Fierce Fighting, Fierce Hope

Baghdad.
Email up, but Blogger’s been down all day. Fierce fighting near the Medical College. Windows rattling on and off for three days. Mortars falling in residential neighborhoods everywhere. Security guards posted everywhere. Daytime curfews have shut down transportation between city districts.

But good news nevertheless: things are reported as quiet in Mosul. More work has managed to limp along, and I’m told that back at Stony brook the Grayson library sort is nearly complete. I cannot describe the courage exhibited every day, day after day, by those around me. There is great hope and promise in this country yet.

Good News and Threats to Fruit

Baghdad
A New York Times piece today, commenting on the government shut-down of Al-Jezira reporters, was headlined something to the effect “no bad news allowed.” Now, of course, the Times was addressing appropriate concerns that free press not be suppressed. But I must question the very substance of the headline. No bad news? From Iraq?

My impression is that there has been very little except bad news reported from Iraq. This despite concerted and often successful efforts by a great many citizens to calm things down and move life onto a—if not normal, than at least hopeful—footing. The utter failure to report any of the good news has been demoralizing for a lot of people—most of them Iraqi; and a dedicated few of other nationalities--who have not had a day’s respite in over a year. They’d like a little credit for what they have accomplished.

So, I’m not going to deliver bad news today. I’ll leave that to the wire services. Even without Al-Jezira, I am sure they’ll find plenty. I’m going to give credit where credit is due, and concentrate on some good news.

Yesterday evening, after the office closed, I went grocery shopping. This may sound utterly mundane. It was. That’s the point. No-one harassed me. No-one closed the door. No-one nervously thanked me for my custom, then requested quietly that I not come back. I made my selections from well-stocked shelves, paid predictably high-ish prices for imported items, and predictably dirt-cheap prices for local commodities, then went on my way. Nothing at all out-of-the-ordinary happened.

Next stop was a roadside fruit stand. Much haggling ensued over a watermelon the size of New Jersey. Insistence (on our part) that it not be cut for a sample. The melon is cut nonetheless, with a knife worthy of a bad b-movie. Now that it is cut, we don’t want it. Now that it is cut, we must take it. A price is named worthy of a Brentwood organic grocer. For an unwanted, uncut melon? Never! We buy elsewhere. Mundane. Again. Despite much brandishing of melon knives, only fruit was threatened, and in the end we bought two monstrous melons for about $1.00 each.

Of course, you are hoping for archaeology news, mundane or otherwise. Much of the past several days has been mundane indeed, spent reviewing invoices for equipment orders, making final decisions about placement of things like flatbed scanners and fax machines, and figuring out what, if anything, we are to do about the leaky roof at Mosul. As at home, it somehow takes the combined decision-making skills of at four Ph.D.s, the CEO, an IT chief, a senior civil engineer, a security chief (travel to, from, and within Mosul is dicey), a systems integrator, a budget analyst, and a secretary to accomplish this. (And these are only those of whom I am aware). But accomplished it is: installation at Baghdad U., Inshallah, is to be finished this week, and work will start in earnest at Mosul U. in the next several days.

Other good news is USAID’s donation of a used 4WD vehicle for the duration. We must first figure out how to pick it up from an undisclosed location, but it is destined for Baghdad U., so that they can get out to their field school at Sippar.

Intellectual Reconstruction

It's hard to know what to do to help reconstruct "ordinary" life after a war. No situation; no life; is ordinary under such circumstances. Some render heroic assistance: food, medicine, water, shelter, evacuation…the kind of help that provides the very basis for ordinary life to become possible once again. But not all of us are trained or equipped to do that.

So some of us try to render a different kind of help: an optimistic sort of help that presumes that ordinary life can and will return, envisions that return, and prepares for it while building toward it. We peer into postholes. We focus on the slice of life that's ordinary for us, because that's what we know about. That's what, over the long term, we can envision, because it's what we do.

But we are archaeologists. By most standards, we are not ordinary ourselves. We are accustomed to thinking about ordinary life as lived over the past several thousand years, not over the last several hundred hours. Yet, manifestly, a preoccupation with some distant past, populated by people now long dead, is utterly inappropriate in the midst of urgent need among the living. How do we connect the two? How do we connect a preoccupation with an ordinary past, to the hope of an ordinary future?

Well, in small ways, with ordinary people living in the present. We are actively engaged in re-building archaeology programs at universities in Iraq. We are trying to restore looted libraries, refit looted classrooms, and re-connect students and faculties cut off from one another and the world outside. We are not engaged in combat. We are not embedded in "hot" zones. We are just going about a very odd little bit of ordinary life, under extraordinary circumstances.

Along the way, I'll try to describe what ordinary things we see, and reflect a bit on pasts, presents, and futures.