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Baghdad: As the armoured truck rounds the street corner, nurse Lamia Hussain Mohammad paces the crayon-scribbled hallways of a Sadr City elementary school with an army-issued rifle over her shoulder.
From inside the building, now a temporary patrol base for the US Army, she can hear the truck bouncing and jerking, full of food, cooking oil and Iraqi soldiers preparing to face a crowd of locals.
The American soldiers didn't know the Iraqi army was coming today to bring food and help with medical care. Army Captain Logan Veath drops his arms in frustration. The visit was planned at the last minute, and the Iraqis failed to arrange for a female soldier to carry out full-body bomb searches of women entering the clinic set up in the school. Lamia, a medical volunteer waiting at the makeshift clinic, hands off her rifle and makes some calls.
Familiar sight
The aid truck is an unexpected but familiar sight in this conservative Shiite neighbourhood. People stumble sleepily from their homes, then break into a run, racing to get to the school. Children, experts at this game, are the first to reach it. Older men push each other out of the way. Women are the last to arrive. They trip over their billowing black abayas, thrown on hastily like housecoats.
The crowd gathers impatiently. Iraqi army Captain Qiauce Frijohn uses a stick to push women back and smack the feet of teenagers, turning the line into sport.
Watching from a window, Lamia snaps shut her cellphone with a nod of success after locating a female Iraqi soldier. "They are most desperate," she says of the waiting women. "This war leaves them without fathers, husbands. No way to buy food or medicine. Except for this."
Pushing each other out of line, people sneak onto the truck, reaching out of turn and climbing onto the bumper before the soldiers get a chance to hand out the food.
"This is how it always goes," says Iraqi army Lieutenant Colonel Haitham Hosham. The Iraqi army delivers aid in Baghdad three to five times a week. Today, more than 500 local residents have shown up.
After nearly an hour, the female soldier arrives and escorts patients, three at a time, into a small, dusty office decorated with paintings by schoolchildren. Schedule books and student rosters lie open, as if abandoned in the middle of a school day.
Women shyly whisper their problems to Lamia. Across the room, men meet with a male medical volunteer. Most cases involve heart problems or pregnancy. Also blood pressure, diabetes, anaemia, asthma, malnutrition, vomiting, diarrhea and an outbreak of chicken pox. "In the harder cases, where surgery is needed, there is nothing we can do," Lamia says. No exams are given, only advice, antibiotics and supplements. She would like to recommend local hospitals but usually doesn't.
"Most real doctors are gone," she says.
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