Sunday, January 04, 2004

10:30 – Baghdad. Sometimes I wonder what the Iraqis think of us. Not lots of the time, only sometimes. And not lots of Iraqis, only the ones that work in the palace, providing for a few of our perceived basic needs, like clean bathrooms and floors.

In our end of the building, there are three Iraqis who work to keep the place tidy. Two of them do most of the work and, as we are American ignoramuses, their given names are “Bathroom Boy Number 1” and, what the heck, “Bathroom Boy Number 2”. In all honesty, I can’t tell Number 1 from Number 2, so I tend to use their real names. They are both supervised by Mohammad, a huge man who just points them to new tasks throughout the day.

Bathrooms are just a part of their three bucks a day existence. They also sweep and mop the floors. The sweeping is effective enough, but there’s so much dust and dirt here, that mopping is really the only way to effectively pick up the filth. Sadly, modern mopping techniques have yet to immigrate to Central Iraq. In Baghdad, mopping involves a moist and dirty rag draped over a squeegee and pushed back and forth over the floor. The rag is never rinsed, so the result is just temporarily moistened dirt.

At the Ministry, they use the same process, and I’ve witnessed the stooped, black-clad old women moistening the dirt through the corridors and down the stairs, without benefit of the squeegee. It’s cleaning chaos, really. Push brooms are pulled. Pull brooms are pushed. Teams of Squeegee Boys are tasked with moistening the dirt in the palace parking lot. I even saw a man sweeping the dirt (as in, there was no grass, only dirt, dirt) outside the office door yesterday. Meanwhile, there’s a guy at BIAP who spends his day propelling one of those rotary buffers across the terrazzo floors in the international terminal – never applying wax or cleansers, just buffing and buffing.

In the palace, the cleaning gets done while we work, so we’re distracted as it occurs and relocated while it happens right around the desk. This marks the time for another snack.

You see, we eat all the time here. Now, whether it’s for comfort, or for calories, or to make up for the lack of taste and variety at the DFAC, it really doesn’t matter. We keep huge amounts of snacks in each office, and pause to consume them at regular intervals. Cleaning time is just another excuse. Typically in each office, a separate table is assigned the responsibility to hold and display these snacks. The arrays of food are often compared and bragged about, “Well, this is nothing. You should stop by sometime and see our huge pile of crap”.

I guess it’s not all crap. Well, sure it is. Some of it’s better for you (dried fruit and popcorn) than others (Peeps and Pop Tarts), but there’s a lot of it. Scads and scads. Candies, crackers, chocolates, chips, chewy stuff, crunchy stuff, and bad beef jerky (to hell with the alliteration). The snack table gives us something to do for a moment’s break, and entices visitors to stay a while and be sociable, instead of just delivering orders or assignments and disappearing.

This is especially effective with a senior USACE guy, who can hear a bag of Peanut M & M’s opening from down the hall, a bird Colonel who is addicted to Hot Tamales, and a General who will give you a medal in exchange for a bag of Twizlers.

Sometimes snack food shows up from the DFAC, typically in the form of canned fruit and chips. Not the Brit “chips”, but the Kuwaiti kind. They’re much like American chips, made from thinly sliced potatoes and deep fried, but with odd flavorings – like paprika, green pepper, chicken, and tomato ketchup. The latter variety was introduced just today, to very bad reviews throughout the bullpen. What condiment-flavored chips are next? Mayonnaise? Relish?

More strangeness. The Iraqis aren’t poor starving Third Worlders, but they are poor Third Worlders, and the cost of keeping us in empty calories is lots more than they make in a day. Our response? We continue to consume, demonstrating our excessiveness. Continuing to establish our assemblage of plenty in the midst of dire need.