I woke up cursing this morning. Cursing because my deep sleep was rudely interrupted by the aircon in my bedroom coughing loudly into life. What was I thinking..... I was still sleepy, but cursing the aircon when it starts working is just bad karma......The Daewoo Window Fixed Airconditioner Fan Swing model number DBW 180RH-R gods will punish me today i fear...
Having said that ....... we have had power - and therefore full, fan-swinging aircon, for a full, uninterrupted and gloriously cold two hours so far.
This morning I have to catch up on our accounts - Janet back in Amsterdam will be proud of me. Anyone else who knows me will probably fall about laughing to know I am in charge of keeping track of the money. But as there are no boots to buy I should be okay (I have a bit of a shoe fetish I confess - three weeks in the same pair is just another thing I have to come to terms with here!!!!)
Later today we are planning to visit some of the local hospitals. One we have already seen is so comprehensively looted it is virtually pointless. Certainly none has the capacity to test patients and tell the difference between the usual disease that goes hand in gripping hand with extreme poverty or the early stages of radiation sickness.
When your food is in such short supply, raw sewage runs past your front door and the water you drink comes from rusted filthy pipes or worse, the still and green-tinged river, the most hardened bodies are not immune.
We are also planning to meet with the local editor of one of the new free (free cost as well as free speech) newspapers that has sprung up since the fall of Saddam. Freedom of speech was a luxury not afforded to the people here. They use is with gusto now and it is not surprising. I have heard stories of people who would not speak ill of Saddam in the privacy of their own homes because they feared reprisal through his insidious network.
I have heard stories of sons and fathers being taken away because they dared to disagree.
Freedom of speech, of thought, of action is something so many of us take for granted - I am thankful for that freedom and cheered that here too they can express themselves. The hurdle now is not being fearful of speaking out, it is the despair of not being heard.
There is a village near Tuwaitha called Mansir (might have spelt that wrong) - it means "The Forgotten Place" - at the moment there are Mansirs everywhere you look.
(Just been damned by the Deawoo gods by the way.....back into the inferno)