photo courtesy Jan Hoyer Kansas City area residents pay their respects at the outdoor memorial exhibit,

Rick McDowell and Mary Trotochaud, a husband and wife humanitarian assessment team working for the American Friends Service Committee as Iraq country representatives, were in Kansas City for two days in October to speak to students at Avila and Rockhurst universities about their experiences with the Iraqi people.

McDowell and Trotochaud arrived in Baghdad in April 2003, shortly after coalition forces reached the city. It was not their first trip to Iraq. McDowell had been a member of 15 anti-sanction delegations to Baghdad between 1996 and 2003, and Trotochaud participated in two delegations during 2002.

"This time when we got there, the invasion had just ended, so it was very visible in the bombed out buildings," Trotochaud said in a telephone interview from Akron, Ohio. "What stood out was the total lack of security. There was a lot of looting and burning, and the streets were very unsafe. Even under the old regime, the city was always very safe to walk around in. Now it is not. Even after 18 months, many of the buildings are still unrepaired," she said.

Trotochaud said security continues to be a grave concern to the Iraqi people. While they are very happy to see Saddam Hussein's' regime gone, they remain fearful of the long process of reconstruction. Unexploded ordinance litters the streets, schools and neighborhoods, she said. Basic services such as electricity and water are still erratic, although some progress has been made in rebuilding the infrastructure and restoring phones, water and electricity to pre-invasion conditions.

"Civilians are suffering," Trotochaud said. "In the wake of the invasion, security, not just safety, but job security, schools and food, disappeared so quickly that the people ask where the freedom is. Iraqis just want to have jobs and raise their kids."

"We can no longer believe that the U.S forces in Iraq are there to protect the Iraqi people, either physically or economically," she said. "More than 20,000 Iraqis have died and many more wounded in the aftermath of the invasion. Millions are unemployed. Increasingly, they fear for their lives and the lives of their families."

The "insurgents" have been given a lot of press, Trotochaud said. She said they are made up of divergent forces - terrorists, religious extremists, even criminals - and are a small minority of about 20,000 people in a country of about 25 million.

A lot has been written about the Shiite and the Sunni Muslims in the past couple of years, she said. "Actually the Iraqis don't understand religious divisions, and that only adds to the chaos. Iraqis are Iraqis first, Muslim second," she said. "The Shiite and Sunni Muslim designations have been superimposed on the people, which creates more divisiveness, and the threat of a civil war looms ever closer," she said.

"There's no accountability in spending, so funds are misspent or not spent in rebuilding the cities and restoring the services," Trotochaud said. "The civilians are not being put back to work; they're not being empowered to control their own country."

On the flip side, an American engineer, who lives and works in the Green Zone, a secure area for American government workers and the military, wrote in a recent e-mail, "We have put a big effort on in the last three weeks to hire lots of Iraqis. The concept being that the more Iraqis you hire the more you reduce unemployment and the better the security situation will become. Now a new problem has arisen. The insurgents are targeting workers who work with us." Those workers are easily identified by the blue jumpsuits, work boots and hard hats issued by American contractors. "Now our workers do not want to look like workers on American projects. They are literally scared to death," he wrote.

Iraq is run by 'State-Owned Enterprises,' he wrote. "The ministers who run many of the state-owned enterprises want us to give them the funds with which they say they will rebuild the infrastructure. But if we do this they will simply award the projects to their friends and families. We are having to teach them about open, transparent bidding processes. Until the state-owned enterprises are privatized, we will not have a free Iraq."

Several months ago, the goal of the occupation shifted from "Rebuild Iraq" to "Nation Building." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Iraq to review the shift from reconstruction to creating security, economic stability and democracy. This involved "changing the way the $18 billion designated to rebuild the nation will be invested, which means some programs will be cut and others expanded," the engineer wrote in the e-mail.

There are no easy answers, Trotchaud said. There have been many mistakes, and "solutions" that do not work. "The Iraqis are a courageous, intelligent people," she said.

"They want a voice in rebuilding their own country. They are coming together to solve some of the problems. There is an emerging women's movement. The Iraqis need the international community to work with them to rebuild and restore their country.

"The U.S. government talks about the insurgents. But if there are about 20,000 insurgents, that leaves 24,980,000 non-violent civilians who just want peace, jobs and to provide for their families. And they are caught in the middle," Trotochaud said.

Trotochaud and McDowell plan to return to Amman, Jordan, at the conclusion of their speaking tour and continue with their humanitarian relief programs, including filling emergency medicine prescriptions for children in refugee camps, transporting hygiene kits, and funding the construction of toilets and sinks.

The speaking tour coincided with "Eyes Wide Open," an exhibit presented by the American Friends Service Committee, memorializing the American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion began.

The exhibit was first shown in Chicago in January 2004, with 504 pairs of boots symbolizing the American troops killed in the war. More boots were added at each city where the traveling exhibit was presented. More than 1,100 pairs of boots and the names of more than 11,000 Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives made up the exhibit in Kansas City last month.

"'Eyes Wide Open' helps people understand and get a realistic impression of the human cost of the Iraq War," said Ira Harritt of the American Friends Service Committee's Kansas City Chapter.

Harritt said AFSC's teams in Iraq have been working since 1991 to alleviate human suffering arising from the decades of sanctions and the current occupation. "Trotochaud and McDowell made it clear to their listeners that the Iraqi people are people just like us," he said.

"There is no argument that Saddam was not a brutal dictator," Harritt said. "But, despite his secret police and the brutality of some of his minions, there was more stability for the 25 million civilians in the country."

Just before Trotochaud and McDowell returned to the U.S., a close friend of theirs, Margaret Hassan, the British worker with CARE International, was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents. Her kidnappers have threatened to behead her if their demands were not met.

"Margaret's life remains in jeopardy," Trotochaud said. "There is no news at this point, and we don't know if that's good or bad. All we can do is pray."

END