Spring flowers

Spring blooms

There hasn't been much rain here in the last two weeks, a few drops around midnight two nights ago, a little drizzle before that. Against all odds, there are patches of green here and there on this otherwise brown landscape. Today I found this little flower growing inside the running track. I haven't a clue what it, but you can see the concrete hard cracked mud beneath it that it is forcing itself through. Today's bike ride to the irrigation pond yielded two Black-winged Stilts and dozens of what I think are Wood Doves settled down for the evening in the dead limbs of tamarisk trees by the dozen. There were plenty of Crested Larks on the gravel roads and one bird that looked very much like a Ruffed Grouse back home. I haven't seen any of the nasties that the Army trained me to be on the lookout for... camel spiders, scorpions or snakes. If they are out here, they are staying out of my way. I'm anxious to see a jackal or fox, but so far, only footprints in the mud near the running track that could be from them.

I met with an Iraqi contractor today that told me bluntly that he was putting his life in danger working for me. The attraction of the $2 billion dollars in construction jobs we responsible for in the south draws both excellent and awful bidders.

The health care facilities are filthy and over-crowded. Our Iraqi interpreter told me his family cares for their son in the hospital, feed him, clean him and laughing at the irony, says he brings him medicine, "That's funny, we bring him medicine in the hospital, eh?" It's sad. The hospitals are packed with both the sick and their caregivers who camp out in the patient rooms. The interpreter has asked us several times to get his son to an American hospital, but there is no way to make that happen. We are building new health care centers by the hundreds and rebuilding "temporary" hospitals put up by the French twenty years ago to give them new life. A group called Cooperation Italian is putting in two new children's wards here. We work together on issues like connecting the sewage lines to the main line in the basement, maintaining emergency power and raising the elevators that don't go to that floor. The hospital where Jessica Lynch was rescued from at the start of the war is near here. It caught fire two weeks ago killing 14 people and injuring hundreds. It left thousands of Iraqis no place to go for emergency services. They have three floors open again I'm told, twenty patients to a room, and repairs could be years away.

The police, Iraqi National Guard and Iraqi Army have the most dangerous jobs here and have been targeted by the bad guys, being easier targets than the Coalition Forces. They need and we are getting them better fortifications, training and equipment to continue the fight here once we are gone. The new recruits have the most to lose and the most to gain. These are brave young men carrying rifles that look too big for them, always asking to have their pictures taken, living in tents and working long hours for little pay. They are willing to fight for their new country and but do so I think mainly to feed their families.