Will Robb Photography

Spring 2006

It was my second day in Iraq. The sound of the generator outside my window growling all night hadn’t given me much sleep, then when the call to prayer started at 4am there was no way I was getting any rest. It was freezing cold inside the house I was in, I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag and stared out over the dark city and watched the sun come up over town. No buildings of any height other than the local mosque, cars driving past outside, people pushing carts, a city waking up like anywhere else.

When the NGO workers got up I ate with them and after a quick stop at HQ we jumped in a convoy of Toyota Hi-luxes with our armed guards as always. Two in the front, one in the back, always with weapons in hand, always looking out the window at whatever was happening.

Once we were out of town the landscape was featureless. Sand and rocks, no trees, every now and again small ramshackle villages and the occasional military convoy whizzing by. The spring skies were overcast with a strong sun behind the clouds. The temperature would stay low all day and plummet to freezing at night, not what most people imagine Iraq to be. There were packs of filthy wild dogs everywhere. I was warned not to go near them, the were full of rabies. After about 30 minutes we pulled off the road and drove up a dirt track to the entrance of the refugee camp where I was to spend quite a bit of time over the next few weeks, shadowing the NGO workers and seeing how the refugees lived.

The entrance to the camp was guarded. The perimeter had no fence, only a dirt wall that had been pushed up by bulldozers. The camp was only 2 months old, near the entrance was a port-a-cabin where the Qandil NGO staff and camp doctor worked from. 50 meters beyond was the camp itself, 3 rows of make-shift housing, each small dwelling had a plot partly surrounded by a wall of sorts, sometimes wooden boards, sometimes blocks, inside was a small house with a low breeze block wall to keep the rain out and roofs made of blue tarpaulin with a UNHCR motif. The housing was set on top of stones. People arrived at the camps carrying everything the could from the homes they lost to war, most with only the clothes on their backs, a few utensils and whatever animals would walk with them. Goats and chickens peered out from the tents as much as the people did upon our arrival.

Each house had 2 rooms, a small kitchen area with one gas burner on the floor so people could make tea or heat up the food the UN delivered and one larger room where people slept at night. Inside there was no natural light other than from the doorway and a small glass-less hole in the kitchen area. Once we entered the main room of the tent, it was almost pitch black. A small gas lamp was used to bring a little bit of light. The people there had nothing, but they offered tea and they would let us refuse. It was humbling to meet people with so little who could be so generous.

It was my first morning in Iraq, I wasn’t fully adjusted to things yet and it was surreal. I started to ask people through an interpreter about how they came to be in the camp, where they had come from and where they hoped to get to. Everyone had a story to tell that was a mix of struggle, pain and anger. Some were angry at Saddam, some were angry at George Bush, everyone had lost their homes and their possessions, most people had lost a lot of friends and families, but when they talked about it they just seemed to be having a normal conversation. Like some people in the UK would sit and talk about the football or what they had planned for the weekend, these people would sit and talk about how their house and been blown up and their families had been killed. I felt really conscious about taking photos, I was listening to these stories, the light was no good for photos and I didn’t want to blind people with my flash (can you imagine sitting in almost pitch black and having flash go off every 10 seconds), so I decided to sit and listen. Maybe 15 women and children sat and talked (all the men stayed together outside, Muslim customs were always adhered to). One story stuck out from all the rest though. One girl, a 7 year old called Fatimah sat there smiling at me as everyone told their story, she was just like any kid, happy, interested in new people, I thought she must just be a kid brought along with her family, she looked quite happy and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I asked her her name, how old she was and she told me. Then I asked a question that I guess you could ask any kid in the world;

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A doctor” she replied.
“Why?” I asked.

The translator started telling me Fatimah’s story and my heart broke. When she was 5, soldiers came to her house and raped her mother in front of her whilst forcing her father and brothers to watch. Then they had shot her mother and the rest of her family. She was left in her house with her dead family until neighbours came and took her away, with no-one to look afte her she ended up in a camp. Sitting there smiling all the time as if she was talking about her day at school she said, if she had been a doctor, she could have been able to save her family, so one day when she grows up she wanted to be a doctor and help people who had been shot. I just sat and stared at her, I was numb, I just couldn’t put this story I was being told as coming from this little girls mouth. I just couldn’t connect it, it seemed too much. I couldn’t speak, I just seemed to zone out. Five days before I had been on the train to Narita airport worrying about my camera equipment, would my film be damaged by X-rays, would I get into Iraq OK, would I get access to good stuff to shoot. I was worried about me and the photos I would be taking, then here I was listening to little girl who had been through hell but yet told her story calmly like it was just one of those things. At that moment, everything started to become real for me, it all came into perspective, what was going on in Iraq, what was happening to people. These people were going through hell, experiences we can’t even imagine, but they just keep getting on with it. It was an attitude I was to come across everyday.

I listened in stunned silence not really taking things in properly, then when we left and were back into the light I started to become more myself again. I realised that this was going to be par for the course, I had to just be like the people I was meeting and get on with what I had to do, listen to the stories and keep getting the pictures. From that moment I did exactly that, I wandered round the camp with a translator and a guard always close by, the NGO groups wouldn’t let me be alone which I thought was kind of strange at the time, but I later learned that some foreign workers do get kidnapped and killed within the camps themselves, but that’s another story.

Over the next few weeks I made several trips there, each time meeting new people, listening to what they had to say, getting their photos. I spent times with families as they took their children on regular trips to nearby medical centers where they were being taught how to treat their own children, one 7 year old boy called Merhadi with cerebral palsy whose mother was learning to stretch his limbs to keep him supple, another boy, 5 year old Circot who had lost the ability to speak was getting speech therapy where a doctor spoke into a mirror that Circot would also look into, encouraging him to make the same lip movements and produce sound. The facilities were very bare, care was limited, so the best solution was to give the families the skills they needed to help themselves.

On subsequent trips to the camp I saw a lighter side of life in the camp, I watched as a newly made “cinema tent” was opened and the children all watched Tom and Jerry on DVD and they were so amazed they literally ran riot. The next day they tried to show Monsters Inc, but they kids booed the place down and went berserk with joy as they exact same Tom and Jerry cartoon was showed. Some of the older boys happily played football outside in the sand. Young lives that were seemingly shattered, but the kids were resilient and they got on with life. They were a lot more positive than a lot of adults I have met in western countries who live a life of relative luxury in comparison.

The NGO group who ran the camp got blocks of funding from the UN to keep camps open. When the money stops, the camp gets disbanded. Whilst in the camp, life can go on, there is some sense of normalacy and hope. Without the camps, life is uncertain. In the camps, food is delivered every few days, but outside you don’t know where the next meal is coming from.

Qandil used my photos as part of a portfolio to secure another 6 months of funding for the camp. That meant a lot more to me than the publications I got from being there. It wasn’t much on my part, but I managed to do something. I learned a lot about life from the people I met there. Sometimes we complain about trivial stuff, we all have our ups and downs, life can be damn hard sometimes, but we have just got to keep trying. We have so much opportunity all around us, with just a little bit of effort we can make amazing things happen. It’s such a shame most people never realise this. Everyday I’m thankful for the little things that make life great.

(The first Iraq diary entry can be found here)