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Security Holds Up School Supplies
Delivery of Kits to Iraqi Students Proved Difficult

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 5, 2003; Page A19


BAGHDAD -- The smiling children swarmed the theater at Al Farouq Secondary
School and grabbed at the stacks of navy shoulder bags. A gift from the
American government, the bags were stocked with goodies such as notebooks,
rulers, geometry sets, and a real treat -- premium-quality No. 2 pencils,
something that had been hard to come by under the previous regime.

It was a small but important victory for the U.S.-led occupation.

"We are very happy today. We never used to have bags like these," said Dhia
Aqeel, an 11th-grader who like other boys in the schoolyard was proudly
wearing his across his chest.

In the Bush administration's grand plan for rebuilding Iraq, the delivery of
the student kits is one of its more visible projects. Unlike more long-term
efforts such as creating democratic councils, training nurses and rebuilding
water systems, the bags being handed out to 1.5 million schoolchildren
around the country are a tangible sign of how the new government is making
people's lives better.

Delivering these kinds of basic supplies was supposed to be the easy part.
But in a place where the airports are closed to commercial traffic, ports
are operating at limited capacity, and roadside ambushes, hijackings,
kidnappings and bombs have become daily hazards, it has become a logistical
nightmare.

Route maps and delivery plans must be reworked constantly on the news -- or
rumor -- of the day, a reality that has thrown both timetables and price
tags askew.

"People think the war is over. That's not true. We're still in a transition,
and if things go a bit slower and cost a bit more for security, that is how
it has to be," said Robert Gordon, who works for Creative Associates
International Inc., the District-based company that is overseeing the
distribution of school supplies on behalf of the U.S. Agency for
International Development.

The months-long journey of the student kits, chalkboards and other education
supplies helps explain why the reconstruction is proving more difficult than
originally anticipated. It is a story that has taken the government through
the forests of China, barges on the Persian Gulf, dusty roads in Kuwait, a
secret warehouse in south Iraq -- and an ambush on the highway to Turkey
that left one trucker in the hospital.

It's difficult to estimate how much all this has added to the bottom line
for reconstruction. But in more than a few cases, including the recent
delivery of new currency for the country and the importing of cement, the
bill has more than doubled.

That includes the premium paid for imported goods versus local goods;
overtime, hazard pay and insurance for truckers; extra storage for items;
and compensation for stolen or damaged goods.

The materials for each of the 1.5 million school kits cost $4.56, and the
extra delivery costs added 75 cents per kit -- about 16 percent to the price
tag. Creative Associates also is spending up to $1.25 million of its $63
million contract on security for project personnel.

But the problem turned out to be more about time than about cost. As the
security situation deteriorated, so did the delivery schedule. The
government delayed the start of the school year from Sept. 21 to Oct. 4, but
even so, some of the supplies didn't make it until weeks after classes
began.

In the psyche of even the youngest Iraqi schoolchild, pencils have a special
symbolism. Bad pencils equal sanctions. Ever since the international
community imposed restrictions on foreign trade on Saddam Hussein's
government after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, it's been difficult to import
school supplies. And Iraqi-made pencils wouldn't sharpen, smeared easily and
couldn't be erased.

Those against the sanctions used the pencil shortage to support their
argument that the restrictions were harming the general citizenry more than
Hussein's government. A British member of Parliament, seeking an end to
sanctions, carried a gift of pencils from Jordanian children to Iraqi
children on a visit. And U.S. activists began a "Pencils for Peace" program
to distribute the writing instruments to youth.

Hardy No. 2 pencils were so treasured that some families would save for
months to buy them. A packet of a dozen, at 100 to 250 dinars each, could be
three or four days of a teacher's salary.

So when Creative Associates planned its student bag supplies, it was sure to
include 12 No. 2 pencils, along with a six ballpoint pens, 10 writing
tablets, a metric ruler, erasers, mini-calculator, geometry set and plastic
pencil sharpener. The red-white-and-blue USAID logo was stamped in as many
places as possible.

In April, even as the fighting was still going on, Creative Associates
subcontractor American Manufacturers Export Group Inc. placed an order for
the school supplies from a company in China. In late September, the goods
began arriving in a port in Kuwait and were scheduled to be trucked via the
desolate 420-mile road between Kuwait City and Baghdad that was supposed to
be the main supply route for getting supplies, both civilian and military,
into the country. But that path, as well as the main roads from Jordan and
Turkey, quickly turned into what locals deemed "highways of death."

In the spring, two Kenyan contract truck drivers carrying aid supplies for
the British army were abducted and held hostage for 10 days. In July, three
Jordanian drivers ferrying Coca-Cola cans were attacked -- one was shot and
killed, another one was injured and the third was held for ransom. In
August, a Kellogg Brown & Root Inc. contract driver transporting mail was
fired upon en route and died.

"Supply convoys are being hit more than anything else. It's scary on Iraq
roads. People are all over you," said Army Sgt. Daisha Brown, 21, who serves
with the 183rd Transportation Company and has been attacked three times in
about as many months.

There were so many armed attacks on travelers that the military quickly
devised a more secure, but much slower, way to travel, said Army Brig. Gen.
Jack C. Stultz: convoys with armed escorts that traveled no more than 40
miles per hour and only in daylight so they can have a better chance of
seeing bombs in the road and glimpsing attackers. As a result, instead of a
quick eight-hour trip, traveling that road has become a tense two-day
ordeal.

Instead of being loaded onto a fleet of 85 flatbed trucks headed straight to
the schools, each student kit ended up being transferred to a minimum of
four different vehicles before reaching the children.

Kuwaiti truckers refused to go further north than the southern Iraqi city of
Basra. And an Iraqi trucking company wasn't allowed to go into Kuwait,
explained Loic Chabbert, the logistics manager for Creative Associates, and
Bruce Oliver, a manager for Matrix International Logistics Inc., a
subcontractor in charge of the transportation. So the goods were transferred
in Basra and taken to three secure distribution centers, for the northern,
central and southern parts of the country. From there a third truck took
them to the 18 governorates in the country. Then a fourth truck headed to
the individual schools.

For the Agency for International Development, this indirect system meant
that some of the student kits arrived later than planned, taking away some
of the magic of the deliveries.

"The bags are a nice thing, but they came very late," said Heba Talib, a
19-year-old high school senior who received hers on Oct. 21, almost three
weeks after school began. "Many of us already bought some things from the
market."

The delivery of 58,500 aluminum-framed green chalkboards and erasers, which
cost $2.7 million, also turned out to be unexpectedly complex. Designed by
British firm Findel Education Ltd., they were manufactured in Turkey. When
the chalkboards were ordered in the early summer, the roads from the north
to Baghdad were relatively safe. Most of the planned route went through
Kurdistan, a region that had been oppressed under the old regime and where
there has been little violence against the U.S.-led occupiers. A single
Turkish firm, Caniler, agreed to take the goods all the way to the Iraqi
governorates for $780,000.

No one foresaw that the company's foreign license plates would make it a
target.

The first few trucks made their drops without a hitch, but on the return
trip to Turkey one truck subcontracted by the U.S. development agency,
traveling in a convoy with about 20 others, was attacked by a mob of men
armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in the oil town of
Beiji. The driver was beaten up and his truck destroyed, but he managed to
escape. Two of his colleagues were killed.

After hearing about the attack, the drivers of the three dozen trucks
carrying the rest of the chalkboards stopped in the northern Kurdish town of
Irbil -- and refused to budge. With school already in session and teachers
expecting the boards immediately, this had the potential to be a crisis,
fueling the arguments of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation and say it
is not living up to its promises.

So Gordon raced up to Irbil. He offered the truckers $500, and then $600, to
make the trip. He offered to pay for private security guards. He offered
U.S. military escorts. "You need to get these chalkboards to the Iraqi
people. They are counting on you," Gordon recalled begging.

The drivers were apologetic, but the answer was still no. So Gordon hired an
Iraqi company to take the chalkboards the rest of the way. He demanded that
the Turkish company absorb the additional costs, which it did -- eventually.
It took a few days to negotiate the new terms and five days to unload and
reload the remaining 28,600 chalkboards, which measure four feet by eight
feet. The delivery schedule was thrown off by a week to 10 days, but the
Iraqi truckers haven't had any problems. The chalkboards have now begun to
arrive at the schools.

Meanwhile, the casualties -- a total of six military, four contract drivers
killed -- and thefts -- everything from bottled water to construction
equipment -- have military commanders scrambling to devise a new
distribution strategy that tries to get as many people off the roads as
possible. The Army 's Stultz said that soon more supplies will be moved
through the Iraqi rail system and a new airbase north of Baghdad.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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