June 17, 2003
Nightmares
Didn't sleep much last night. Head full of laughing kids and radiation alarm bells jangling.
It only took half a day to find the very thing we really didn't want to find, but feared we would - right outside a primary school near the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, we measured radioactivity at least three thousand times above normal levels.
That in itself is scary enough - our worst fears realised within hours of starting - but the real wrench in our guts was not finding it - it was realising it was the very spot where a ragged and smiling collection of kids had been standing when we arrived.
Of course they stood there, it's a handy corner to peer round when curiosity overcomes the initial suspicion of three cars full of strange looking foreigners in your village.
It's the corner people stand and chat on; it's the corner of someone's garden.
It is also less than twenty metres from Al- Majidat primary school. 900 shiny, laughing, smiling boys and girls shuffle and skip, some bare foot, through the dust and dirt every morning passed that very spot.
We had some tape yesterday and marked off the road - the kids thought it was great - a new game to play. The mentality of a child is universal - tell any child in any part of the world not to go some where, to stay here, don't touch, not to play - we all know what they do. But cheeky kids in the rest of the world don't have a radioactive source outside their school that could kill them so it doesn't matter. Here it matters.
We got a riotous welcome on our return. They know there is danger - and we have brought the news of the danger to their door - but still they cheer and smile. We worked all through the day in the fierce heat that our Western bodies are unaccustomed to, hammering in the signs we had made with the radiation symbol and Danger - Keep Out written in Arabic. We are hopelessly ill equipped for the scale of the problem and it was pitiful to see how grateful they still were for our wooden yellow signs and lengths of green rope.
It is too dangerous for us to move the source at this stage, we don't know what it is, nor can we pin point exactly where - we could make the problem worse if we disturb it. How do you explain that to the teachers and families - they just want someone to help them make their homes and school safe?
It's exam time at the school - life goes on - exams have to be taken, the children have to learn - it's a crime that eight year old girls and boys are now being forced to learn about the dangers of radioactivity before they even get into the classroom.
I spoke to one of the teachers - she told me they were ashamed to have this problem in their midst - I told her the shame was not theirs - it was those who failed to secure the nuclear plant after the war, but took care to ensure the oil pipelines were protected, it was those who allowed investigators from the British Museum in to Iraq to search for stolen treasures within days, but did not let the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in to search for stolen nuclear material for two months - and then not even with a mandate to search, it was those who claim still that they are responsible for public health in Iraq and say there is no problem - it is the occupying forces. She shrugged her shoulders in despair and walked slowly away.
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