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U.S. Engineer Views Work Done So Far With Pride
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Across the courtyard, workers pushed wheelbarrows and swept up dust in a newly renovated wing of the facility, the first phase of a $2.9 million overhaul of the children's hospital. Project quality supervisor Anmar Abdul Karim pointed to the panels that would deliver oxygen and suction fluids at each bed, to the reverse-osmosis system that would deliver some of the rare clean water in Baghdad, to the placement of a clock in every room so that nurses would know when to hand out medication. Karim was particularly satisfied with an isolation ward, with self-contained ventilation and climate systems that engineers built in part from instructions found on the Internet.
Karim reminded Hudson of the last time when they were on the old side of the hospital, when parents who had brought their child in mistook the Army engineer for a doctor. The baby died, Karim said.
The final stop took Hudson to a women's hospital that will tend more than 300 patients when a $5.75 million renovation is complete. Iraqi hospitals normally are decrepit facilities, with grim paint and mysterious stains. At this hospital, Hudson and project chief Mohammed Hassani pointed out an Internet cafe, a cafeteria and a flower shop.
"No excuse ever now for Iraqi husbands not to grab some flowers before they go upstairs," Hudson said. Distracted, he pointed to a dropped ceiling. "Plumb and flush and straight. They've done a good solid job with them."
Hudson liked it all.
"Even if it's something grubby like a sewage system, I think it's exciting,'' he said.
"Some of these places, we don't even know where the sewage goes. The system's so jury-rigged,'' he said. Fixing it all, he said, "will take years."
Hudson will return to Colorado Springs around March. Money for the U.S. reconstruction package here is scheduled to run out around the end of the year. International donors largely have not kept their pledges to pick up the tab for reconstruction. Iraqis have balked at the painful economic reforms necessary to win foreign loans to do the work. Insurgents want to destroy it all. Civil war would do the same.
"Guys like the doctor give me confidence they're certainly going to do their very best," Hudson said. "We'll have to see how all that stuff works out."
