Take a load off

Knock! Knock! Knock!

Is this one of those jokes I used to enjoy so much when I was a little girl, and admittedly sometimes still do? No. Someone is actually at my door.

Come in. Come in out of the cold and wet. Let me take your hat and coat. Just kick your boots off and stow them in the cubby by the door, then go sit in that plush sinky chair over by the fireplace. The blue one. Yes, that's it.

Would you like a blanket? A cup of hot cocoa? With marshmallows, whip cream, or straight up? Oh, and don't forget to try some of those cookies. Homemade, you know. My own personal recipe. They're good aren't they? Oh, help yourself dear. Eat as many as you like. I can always make more.

One of my favourite things to do on a chilly rainy day is to snuggle up here with a good book, a hot mug, my dog lying at my feet and my parrot on my shoulder. Sometimes I substitute a good movie for the book. It's a simple pleasure, but one that I like nearly as much as just kicking back and talking to friends. And I do hope that you will be my friend. If not now, then very soon.

Have you heard? I've been asked to try my hand at writing a short column. Nothing major. Just a few words here and there about whatever captures my interest. It's been so long since I've written that I am not certain how well I will do. Then again, I do lead an exciting life. I'm bound to be able to come up with an abundance of chatter. Some might even be entertaining.

Was that a smile I saw creep across your lips and twinkle out of your gorgeous eyes? Oh please, feel free to laugh, if you like. I know I did when the proposition was layed before me.

Now, tell me. What's the latest news or gossip that has brought you to my door today?

------

Happy New Year Everyone!! I promise, I will be back soon.

Eleanor

"Just go to the doctor dear,

he'll give you a cream that will clear that right up. It's silly to walk around with something that ugly on your hands (or legs, or elbows, etc...)."

How many of you have heard that statement or something like that more often than you care to count? If you're a sufferer of psoriasis you've probably taken to covering yourself from toe to chin just to avoid listening to yet another bit of advice from someone who has never had to deal with the problem, or who had a very light case that cleared up right away, and has no real idea of what they are talking about.

To the person that was lucky enough to experience a complete remission with that one time cream treatment, I say be happy that you were so blessed and be more understanding of those who have not been.

To those of you who are still hiding under layers of cloth for fear of offending someone with the appearance of the plaque lesions on your skin, my niece Sarah has something to say. "Buck up! Stop letting others make you feel self conscious because they think you are not putting forth the effort to rid yourself of what they view as basically a bad case of dandruff or a minor rash. Be yourself. Show your body if you want. If you shackle yourself in one part of your life, how can you expect to feel free and successful in the rest. Your confidence will win out over the minor imperfections in your appearance."

And, even though I do not have psoriasis, I must admit I agree with Sarah. My beautiful niece has dealt with plaque psoriasis since she was 18. I admire her courage and her lack of self consciousness. I asked her once what she does when someone comments on or asks her about the lesions, she aimed her light grey eyes right at my blue, smiled and said, "I tell them the truth". When they ask me if that's a burn or just straight out 'what is that', I tell them that they are psoriasis lesions, but not to worry because they don't hurt or itch, and they aren't contageous and that there is no cure yet." That usually works for her, but if she is outdoors and more explanation is needed, she simply adds that sun and exercise are good for the healing process, which it turns out is quite true.

Sarah's example is easier to admire from a distance than to follow. For many it is not the psoriasis itself that does the most damage to their well being, but rather the psychological impact it has on their lives. Still, Sarah is correct in her attitude, and in her statement that there is no cure YET. Yes, place the emphasis on the yet. Every day research comes a step closer to unraveling the secret to this disease.

Yes, psoriasis is a disease, not a rash. It is a disease of the immune system, or as better defined by the National Psoriasis Foundation--Psoriasis is a noncontagious, genetic disease that results when faulty signals in the immune system prompt skin cells to regenerate too quickly, causing red, scaly lesions that can crack and bleed. It often affects the elbows, knees, scalp and torso but can appear anywhere on the body. As many as 7.5 million Americans have psoriasis, according to the National Institutes of Health. Ten percent to 30 percent of people with psoriasis also develop psoriatic arthritis, an inflammatory disease which causes pain, stiffness and swelling in and around the joints. Psoriasis can affect anyone at any age, including children. There is no cure yet for this lifelong disease.

Sarah considers herself to be among the lucky few for whom the disease may just suddenly go away. She was in remission for nearly a year, until last week when she had a flare up. Flare ups can be very painful, or they can just be itchy, with lesions cracking, bleeding and peeling. Sarah is still hopeful though, even after this last disappointment. "It was just a small flare," she says, her smile lighting up the room. "The lesions are fewer, smaller, and healing faster than usual. I think it was just a minor hiccup before full remission takes hold."

For Sarah's sake, I hope that is the case. She is not sitting back and praying for a cure. She is living her life, confident in the fact that someday there will be a cure, but not letting her affliction handicap her in the mean time.

Tears in my eyes

As we sit here in our comfy chairs surrounded by family and friends, most of whom have never known war as anything more than a word that represents something we all wish to avoid, you have to wonder what it must be like to live in a world where war is so much more than a word. Where war is a reality.

In that world violence and fear walks the streets, invades your homes unexpectedly and unwanted even if you lock your doors and shutter your windows. There is no lasting peace beneath the dark shadow. You take the little bits of happiness you can find, and share the sadness with those who are willing. You treasure every moment of your life, hope against hope that the situation will improve, and strive with heart and soul in hand to make those improvements. And you question and pray as you have never done before, even as you watch your neighbours, friends and family give up and move on in search of a better way, a safer way.

This article, courtesy of a friend, is I admit a few days late in being posted. Still, it shows life in war torn and civilly distressed Iraq as most of us could never imagine it. Put yourself and your families and friends in the places of these people--would you be able to survive. Can you even come close to understanding what they are going through? Is it for the better or the worse? I cannot judge. I was not there before, I am not there now, I do not know what their future will hold. I can but pray and hope.

Read on.

Eleanor







The Washington Post
Sunday, October 29, 2006; B01



This is Baghdad. What could be worse?
By Anthony Shadid

Militias roam the streets, violent death is a daily reality, and Baghdad’s citizens are giving up hope. To call the chaos there a civil war might be too generous.


BAGHDAD

There was an almost forgettable exchange earlier this month in the Iraqi National Assembly, itself on the fringe of relevance in today's disintegrating Iraq. Lawmakers debated whether legislation should be submitted to a committee to determine if it was compatible with Islam. Ideas were put forth, as well as criticism. Why not a committee to determine whether legislation endorses democratic principles? one asked. In stepped Mahmoud Mashadani, the assembly's speaker, to settle the dispute.

"Any law or decision that goes against Islam, we'll put it under the kundara!" he thundered.

"God is greatest!" lawmakers shouted back, in a rare moment of agreement between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Kundara means shoe, and the bit of bluster by Mashadani said a lot about Baghdad today.

It had been almost a year since I was in the Iraqi capital, where I worked as a reporter in the days of Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and the occupation, guerrilla war and religious resurgence that followed. On my return, it was difficult to grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on the worst days, I had always found Baghdad's most redeeming quality to be its resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. That resilience is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital, it seems, no longer embraces life.

"A city of ghosts," a friend told me, her tone almost funereal.

The commotion in the streets -- goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun -- once prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course, they were seeing the city through a windshield, the often angry voices on the streets inaudible. Today, with traffic dwindling, stores shuttered and streets empty by nightfall, that conceit no longer holds.

Even the propaganda, once ubiquitous and often incongruous, is gone. One piece I recalled from two years ago: a map of Iraq divided into three colored bands. In white, it read, "Progress." In red, "Iraq." In white again, "Prosperity." The promises are now more modest: "However strong the wind," reads a new poster of a woman clutching her child, "it will pass." More indicative of the mood, perhaps, was one of the old banners still hanging. Faded and draped over a building scarred with craters from the invasion, it was an ad for the U.S.-funded Iraqi network, al-Iraqiya. In Arabic, its slogan reads, "Prepare your eyes for more."

As I spoke to friends, some for the first time in more than a year, that was their fear: more of the kundara.

"When anyone is against you, when anyone has differences with me, I will put a kundara in his mouth, I will shove a kundara down his throat, I will hit him with a kundara, and so on," another friend told me.

"We live in a kundara culture today."

I had first met Karima Salman during the U.S. invasion. She was a stout Shiite Muslim matriarch with eight children, living in a three-room apartment in the working-class district of Karrada. Trash was piled at her entrance, a dented, rusted steel gate perched along a sagging brick sidewalk. When I visited last year, the street, still one of the safer ones in Baghdad, exuded a veneer of normalcy. Makeshift markets overflowed with goods piled on rickety stands: socks imported from China, T-shirts from Syria and stacks of shoes, sunglasses and lingerie. Down the street were toys: plastic guns, a Barbie knockoff in a black veil, and a pirate carrying an AK-47 and a grenade. There was a "Super Mega Heavy Metal Fighter" action figure and a doll that, when squeezed, played "It's a Small World."

On this day, the metal stands were empty, as were the streets.

"Praise God," Karima said as I asked how she was. In a moment, her smile faded as she realized the absurdity of her words. "Of course, it's not good," she said, shaking her head. "There's nothing that's ever happened like what's happening in Iraq."

On June 23, 2005, three car bombs detonated in Karrada, outside her home, wrecking the Abdul-Rasul Ali mosque and spraying shrapnel that sliced into the forearm of one of her five daughters, Hiba. Friends at school nicknamed her "Shrapnel Hiba." Two months ago, yet another bomb hurled glass through their window, cutting the head of Hiba's twin sister, Duaa. Four stitches sealed the wound. Over that time, Karima lost her job as a maid at the Palm Hotel, where she had earned about $33 a month.

"People are too scared to come," she said matter of factly.

Next to her sat her son Mohammed. During the invasion, Mohammed, an ex-convict, had joined a motley unit of a dozen men patrolling Baghdad's streets as part of the Baath Party militia. Now he had entered the ranks of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to a young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and blamed for many of today's sectarian killings in Baghdad. Karima's son-in-law Ali had been an officer in the American-equipped police force, earning $300 a month. He quit after receiving a death threat. Now he, too, had joined the Mahdi Army.

"Not all of them are good," Karima told me, casting a glance at her son.

Stocky and a little surly, Mohammed smiled. "Who else is going to protect Iraq?" he asked.

They debated the causes of the violence that, these days, is the topic of almost every conversation. Radical Sunnis, the Americans, Iranian agents, other militias. "Even the Egyptians," Karima offered. "And the Sudanese," Mohammed added.

"Brothers are killing their brothers," she said.

Stories poured forth: a bomb amputating the arm of a 10-year-old neighbor; another killing Marwan, the barber.

"If they brought the Israelis, the Jews, and they ruled Iraq, it would be better," said Karima, her face framed by a black veil. Sunlight bathed the room; electricity, as usual, was cut off. "It would be a million times better than a Sunni, a million times better than a Shiite."

Her first grandchild, 2-month-old Fahd, sat next to her. His expression was rare in Baghdad: eyes expectant, fearless.

"Is it not a pity to bring a baby in a world like this?" she asked. "It's a shame."

Her eldest daughter, Fatima, looked on.

"One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing and one-third of us will be widows," she said.

"This is Iraq," Karima added.

The last time I had visited Faruq Saad Eddin, he and his wife, Muna, had argued over whether their eldest son should have left the country. We sat in Jihad, a neighborhood so dangerous now that a stranger risks death by entering it. A generator droned in the background; occasional bomb blasts thundered in the distance, probably homemade mines targeting U.S. patrols. An urbane former diplomat, Faruq had been upset. He worried about what would become of his ancient land if its capable fled.

"You can't just cut out and run away," he told me. "This is our country and sooner or later our children will come back. The resilience of the people, that's what 11,000 years means," he said. "Someone who has 11,000 years, 100 years to lose here or there is not that much."

On April 17, Faruq and Muna left Iraq at the insistence of their son, who had paid a year's rent for an apartment in Jordan. A month later, a car bomb detonated outside their Baghdad home, shattering the windows in the room where we once had shared bitter coffee.

On a cool morning in the Amman neighborhood of Umm al-Summaq, Faruq shook his head at the arbitrariness of fate.

"We would have been killed, no doubt about it," he said.

"We are all stranded, here and there, Iraqis," he added.

A friend once compared the elderly who are reluctant to leave Baghdad to the blind. Take them away from the familiarity of their home, garden and street, and they become lost and disoriented. Faruq has sought new routines: morning strolls, e-mails to friends, a voracious appetite for news and late-night updates on his favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals. His apartment overlooked the rolling hills of Amman, glowing in the morning's soft sun; his granddaughter Mayasa played giddily next to him with a stuffed toy.

"I should feel happy," he said.

He shook his head again, a gesture that meant he wasn't.

"We have a heavy heart, really," he said after a few moments of silence. "Just knowing what's happening makes us grieve."

I had come to know Wamidh Nadhme in 2002, before the invasion. A professor of political science at Baghdad University, he was a forthright voice in those tense, uneasy days when Hussein was still in power. He tried to speak with complete honesty despite the possible consequences of doing so in a police state. With an ever-present Dunhill cigarette, he would slowly field questions back then, reasoning out every intricate response, surrounded by his French-style furniture, worn Persian carpets and a framed piece of papyrus from Egypt, where he had spent time in exile as a young activist. But on this visit, reason eluded him, as did explanation.

"I find myself unable to understand what's going on," he said.

Wamidh had settled into what he called "withdrawal." He still visited the university once a week, but Baghdad was simply too dangerous to venture outside. After nightfall, the streets of his neighborhood of Adhamiya look like they might an hour or so before dawn: dark, without traffic, and menacing. As we talked, helicopters rumbled overhead. Gunfire burst almost continuously.

"You feel like the country is exploding," he said.

We traded stories. One I had heard from a friend: Insurgents stopped a driver at a checkpoint. They opened his trunk. "Why do you have a spare tire?" the insurgent asked solemnly. "You don't have trust in God?"

Well into 2005, Wamidh has bristled at the notion of a sectarian divide, even as the very geography of Baghdad began to transform into Shiite and Sunni halves divided by the Tigris River. Like many Iraqis, he blamed the Americans for naively viewing the country solely through that sectarian prism before the war, then forging policies that helped make it that way afterward. He ran through other "awful mistakes": the carnage unleashed by Sunni insurgents affiliated with al-Qaeda, the assassination of a Shiite ayatollah in 2003 who may have bridged differences, the devolution of Sadr's movement today into armed, revenge-minded mobs.

As Wamidh finished, he flashed his customary modesty. "Perhaps you could correct me?" he offered.

I asked him whether it would become worse if the American military withdrew.

He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, as though he were a little confused.

"What could be worse?" he asked, knitting his brow.

I saw Wamidh again a week later, and the question had lingered with him. "I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were the Americans," he said over a traditional Ramadan dinner. His answer seemed to hurt him. "I have no idea, really."

"It's like a volcano that has erupted. How do you stop that?"

On April 9, 2003, Firdaus Square became the lasting image of the U.S. entry into Baghdad. In its center was a metal statue of Hussein in a suit, his arm outstretched in socialist realist fashion. Like an arena of spectators, columns of descending height encircled him, each bearing the initials "S.H." on their cupolas. By early afternoon that day, hundreds of Iraqis swarmed around the statue with one task in mind: bring it down. It marked the fall. A year later, amid uprisings by Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Sadr's militia in Baghdad and the south, it spoke of occupation. The square was deserted, guarded by U.S. tanks whose barrels read, "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust." Soldiers, edgy, had orders to shoot anyone with a weapon. At times, music blared over speakers on a Humvee.

One song: "Ring of Fire," by Johnny Cash.

As I stood in Firdaus Square this day, after invasion, liberation and occupation, I wondered what word described Baghdad.

"This is a civil war now," Harith Abdel-Hamid, a psychiatrist, had told me, trying to diagnose the madness. "When you see hundreds of people killed every day, corpses of people tortured in the streets every day, what else does it mean?"

"Call it what you will," he said, "but it is a civil war."

Perhaps. But I felt as though I was witnessing something more: the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy.

Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy.

I looked out on the square. On one side were rows of concrete barricades and barbed wire, having faded almost organically into the landscape. In another direction, a billboard read: "Terrorism has no religion." Across the street, a poster portraying Iraqi police pleaded: "We are the heroes fighting for the sake of Baghdad." In the middle of the square, on the stone perch where Hussein's statue once stood, were torn scraps of other posters: "Your voice," "the nation," "patriotism," "dialogue," "building the future." The words were isolated, without context, like fragments of a clay tablet.

Sirens soon pierced the square. Two armed police escorts, headed in opposite directions, rushed along the street. Each frantically waved at the other to pull over. Guns dangling from the window, they fired volleys into the air to intimidate each other.

In time, the one with fewer rifles and fewer men let the other pass. They were playing by the rules of the kundara.

In the square, Salam Ahmed sat with a friend, Saad Nasser, under the statue, looking out at the scene.

"They died under Saddam, and they're dying now," Salam said.

Unshaven, wearing a baseball cap, Saad looked at the ground. He was grim, angry and dejected.

"No one can stop it but God," he said. "Only God has the power."

Anthony Shadid, a Washington Post foreign correspondent, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is the author of "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" (Picador).

So, what does Eleanor look like

Very much like the niece that I am so fond of and will often mention in my posts, once I get the gears in my antiquated engine moving. Well, at least I did resemble her many, many years ago. These days, I look more like a wrinkled old prune, but I prefer to think of myself as a tea totling, fuzzy blonde teddy bear in a floppy white straw hat with multi hued roses around the brim and a stylish net hanging down to shade my eyes. Unfortunately, search as I might, I was unable to find a photo of that cuddly little bear. So, since I feel that posting a photo of a dehydrated piece of fruit would be distasteful, I have decided on the more appealing option of the image of my niece. She has consented to this misrepresentation, as long as I promise not to disclose her true identity. Add another half a century to her beauty and your imagination will have adequately sculpted my distinct features.

Who is Eleanor Waverly?

What could she possibly have to say?

Well, knowing Eleanor, as I do,--quite a bit. I won’t say that it will definitely be worthwhile reading. Eleanor wouldn’t want me to lie. After all, it could simply be more nonsense about the nonsense that we already hear and see too much of everyday, but I’ve seen Eleanor produce unbelievably provoking thoughts.

She speaks her mind and knows her opinions often brush others the wrong way. She’s not afraid to ruffle our feathers and expose the thin layer of fragile down beneath. Honestly, I sometimes think she does it on purpose. “To encourage friendly discussion and debate,” I can hear her say as she sits reading in her forest green arm chair, her lips stretched into an almost evil cat-like grin. Eleanor has always been an instigator.

She admits, though, that she is as often wrong as right—perhaps more so.

I can only hope that I will have the courage to stand up and face the world, and the strength of voice to shout back at it, when I am Eleanor’s age. A sagely figure she will not allow me to reveal.

The ice is broken Eleanor. The first entry written. The introduction made.

May the popularity of your blog rise with the tide and never recede.