By Sheila Provencher

The flocking birds wheel and turn above Baghdad buildings. Sunlight glints white on their wings. In the morning sun, their wings flash like light; in the evening, like blood. I do not know why they dance like this. I think it is simply for joy of the wind.

In Kerbala, during a visit to the hospital, I met dozens of bombing victims injured in a pre-Christmas suicide blast. Faces swathed in bandages; skulls stitched together. *Ahmed, age 32. Khalid, age 13. Students, porters, taxi drivers. And Simah, a 6-year-old shepherd girl whose legs were torn to pieces by gunfire.

Elections. Everyone is talking about them or trying to avoid the topic. “Will you vote?” I asked all my friends.

“No,” said Um Bushra, a Sunni widow who lives with her daughter in a servant’s shack in the backyard of an abandoned house. “I will not vote, I am too afraid of explosions.”

“Of course we will vote, both myself and Noor,” said Abu Zayneb. “Sayyid Sistani told all the Shi’a people that we must take courage and let our voices be heard.”

“This will not be a perfect election,” said Emad, a Chaldean Christian. “In fact, it will be the worst. But it is step one. I have never had the right to vote before, so of course I will use it.”

“It is ridiculous,” says Abdullah, a Sunni from western Iraq. “The election is a joke, a tool of the Americans.”

In Kerbala, the schools will be used as voting centers. Every day, children go through checkpoints and searches before they enter their school. Many parents are keeping their children at home these days, so frightening is this ordeal and so grim the prospect of sabotage bombing.

“Even Iraqis do not go out much.” Plenty of people say this. But I am tired, tired, of the same old street, the same old building. Tired of walking up and down the stairs but rarely out across city blocks. Every time I get in the car and ride across Baghdad, I feel great relief, but also as if I am risking my life. “Will there be a car bomb now?”

To survive, I sit on the roof and watch the birds’ daily dance. And remember my Iraqi family mom who said through the phone, “I miss you. Please come” and then sent her daughters to visit me and continue the dance.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical violence-reduction program with roots in the historic peace churches. Teams of trained peace workers live in areas of lethal conflict around the world. CPT has been present in Iraq since October, 2002. To learn more about CPT, please visit http://www.cpt.org. Photos of CPT projects may be viewed at www.cpt.org/gallery