Children of War Read Online Free

time.
    Our lives didn’t last like this for long. Very soon, a stranger left
     a note at our house saying, “Get out or we will kill you.” I don’t
     know who left the note. I don’t know who wanted us dead.
    We left Iraq and came again to Jordan. Now we live inZarqa, and we are trying to make our lives here. But everything feels so broken. I
     miss my father, and I miss my home.
    My brothers and I go to school here. I’m the only Iraqi kid in my
     class. The other students are okay, they’re friendly. My best subject is science.
     We’re studying genetics now, and the properties of gas and liquid. It’s very
     interesting. Earlier today we went on a class trip to a park in Amman, with lots of
     trees and fun things to do.
    We don’t play much with the neighborhood boys. They’re all
     Jordanian, and they tell us that they don’t like Iraqis. My mother worries too
     much when we leave her sight, like she’s afraid we will disappear. So we mostly
     stay inside, but that means we fight a lot. Especially, I fight with the brother right
     next to me in age. I used to like him a lot but now he’s always plowing into me
     and throwing things at me.
    He wets the bed every night, too. He didn’t used to, and he’s
     ten, too old to be doing that. My mother gets him up a lot during the night to go to the
     bathroom, which wakes me up, so none of us gets much sleep. I try not to tease him about
     it, because I know he can’t help it, but sometimes I do, and that makes me ashamed
     of myself.
    My mother even stopped taking us both to church because she’s afraid
     we’ll start fighting in the middle of the service. She takes us one at a time now.
     I promised myself I won’t fight any more, then I do it. Like I said, it makes me
     ashamed. Our fighting just adds to my mother’s unhappiness, so I must find a way
     to stop it. I see her sittingand staring and looking very unhappy.
     She used to make fatyr, meat pies, to sell for some money, but the oven broke so she
     can’t do that any more. She forgets all kinds of things, and just sits and
     stares.
    We’ve been accepted by the UNHCR, and we were supposed to go to
     Australia, but Australia changed its mind and doesn’t want us. So here we sit.
    I have nothing in common with American children, except if there is maybe
     an American child whose father has died, whose house is destroyed, and who is forced to
     live in a foreign country that doesn’t want them. Then he and I would have
     something to talk about.
    I think it would make the world better if people had to fix the things
     they broke. Like, if someone bombs your house, they couldn’t go away and do things
     they wanted to do until they built you a new house and fixed what they broke.

Sara, 15

    In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, sanctions were imposed on
     Iraq by countries around the world. Food, medicine and other goods were prevented
     from going into Iraq, and the country’s economy and its people suffered from
     being unable to engage in full trade with the rest of the world. Because
     water-treatment plants had been damaged during the First Gulf War, half the Iraqi
     population did not have access to clean drinking water. Inflation skyrocketed, the
     education system collapsed and, as Hadani Ditmars wrote in
Dancing in the No-Fly
     Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, “
almost overnight, the lives of
     most Iraqi citizens went from comfortable to desperate.” The sanctionscontinued until 2003, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths,
     according to UNICEF.
    Sara is old enough to remember those years under sanctions. She
     lives in the Hashimi district of Amman, near the older downtown. There is a shiny
     new shopping mall nearby. Behind the wide, bright streets of the commercial area are
     houses full of small apartments that house many Iraqis, including Sara, her two
     sisters, her mother and a