Remember Those Schools?
From Sothernstudies.org:
The situation in Iraq’s schools—which Bechtel was supposed to have repaired over the summer—is not much better. Complaints about shoddy or undone school repairs have recently brought high-level outside scrutiny. An internal study by U.S. Army personnel, surveying Iraqi education ministry staff and school principals and recently leaked to Cox Newspapers, strongly criticized Bechtel’s attempts to renovate Iraqi schools.
"The new fans are cheap and burned out immediately upon use. All inspected were already broken," wrote a U.S. soldier. "Lousy paint job. Major clean-up work required. Bathrooms in poor condition," wrote another about a different school.
Much of the criticism focuses on Bechtel's Iraqi subcontractors. "The contractor has demanded the schools managers to hand over the good and broken furniture. The names of the subcontractors are unknown to us because they did not come to our office," wrote an Iraqi school planner.
"In almost every case, the paint jobs were done in a hurry, causing more damage to the appearance of the school than in terms of providing a finish that will protect the structure. In one case, the paint job actually damaged critical lab equipment, making it unusable."
Bechtel officials defend their work. "The people at Bechtel really care about this one. We've all got kids. We've all been to school. In a country with a lot of hurt, this is meaningful. So, it's a system, it's people who care and it's being done in the middle of chaos, chaos evolving into something more orderly and more Iraqi," Bechtel's Gregory Huger, a manager in the reconstruction program, told a Cox reporter.
To find out for ourselves, we visit four Baghdad schools (all listed as renovated by Bechtel), beginning with Al-Harthia, a low white building that houses 570 elementary school students. Here we meet Huda Sabah Abdurasiq, who loses no time in showing us all that is wrong. The rain leaks through the ceiling, shorting out the power. The new paint is peeling and the floor has not been completely repaired, she says.
Most shocking to Huda is the price tag: “I could fix everything here for just $1,000. Mr. Jeff [a Bechtel sub-contractor] spent $20,000!” she fumes. She went to the district council and complained and then marched off to the convention center to confront the military. “They were very angry and spoke to our councilmember Hassan but nothing happened. And we have no receipts for money spent. It’s useless, they won’t do a thing,” she says.
We head over to Al-Wathba school, easily in the worst condition of all the schools we visit. Ahmad Abdu-satar, a friendly man in a dapper suit who has worked here for two years, shows us the toilets and sinks: new brass taps and doors painted a dark blue but the sinks are in a terrible state, they don’t look like they have been touched in a decade. There is no new paint on any of the walls, and, like the previous school, the playground is flooded.
”I’ve been thinking of turning it into a swimming pool,” he remarks sarcastically. “Honestly, nothing has changed since Saddam’s time. I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We tell him that budgets have been slashed in America and teachers fired en masse, but he repeats his question: “I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We are forced to concede that the answer is no.
”We have no books, no stationary, nothing. At least we had that in Saddam’s time. Yes, our salaries have gone up, but so have prices. When I asked the contractor why they didn’t finish the job, they said: we don’t work for you, we work for the Americans.”
We stop briefly at the Al Raja’a school, but it is still being repaired. Jamal Salih, the guard, shows us around, then complains that he had asked the contractor to fix his house, but they refused. We take a peek inside, surprising his two daughters and wife who are busy preparing a meal of potato chips for lunch. The workers also invite us to join them for their falafel lunch, but we decline and hasten to the last stop of the day before the school closes at one p.m.
This is Hawa school, run by Batool Mahdi Hussain. Hussain is a tall woman, dressed all in brown, including her traditional Islamic headscarf. She appears young for the 11 years she has spent at this school, which she recently took over when the parents voted her in as headmistress after the war. Like the two previous headmistresses, she is eager to talk and show us around.
She is also bitter about the contractors. The school has a fresh coat of paint on the outside with all of the characters from the Disney version of Aladdin, complete with the genie and the prince.
But, she says, things are worse than under Saddam. “UNICEF painted our walls and gave us new Japanese fans. They painted the cartoons outside. When the American contractors came, they took away our Japanese fans and replaced them with Syrian fans that don’t work,” she says angrily.
We are joined by the school guard, Ali Sekran, who speaks a few words of English. He repeatedly uses his AK-47 as a pointer to help Hussain illustrate all the problems. We pray that the gun isn’t loaded.
The headmistress takes us to the toilets where a new water system has been installed, pipes, taps and a motor to pump the water. The problem is the motor doesn’t work so the toilets reek with unflushed sewage. She then uncovers a new drain cover to show us that it is nothing but a cover. She walks quickly, not waiting for the camera to catch up, a whirlwind of show-and-tell. “These doors, the hinges are broken. We were supposed to get steel doors, we got wooden doors. The new paint is peeling off. There isn’t enough power to run our school.”
We notice a brand new blackboard. Hussain says that the teachers paid for it out of their own pocket. As we bid farewell, she walks us out of the gate and points to the construction debris in the road.
“They didn’t even take their rubbish with them. They gave us no papers to tell us what they had done and what they did not do. We had to pay to haul the trash. Honestly, the condition of our school was better before the contractors came.”
Bechtel Baghdad spokesman Francis Canavan says the company has “received inquiries" on a number of the schools it contracted to repair. He says Bechtel has directed its subcontractors to make repairs, and is witholding 10 percent of the subcontractors' payment to ensure that repairs will be made.
But the United States Agency for International Development (AID) is unapologetic about the state of the schools. An official spokesperson tells us: “If you are going to do a slam article that complains that the paint is peeling on a school that we didn’t fix, I don’t see why I should talk to you. I don’t even know that you went to schools that were fixed by AID—26 of the 52 schools that have submitted complaints were not even part of our contract.” We assure her that we only visited schools that were listed by Bechtel, showing her Bechtel’s own list. She acknowledged the list with bad grace, clearly rattled by numerous news reports of the failure of the school repair program which officials had hoped would bring them much-needed positive publicity.
The situation in Iraq’s schools—which Bechtel was supposed to have repaired over the summer—is not much better. Complaints about shoddy or undone school repairs have recently brought high-level outside scrutiny. An internal study by U.S. Army personnel, surveying Iraqi education ministry staff and school principals and recently leaked to Cox Newspapers, strongly criticized Bechtel’s attempts to renovate Iraqi schools.
"The new fans are cheap and burned out immediately upon use. All inspected were already broken," wrote a U.S. soldier. "Lousy paint job. Major clean-up work required. Bathrooms in poor condition," wrote another about a different school.
Much of the criticism focuses on Bechtel's Iraqi subcontractors. "The contractor has demanded the schools managers to hand over the good and broken furniture. The names of the subcontractors are unknown to us because they did not come to our office," wrote an Iraqi school planner.
"In almost every case, the paint jobs were done in a hurry, causing more damage to the appearance of the school than in terms of providing a finish that will protect the structure. In one case, the paint job actually damaged critical lab equipment, making it unusable."
Bechtel officials defend their work. "The people at Bechtel really care about this one. We've all got kids. We've all been to school. In a country with a lot of hurt, this is meaningful. So, it's a system, it's people who care and it's being done in the middle of chaos, chaos evolving into something more orderly and more Iraqi," Bechtel's Gregory Huger, a manager in the reconstruction program, told a Cox reporter.
To find out for ourselves, we visit four Baghdad schools (all listed as renovated by Bechtel), beginning with Al-Harthia, a low white building that houses 570 elementary school students. Here we meet Huda Sabah Abdurasiq, who loses no time in showing us all that is wrong. The rain leaks through the ceiling, shorting out the power. The new paint is peeling and the floor has not been completely repaired, she says.
Most shocking to Huda is the price tag: “I could fix everything here for just $1,000. Mr. Jeff [a Bechtel sub-contractor] spent $20,000!” she fumes. She went to the district council and complained and then marched off to the convention center to confront the military. “They were very angry and spoke to our councilmember Hassan but nothing happened. And we have no receipts for money spent. It’s useless, they won’t do a thing,” she says.
We head over to Al-Wathba school, easily in the worst condition of all the schools we visit. Ahmad Abdu-satar, a friendly man in a dapper suit who has worked here for two years, shows us the toilets and sinks: new brass taps and doors painted a dark blue but the sinks are in a terrible state, they don’t look like they have been touched in a decade. There is no new paint on any of the walls, and, like the previous school, the playground is flooded.
”I’ve been thinking of turning it into a swimming pool,” he remarks sarcastically. “Honestly, nothing has changed since Saddam’s time. I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We tell him that budgets have been slashed in America and teachers fired en masse, but he repeats his question: “I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We are forced to concede that the answer is no.
”We have no books, no stationary, nothing. At least we had that in Saddam’s time. Yes, our salaries have gone up, but so have prices. When I asked the contractor why they didn’t finish the job, they said: we don’t work for you, we work for the Americans.”
We stop briefly at the Al Raja’a school, but it is still being repaired. Jamal Salih, the guard, shows us around, then complains that he had asked the contractor to fix his house, but they refused. We take a peek inside, surprising his two daughters and wife who are busy preparing a meal of potato chips for lunch. The workers also invite us to join them for their falafel lunch, but we decline and hasten to the last stop of the day before the school closes at one p.m.
This is Hawa school, run by Batool Mahdi Hussain. Hussain is a tall woman, dressed all in brown, including her traditional Islamic headscarf. She appears young for the 11 years she has spent at this school, which she recently took over when the parents voted her in as headmistress after the war. Like the two previous headmistresses, she is eager to talk and show us around.
She is also bitter about the contractors. The school has a fresh coat of paint on the outside with all of the characters from the Disney version of Aladdin, complete with the genie and the prince.
But, she says, things are worse than under Saddam. “UNICEF painted our walls and gave us new Japanese fans. They painted the cartoons outside. When the American contractors came, they took away our Japanese fans and replaced them with Syrian fans that don’t work,” she says angrily.
We are joined by the school guard, Ali Sekran, who speaks a few words of English. He repeatedly uses his AK-47 as a pointer to help Hussain illustrate all the problems. We pray that the gun isn’t loaded.
The headmistress takes us to the toilets where a new water system has been installed, pipes, taps and a motor to pump the water. The problem is the motor doesn’t work so the toilets reek with unflushed sewage. She then uncovers a new drain cover to show us that it is nothing but a cover. She walks quickly, not waiting for the camera to catch up, a whirlwind of show-and-tell. “These doors, the hinges are broken. We were supposed to get steel doors, we got wooden doors. The new paint is peeling off. There isn’t enough power to run our school.”
We notice a brand new blackboard. Hussain says that the teachers paid for it out of their own pocket. As we bid farewell, she walks us out of the gate and points to the construction debris in the road.
“They didn’t even take their rubbish with them. They gave us no papers to tell us what they had done and what they did not do. We had to pay to haul the trash. Honestly, the condition of our school was better before the contractors came.”
Bechtel Baghdad spokesman Francis Canavan says the company has “received inquiries" on a number of the schools it contracted to repair. He says Bechtel has directed its subcontractors to make repairs, and is witholding 10 percent of the subcontractors' payment to ensure that repairs will be made.
But the United States Agency for International Development (AID) is unapologetic about the state of the schools. An official spokesperson tells us: “If you are going to do a slam article that complains that the paint is peeling on a school that we didn’t fix, I don’t see why I should talk to you. I don’t even know that you went to schools that were fixed by AID—26 of the 52 schools that have submitted complaints were not even part of our contract.” We assure her that we only visited schools that were listed by Bechtel, showing her Bechtel’s own list. She acknowledged the list with bad grace, clearly rattled by numerous news reports of the failure of the school repair program which officials had hoped would bring them much-needed positive publicity.
posted by Captain Caseous at 8:44 a.m.
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