A fine of $20,000 was issued to them for merely delivering medicine and toys to Iraq. The abuser hid in the muddle of hypocritical policies that no one involved really believed in’.īack in the US, the Voices in the Wilderness organization received threats of incarceration for travelling to Iraq, and were accused of being supportive of the Saddam Hussein regime for staging anti-war demonstrations.

‘Month after month, the bullying went on, unchecked. The main accomplishment of her reporting is distancing warfare from politics and bringing it down to the daily endeavors of the targeted population.

As an organization with close ties to the conflict, they distanced themselves from ‘both President Bush and President Hussein, believing that neither side is blameless’. As an American in Iraq, she speaks about feeling ashamed of her health and well-being, ‘ashamed to be so comfortably adjusted to the privileged life of a culture that, however blindly, practices child sacrifice’. In her view, the US government was practicing child sacrifice, something that Bush, in his war propaganda, accused Saddam of tolerating. To cope with this shortage, doctors often had to rotate whatever available equipment they had between their most severe cases. Even incubators for babies could not be maintained. Doctors she spoke to complained of not being able to maintain their equipment and store vaccinations in refrigerators because of constant power cuts. Apart from the poverty imposed by the economic sanctions, bombardments from Operation Desert Storm destroyed power grids, which in turn damaged the country’s medical facilities.

The precision of Kelly’s description offers disturbing detail of the physical and mental conditions trapping the children and their families, and carefully communicates their wretchedness to an English-speaking audience. Kelly highlights this in the end of part one where she describes her stories with the Iraqi people as ‘interactions between very ordinary people, from Iraq and the US, who caught courage from one another during a time of war’. The careful attention she puts into depicting the emotional strain inflicted on every individual she has encountered, young and old, exposes the common face of humanity across civilizations. Her work with Voices of the Wilderness in Iraq aimed to alleviate the distress, through medical and humanitarian aid, imposed by the economic sanctions on the country. Her account of the Iraqi invasion highlights the aspect of war that policy makers, as well as the media and the public, tend to overlook.

Other Lands Have Dreams by Kathy Kelly