Return to Baghdad Update 4

Orphans and Street Kids Project
Return to Baghdad Update 4
Friday, 5 August 2005

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - With Steve and Bushra on my side, doors begin to open and momentum begins to build for the project. Thursday morning I met with the Chief of Party for the Employment and Vocational Training Project in Iraq, a USAID sponsored project. The Career and Life Skills Center's vocational school was the main point of discussion during this meeting.

The Employment and Vocational Training Project set up numerous vocational schools here in Baghdad, but they are all focused on adults. There is nothing set for the teenagers who will be heading into these fields. We discussed the keys to adapting the curriculum to fit not only the Arabic language, but the different ways things are done here in Iraq. Carpenters, electricians, mechanics, welders, and other jobs are done differently here than they are in the states. Girls’ careers were also discussed with classes in cosmetology, sewing, and food service. One concept we thought of was to use these food service students to run a soup kitchen for other street kids. People in the states who think of women’s equal rights may be frustrated by this idea, but it must be remembered that these are street kids who must be trained in jobs they get here in Iraq.

This meeting also brought money to the table for the first time. They offered to help me put together a computer training session and possibly provide computers to the orphanages. If this project is to happen, it has to happen quickly. The budget for the Employment and Vocational Training Project ends 30 September. Through the proper proposals, this could make a great impact on the orphanages in a short time.

After this productive session, I headed to the Al Rasheed Hotel, pictured above, to meet Steve for lunch before heading to meet people at the Convention Center. Sitting at the table next to me at lunch was a social scientist, a British bloke, who worked under the CPA and was currently here still helping to improve Iraq. Coincidently I met him a week before leaving for Baghdad at a conference on Capital Hill where he briefed, along with others from his corporation, about lessons learned in Iraq and other nation building efforts. Remembering me, and the project, he promised to email me with some British connections to assist me in what I am trying to accomplish.

Following a meal of hummus, Iraqi Kebabs, and Turkish coffee we headed to the Convention Center. The Center is the only location where local Iraqis, without International Zone Identification, can visit and it still be secured. Here we met with a local national who is going to assist me in fact finding here in Baghdad. This man, who for safety reasons will remain anonymous, is going to work with a Iraqi filmmaker I hired to go into Baghdad and interview orphanage directors, caretakers, orphans, and most importantly street kids. Just the mention of street kids to local Iraqis and they can all name a group of them they know who are living in abandoned basements, under bridges, or in parks in the city. The problem is evidently immense.

Thursday evening, Bushra introduced me to a friend of hers who started a program very similar to mine in the North of Iraq during the sanctions, and now she is the Minister of Human Rights. The Minister, Dr. Narmine Othman, was very interested in what I am doing and provided me with some wonderful ideas of how to make the project work in this culture. By adding aspects such as foster families, apprenticeships, and networking the Career Center into the orphanages, it may reduce the stereo types assigned by the Muslim culture to orphans. Normally these children are tagged like the Untouchables of India, but by making it appear that they are children in training it reduces that affect. The Minister also promised to introduce me to the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs who this project would have to run through.

I came home Thursday evening with the feeling that we are really making progress toward helping Iraqs most needy children, and that feeling was solidified when I found an email in my Inbox from an extremely powerful military contact. Thanks to one of my biggest supporters, Mike Tucker, I was able to send feelers to a few great military contacts, and this led to meetings next week. The importance of military involvement in this is key for me because the fact I am an Iraq Veteran. This provides them a great story of a veteran returning to Iraq and it will hopefully provide the funding and military backing that I drastically need to make this project work.

Friday morning I again met with my Iraqi friend and provided him with a list of tasks I hope he can fulfill. These objectives will provide me with an extremely important human face that I can bring home with me, a face of the Iraqi children who suffer here daily. Through the implementation of this plan, my Iraqi friends will not only be interviewing these kids and capturing their lives, but providing them a meal, and a promise of a hope that is coming. These children will be some of the first that we will help.

Other than this meeting, Fridays in the IZ are relatively slow as it is a holiday for the Embassies, so I spent the day writing. I also enjoyed a few Coronas in the evening, something I couldn’t do when fighting here as a soldier. A few beers are pretty tasty when you are sitting in the oven like temperatures here in Baghdad!

For more information about the Orphans and Street Kids Project visit the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) homepage, http://vvaf.org/. The project is a partnership between the VVAF and Opportunities for Kids International, INC, (http://www.okiinc.org/).