Taji, Iraq -- There are places in Iraq where things are getting better, where people are beginning to step out of the darkness of despotism and war into, if not the light, then at least glimmers of hope. Taji is not one of those places.
In this tiny suburb on the outskirts of Baghdad, about 50 families live as they have for years, in clutches of tiny villages where they build their homes, feed their animals, and raise their children. Their homes are made of garbage. Their animals are fed with garbage. And their children are raised in garbage.
Taji is the capital's garbage dump, but it wasn't always known solely for that dubious distinction. Businesses and factories once operated here -- including one in Saddam Hussein's time that manufactured chemical weapons, according to Secretary of State Colin Powell -- and the first residents lived in small homes near their places of work.
But the businesses are long gone and the factories abandoned, swept away by war, the collapse of the economy and by a flow of garbage that has been swelling recently as Baghdad's sanitation system finally comes back on line.
Now trash is king here, stretching to the horizon, forming hills and valleys, streets and plains of reeking, steaming filth.
Every day, giant green trucks arrive in Taji, carrying the refuse of a metropolis, food scraps and water bottles, diapers and broken glass. They scrape up the mountains of rubbish that have been choking Baghdad's streets since the war and dump them here, virtually on the doorstep of a man who gave his name only as Abu Wisam -- father of Wisam, one of six children he has raised in the garbage.
"Many families have lived here for 20 years. Maybe more. They have no other homes," he said. "We didn't see any changes from the war. Maybe we have the freedom to speak our minds now, but nothing else happened."
Nobody from the Iraqi provisional government or the American military has been to Taji since the war, Abu Wisam said. A humanitarian group came once, with enough blankets for about half the village. Then they went away.