By Sumayya Kassamali

Nine year-old Sajaa lives with 24 other members of her family in a small house in a dusty corner of the city of Karbala. Sajaa’s home consists of her two maternal grandparents, 8 aunts and uncles, 9 cousins, and 5 sisters – yet despite such a large and loving family, the only people missing are the ones she needs most: her parents.

Having grown up in Baghdad, Sajaa lost both her parents by the devastating age of five. Her father was killed in a suicide bombing in 2003, his body never recovered, buried, or given the opportunity to ritually grieve at a funeral. Her mother died soon after while giving birth to her youngest sister, who is now five years old. At the time, Sajaa’s extended family lived together in subsidized housing in a large government factory in the country’s capital. Soon after she lost both her parents, American forces came and kicked the family out of their home in order to convert the building into a military base. Given absolutely no warning or even the permission to gather some of their belongings, they were forcibly evacuated with only the clothes on their own backs. They had no choice but to relocate to Karbala, slowly finding shelter and gathering some belongings with the help of friends and neighbours. Now, together with her own husband and daughter, Sajaa’s mother’s younger sister takes care of her six nieces: 14-year old Nur, 12-year old Ruwayda, 8-year old Baneen, 6-year old Fatima, 5-year old Zaynab, and of course, Sajaa.

Each of the four families in Sajaa’s home lives in one bedroom of the four-room house. With neither beds nor mattresses to sleep on, thin quilts quietly piled in corners and unfolded onto concrete floors at night were the only hint that each room housed an entire family. Electricity was unreliable as it is throughout Iraq, but this home did not have the luxury of a generator to rely on when the power fails. As Sajaa's aunt told us, in the winter they would huddle together for warmth when there was no heat. The tiny bathroom was cold and dank, and the bath was used to wash clothes and large dishes, while a cramped kitchen attempted to support 25 hungry mouths. Windows were loosely covered with cardboard, pieces of netting creatively nailed down onto wooden frames with the tops of aluminum soda cans sliced to form jagged, versatile pieces of hardware. The family cannot afford bottled water and drink contaminated tap water, one of the primary health concerns for young children across the country.

The large family relies upon only one steady income from Sajaa’s uncle Abu Heba, who works cleaning the City Hall for 150,000 IQD ($129) a month – an amount that does not even cover their monthly rent of 200,000IQD. Sajaa’s other two uncles perform a variety of precarious and temporary work, butit was often hard to predict when they would be able to find work and when they would return home empty-handed. The monthly funds CAI provides from sponsoring Sajaa joined these intermittent incomes in a pot of savings used primarily for food and other essential expenses. As they repeatedly told us, this was a family that made ends meet only by the grace of God.

When we met Sajaa, some of us stayed indoors discussing life stories with her aunts and grandmother while the rest of the CAI volunteers played outside with all the children. Sajaa’s siblings and cousins spent the afternoon posing for photos and amusedly trying to make sense of our rudimentary Arabic skills. Sajaa, however, remained quiet throughout. Despite all our attempts to make her laugh, we struggled to bring out even the slightest hint of a smile in the corner of her eyes. Certainly we were strangers, and we expected it would require some effort for the children to let us in to their worlds. Yet it seemed the emotional trauma of losing two parents, being forcibly relocated to a new city, and growing up under conditions of poverty and war had left a particularly deep mark on young Sajaa. Unlike the other children, Sajaa appeared frightened, lost in her own little world of fear and confusion.

Weeks after we left her, Sajaa’s face continues to stand out from our pictures, staring back at the camera with both warmth and intensity. As one volunteer remarked, “I want to go back to Iraq, especially for her”. It is for children like Sajaa that CAI was founded, in the hopes that a small donation from somewhere across the world might indeed help rebuild a shattered life. When it comes to Sajaa, even the small monthly donation goes an incredibly long way, as it helps not only her, but as her grandmother told us, contributes to the well-being of her entire extended family. Although our fleeting attempts to make Sajaa laugh may have been unsuccessful, we can take some comfort in knowing that whether through covering the cost of cooking oil, contributing to monthly rent, helping pay for emergency medical costs, or in a good month, covering the cost of a birthday gift or new pair of clothes, in many quiet ways CAI has already helped rebuild pieces of Sajaa’s life.

Sumayya Kassamali recently completed an MA in Sociology and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. Together with 6 other North American volunteers, she traveled to Iraq for 10 days with the Vancouver-based NGO Child Aid International (CAI) in February 2009.