This latest Iraq Health and Infrastructure Digest is a compilation of 9 articles covering a wide range of issues facing people in Iraq. Summaries are given as well as the full, or relevant portion of the articles.

Digest by David Smith-Ferri, Voices in the Wilderness

Voices in the Wilderness-NYC Moves to Bring Attention to Iraq’s Water Crisis

by Anna J. Brown, Voices in the Wilderness-NYC

In the “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis (2004)” report published by Public Citizen’s Water for All Campaign, its North American reader meets Ahmed Abdul Rida, a resident of Baghdad’s Sadr City. Mr. Rida, whose family members join a million others in dire poverty, is waiting for the two to three hours of electricity available per day to be activated so that he may use his family’s water pump. Since the water that he is able to pump is derived from the polluted waters of the Tigris River, what he and his family end up drinking is described as a “concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals from antiquated piping, and unknown amounts of depleted uranium, raw sewage and other chemicals from American and Iraqi munitions from the 1991 Gulf war, and the more recent Anglo-American invasion.” [1]

The story of Mr. Rida has been quite present to me during the month of July as I join friends and comrades in the WATER NOT WAR effort sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness of New York City. [2] When I ride the subway to each of our Wednesday and Saturday demonstrations, I meditate on the plight of the Rida family: What is it like to offer your young son or daughter a glass of brown colored and foul smelling water? What is it like to hand your elderly mother or pregnant wife a drink that may cause diarrhea, kidney stones, cholera and that damages the liver and brain? When I imagine the desperate thirst that wells up in a land where summer temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the necessity and the urgency of awareness about this devastating water crisis in Iraq brings to mind this insight of Dr. Martin Luther King’s: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be.” [3]