a clown in iraq:
There, with no anaesthetic and where bags of blood were kept in a fridge and warmed up under the hot tap in a bathroom, a young boy was brought in. "He had been shot in the head. His family had been trying to get into the car to flee and they [US soldiers] shot him. I think they had just been told to shoot at anyone. Certainly they had been told that ambulances had been carrying weapons and I know from my own experience that they were shooting at ambulances." Wilding says she was in an ambulance on their way to get to a pregnant woman who had gone into labour too soon, when marines shot at the ambulance, through the windscreen. A tyre was shot out and the ambulance driver screeched back in reverse to the hospital. With the ambulance out of action, they never reached the woman.
(...) "I had read a lot about it but it can't prepare you for the reality. There were consumer goods on the street, but there were things you just couldn't get, such as medicine. You could buy fresh fruit but it was way beyond most people's income. A lot of people were completely dependent on the food ration, and they would sell part of their food ration to buy medicines or to pay for bus fares. Going into the hospitals, I knew I was going to see a lot of children who were desperately ill, but I don't think you can prepare for what it feels like when you're there. A child went into a coma in front of us. He had leukaemia and the doctor said they just didn't have enough platelet bags to treat him. His mother was pinching his cheek and slapping his face, trying to wake him up and howling with grief. There was this stick-thin nine-month-old baby and her body was just the shape of her skeleton. You could hear her rattling breathing."
(...) She decided to return there because she felt it was important that the voices of ordinary Iraqis were heard above the din of cruise missiles, cluster bombs and army and political rhetoric. "The mainstream news focused primarily on what was being said by military and political figures and not on what Iraqi people were saying, partly because it was so difficult for journalists to hear them. I was just writing about what happened day to day and putting it out on the internet." Her blog started out quite small, but soon thousands of people all over the world were reading it.
(...) I think that's important. You can't talk about democracy and 'Do you agree with the war or not, did we do the right thing?' if you don't know what we actually did and what actually happened to people. I was just in one city and I talked to a fraction of the people who were affected but still, I think I was able to hear and then tell a lot of people's stories. The number of people who read the blog and responded to it backed that up."
(...) The schools were in an appalling state, but nothing could prepare her for the squatter camps, crammed full of displaced families. They weren't classed as refugees because they were still in their own country and they did not receive aid. In one camp, 125 families were living without adequate food and water, shelter and medical care. There was no sewerage system. A two-month-old girl died because of the cold and a four-year-old boy had his legs badly burned from the open paraffin stove his family used in their shack built of breezeblocks and canvas; with no medical care, he lay there with his legs oozing pus and blood and riddled with infections. A young man had his fingers blown off because he would take bullets apart to sell the tiny bits of scrap metal.
(...) "I was angry that there was all this money - the planes, bombs, guns, the contracts that were given to Halliburton - going to people who didn't need it. There were these children dying for lack of blankets and basic medicine and shelter," says Wilding, her voice rising with fury. "They were living around open sewers, without anything. How could you not be angry? They was always so much need and so little you could do that I was never thinking, 'I'm so clever, look what I've done.' It was always, 'Is that all you did?' People were always asking me to help on a more material level, for cooling fans, money for operations, all sorts of things. A woman at the camp asked for clean knickers and sanitary towels." Even with the £10,000 Wilding had raised for the trip, she could not meet every need, although she did help pay for the installation of drains and pipes in the camp.
(...) Wilding realised she was putting herself and the people around her - drivers, translators, the groups of children that would gather round her wherever she went - in danger. She decided to come home. "There didn't seem anything more I could usefully do, let alone justify the risk that I was putting other people in."
(...) What was it like to be back? "The overwhelming thing I felt was incredibly lucky. I would cycle to university, essentially in complete safety. I would come home to my safe house, turn on the light switch and know I'd got electricity, or turn on my taps and know clean water was going to come out. "At the same time I was incredibly angry that that had been taken away from millions of people who had no control over what was happening. When I gave birth to my son [at home], I knew that an ambulance would be with me in minutes if I needed it. I should be able to take that for granted and so should women over there. I met one woman who told her daughters not to get pregnant because what happens if they went into labour at night and they couldn't get to hospital? There are refugees who are just living in this limbo where the best they can hope for is to stay alive. It's the most appalling disaster."