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SAFWAN, IRAQ
Lost and 'found' in the desert
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff, 3/30/2003
In minutes, hundreds of people were massing on the formerly deserted stretch of road. They formed what one of my colleagues dubbed a mosh pit. With Saddam Hussein's Baath Party loyalists most likely eavesdropping nearby, the majority of Iraqis I approached declined to talk to me. But those who did were friendly, whatever their politics. A teenaged boy, one of the few locals who spoke English, asked me where I was from. When I replied, he gave me a big smile and said, "We hate America!" A taxi driver asked me to marry him. When we got back onto a bus to leave, children gathered outside the windows and waved. But then this one guy stuck his head right up to the partially-open window, puckering his lips. After giving him a few unamused looks, I decided the best response was to turn away. Just then, a Mexican TV correspondent next to me saw a hand reach into the window and grab my telephone. Back in Kuwait, we called my cellphone and listened to the Iraqis laughing on the other end. I got a Kuwaiti to yell at them in Arabic, but they hung up.
This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 3/30/2003.
he residents of this border town haven't had clean drinking water or electricity in a week. But somewhere around here lives an Iraqi with a prized new possession: my cellphone. Reporters went to Safwan on Friday with the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society, which was distributing 3,000 boxes of food aid.Children and adult men came running as soon as one of the aid trucks halted on the outskirts of the town, with a few women swathed in head-to-toe cloaks following more cautiously.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
