Simple Pleasures

Manager Hamid Abdul Hussein gives the Americans high marks for taking the initiative to redo the pool, but insists the Iraqi contractors did little for the money spent. "I don't believe they spent 135 million dinars on the few things they did," he says. Actually, the final bill was 452 million dinars ($377,000), for mostly cosmetics, cleaning, painting and some plumbing work. Hussein says they need a generator, because there isn't enough electricity to pump the water more than once a day, sewers are chronically blocked, and there's no money for chlorine. Still, he's not quibbling too much. As recently as March, Hussein pointed out, there were three or four bodies on the street outside the pool every morning, in an area controlled by the Mahdi Army and now under truce. Nine-year-old Amer, a swimmer at Jadida, has been won over entirely. "I love to see the Americans here," he says, "because without them we would not be able to swim here."

Of the four pools, Al Rafadain's reopening has been the most trouble-free--partly because its complex of three pools segregates nonswimmers. Few if any of those swimmers are from the Sunni neighborhood only 200 yards away, but still, it's a long way from where it had been a year ago. "This place was used by the [Shia] militias for killing, and many bodies were found in the pool, everywhere around here," says manager Sadq Muhammed Naji. "Reconstruction changed it from a place for death to a place for enjoyment of life." In Iraq, for the moment at least, that's victory enough.

© 2008