How many trucks does a school bag kit change before it reaches an Iraqi school student? Four, if lucky. A simple task is turning into a logistical nightmare as Iraqi school children wait for a pencil to write with even as supply trucks get ambushed and delivery men killed, says Ariana Eunjung Cha
The smiling children swarm the theatre at Al Farouq Secondary School in Baghdad, Iraq, and grab at the stacks of navy shoulder bags. A gift from the American government, the bags were stocked with goodies such as notebooks, rulers, geometry sets, and a real treat
premium-quality No. 2 pencils, something that had been hard to come by under the previous regime.
It was a small but important victory for the U.S.-led occupation.
"We are very happy today. We never used to have bags like these," says 11th-grader Dhia Aqeel, who like other boys in the schoolyard was proudly wearing his across his chest. Delivery of the student kits is one of the more visible projects in the Bush administration's grand plan for rebuilding Iraq.
Unlike more long-term efforts such as creating democratic councils, training nurses and rebuilding water systems, the bags being handed out to 1.5 million schoolchildren in Iraq are a tangible sign of how the new government is making people's lives better.
Delivering these kinds of basic supplies was supposed to be the easy part. But in a place where the airports are closed to commercial traffic, ports are operating at limited capacity, and roadside ambushes, hijackings, kidnappings and bombs are daily hazards, it's become a logistical nightmare.
Route maps and delivery plans must be reworked constantly on the news or rumour of the day, a reality that has thrown both timetables and price tags askew.
"People think the war is over. That's not true. We're still in a transition," says Robert Gordon, who works for Creative Associates International Inc., the Washington-based company that is overseeing the distribution of school supplies on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The months-long journey of the student kits, chalkboards and other education supplies helps explain why the reconstruction is proving more difficult than anticipated. It's a story that has taken the government through the forests of China, barges on the Gulf, dusty roads in Kuwait, a secret warehouse in south Iraq and an ambush on the highway to Turkey that left one trucker in the hospital.
'The bags are a nice thing, but they come in too late,' says Heba Talib,a senior at Baghdad High School for Girls.
Iraqi students with school kits... Some of the treasured items in the student kits from USAID are pencils.
