Iraq's wounded: on their own
Nearly 37,000 Iraqis were injured last year alone. Though programs exist to help them, many find hope only when they take matters into their own hands.
from the April 11, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Short-order cook at 'Happy' diner
Musa's life was turned upside down in early November when he was returning to Sadr City with his best friend and neighbor, Saeed Rasoul, from work at the Al-Saeed (Happy) restaurant in the Karrada district.
The men had been making the same daily journey for nine years, leaving at dawn and returning at noon in a taxi. Musa prepared short orders for breakfast and then cooked lunch while Mr. Rasoul manned a stand outside selling gaimar, a popular dish of fresh cream topped with honey or jam.
Musa was paid 15,000 dinars ($12) a day and cooked at weddings and funerals for additional income. Last year, he started getting a monthly pension of 98,000 dinars ($77) from the Ministry of Transport, where he had been employed for years as a public bus driver before he was fired in 1997 for political reasons, he says..
The extra cash enabled him to move out of his parents' home and rent out his own place in the Habibiya Apartments, a housing project built in the 1980s for the families of soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war. He bought a new refrigerator, stove, and living room set on an installment plan.
"I wanted to turn the place into our own little kingdom," he says with a hint of irony in his voice.
Musa, a stocky man in his 40s with a neatly trimmed beard and dressed in a red-and-blue track suit, wells up when he recalls the bombing incident.
The taxi he and Rasoul were riding in was the first to leave a traffic light when it hit a roadside bomb most likely planted for the police behind them.
"When I opened my eyes, I could smell the burning remains of the vehicle and I saw poor Saeed saying his last prayers," says Musa. Both Rasoul and the driver were killed.
Musa suffered for nearly a month, going to four different hospitals in Baghdad, before his arm was properly amputated. He still has shrapnel in his limbs, and after a failed operation to fix a broken jaw, doctors advised him to go abroad for a second try.
"I do not think I would have made it if it was not for God in heaven and the two Jawads under the golden dome," he says referring to two revered Shiite saints buried in a shrine in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah district.
The Ministry of Transport has suspended his pension, and for awhile his family survived thanks to help from his brothers and friends.
He tried recently to apply for the one-time payment of 1 million to 2 million dinars ($787-$1,575) promised by the government to all those wounded or disabled as a result of the violence, as well as for a monthly pension of 90,000 dinars ($70) from the Ministry of Labor's Social Care Network, but was soon discouraged by complicated procedures and a backlog of cases that stretches back years.
At the low point of Musa's despair, he considered removing his 12-year-old son, Ahmed, from school and sending him to work to support the family, but relief came when his old boss told him he could work again at the restaurant supervising other cooks for 7,500 dinars ($6) a day.
RSS feed
