Week

On Sunday I visited City Hall, the Amanat, to check on the current water status in certain parts of the city and to observe the process of the municipal committees and their interaction with the Mayor’s office. Everything was business as usual. Or so I thought. The next morning we were hit with a massive sandstorm. The morning was bloody and tinted with a glow like embers, like rockets, like hot steel melting, like waking up on Mars. A dome of dust, a mist of smoky fine sand hovered and made everything reddish and blurry: where I was going; where I had come from; and even why I was making the trip. The atmosphere here is charged and slight changes in the weather ripple into attitudes and behavior. Or should I say the ‘heat’, because the weather here is ‘heat’ and its many variations-- I have a new kinship with the Eskimo and his world of subtle distinctions-- I could while away hours composing a list of new words to express the different tastes and odors and textures and emotions of the agitations of the molecules in my midst. The heat of a sandstorm is a cool-thick heat, not the sharp, face-gripping hot heat of the typical late summer day. And the air is oppressive and seems to want to be somewhere else; and that feeling is suggested into those required to breathe it. I read the signals of the sky and felt a sense of dread, like a rope tied taut and pulling from behind; it made me slow and cautious. We were hoping to make an important meeting downtown, but the transportation fell through and left us sitting in a darkened office. Then the air conditioner was shut down to prevent the filters from clogging. We received some bad news from the voter registration sites. Many workers were frustrated at the lack of security at some of the sites; there was some miscommunication between a few of the Iraqi police units and the election supervisors. A sense of immobility and frustration sat in the stale air. By Tuesday the storm lifted and the sky had cleared somewhat, but a tenseness remained in the aftermath. News became more clear about the situation at the Amanat; the dilemma of the mayors of Baghdad apparently came to a head. If you read the BBC piece or other reports you may get a general idea of what went down, which was a fairly significant move within the Baghdad political arena. Frustrated with an issue that was in legal limbo, a decision was made to act with the authority of the rifle and the decree. It’s a difficult, diplomatically sticky situation for all involved. While processing that development, we heard that one of our team members in a convoy rolling through town was attacked by a VBIED, a suicide car bomb. The driver detonated while trying to drive into a humvee. One soldier was killed, another seriously wounded. It happened on a route that we are all familiar with. It is a storm here; a storm of heat and dirt. And in the evening the heat doesn’t just go away, it changes; it turns into a reflective heat and that slowly burns off and dissipates into the night and then there must be a moment, a time in the still near the dawn, a pause when the mercury rests, when it’s the coolest it’s going to get and every second before and every second after have more heat and involve more energy, and that moment is between the memories of yesterday and the actions of tomorrow. Somewhere it’s decided just how stormy the day is going to get.