with them all inside, the squalor shut out.
Peats juggling, and his fine balancing of Joe King the clown on a stick on his nose, stunned them into temporary silence. As for walking on stilts, at first only a couple of the boys were brave enough to try, but their example inspired all the others.
After several visits, they even started to work as a team - communicating, cooperating, playing without kicking each other. At the joint Happy Family / Circus2Iraq show for the Eid festival, we watched them take turns to wear the Sylvester and Tweetie Pie costumes and dance for the smaller kids, basking in the applause and appreciation, getting inside their own creativity. It was pure joy.
It was after this show that an Iraqi reporters Spanish-language interview with a French clown resulted in an article about our 26-country tour and our status as one of the most famous circuses in the world. We were introduced as such on Iraqi TV. Our translator refused to upset the journalist by explaining the more prosaic reality. It has become part of our legend and something to live up to.
This being Baghdad, death threats stopped play. The gang that had supplied the boys with drugs and glue were offended less by the circus than by the shelters success in helping the boys stop using drugs. But the emergency had a positive side: a new orphanage, after weeks of promises and delay, was galvanised into offering accommodation to the boys. We piled all the kids into the car and round to their new home.
The sounds of life
The farm complex at al-Shaala outside Baghdad, once owned by Saddams elder son Uday, is now occupied by around 125 families with 800 children in all. Shia from southern Iraq, they are among the most deprived people in the country. The families live in reed houses, tents, breezeblock shacks and farm buildings. Much of the tribal structure remains from their former homes. There is a formal decision-making process, with families pooling subscriptions to build a bridge across the narrow river outside the camp, and eighteen metres of pipe, the beginning of a drainage system.
There is both water and electricity (when the national power is on), but only for animals at present; there is no sanitation, and sewage flows through the camp. At the entrance one day was a mourning tent for a two-month old girl. Abu Ahmed said simply, she died of the cold. Inside one of the shacks a mix of breezeblock, reed, and canvas 4-year old Abbas had lain under a blanket for three weeks, his legs rotting after they were burnt on the paraffin stove. He hadnt seen a doctor because there was no money.
Eleven-year old Marwa is helping her mother with domestic work, and talks confidently about how much water a family uses in a day. She wants to return to school so she can study to be a doctor. There is no school here, let alone money to send her there. The second time we visited the camp to perform and play parachute games, she and many other girls joined in, asking to be picked as cat or mouse and shrieking with joy as they shook the fabric. For one deaf and mute boy, the vibrations from Luiss didgeridoo, held to his ear, was the first music he ever heard.
Ali Al-Rasheed, Iraqs leading authority on post-traumatic stress (PTSD) in children, says that a majority of children in Iraq show symptoms of this condition - including learning disorders and behavioural problems. Any sign of mental illness is stigmatised in Iraq and parents would not take a bed-wetting child for medical attention. In this context, Dr Ali emphasises the value of play therapy, including art and music therapy, as the best available means of diagnosing and rehabilitating children with PTSD. Indeed, few people here have questioned the need for a circus to entertain. The adult viewers and the streets themselves are transformed by play.
Read Jo Wildings articles in ElectronicIraq, ProgressiveTrail.org and her own site, Wildfire
Circus2Iraq is not here to distribute aid, nor have we got the money to do it. But helping the rehabilitation of a generation of children is as vital as any physical repair. We sent emails about the camps plans and within days enough money arrived for the drainage system, and for the conversion of a roofless poultry shed into the beginnings of a school. This will boost the families claim to stay on the land after the new Iraqi government is established.
The rebirth of solidarity
There are many such small, empowering initiatives being run today by Iraqi organisations: Happy Family itself, Childhood Voice running youth centres with art projects and child psychologist support; actors touring hospitals, orphanages and camps for internally displaced persons; writers setting up a National Association for Environment and Children. Iraqis are rebuilding their civil society. It is moving, even inspiring, to see.
After the success of the first month, we are planning to turn Circus2Iraq into a long-term project, keeping three or four circus teachers and performers in Iraq full-time, working with particular institutions for a set period. One of them will be Dar al-Banaat, an orphanage where 85 girls live, from tiny ones to 18-year olds.
As Uzmas clown howled melodramatically over her music box, crushed, jumped on and shoved in a bin by the bullying boss clown, pig-tailed 7-year old Afra crept across, picked up Uzmas broom and started sweeping. It was one of the cutest acts of solidarity Ive ever seen - this in a country where standing by your friends so often means danger. I know its only a game but it felt like the start of something the circus revolution.
There is a MissingLink Cabaret in aid of Circus2Iraq on Saturday 13 March 2004 at The Circus Space, London, N1 (near Old Street). For more details, click here
