With Love From Baghdad... (Jodie Evans co-founder of Code Pink report--just returning from the opening of The International Occupation Watch Center in Iraq*)

WHEN: Monday, July 14th at 8pm

WHERE: SPARC - on the North side of Venice Blvd, West of Lincoln and just west of Oakwood.

RSVP: Please rsvp to Linda at 310-827-3046 or at heartbu@aol.com, include your phone number.

Message from Jodie Evans in Iraq:

On Monday, July 14 you are welcome to join us, to hear stories Jodie Evans brings home from Baghdad. It is hard here, a war zone yet the war is over, hot with no electricity, dusty with no water, danger everywhere that may never appear, fear in everyone's veins as people are now being shot point blank in the head.

Yet the Iraqi people are the same generous, kind, delightful peopleJodie met in February. Jodie visited a very difficult neighborhood in Baghdad. She walked up to a woman talking with intensity and volume about the horror with the lack of water and electricity, hundreds of homeless children, and the sewage at our feet. She couldn't talk fast enough to explain the problem and demand a solution... she was talking to our interpreter, when she turned to me her face lit up with a warm greeting smile--in the midst of all of it she said to me, "welcome." She continued to plead with all of us, babies are dying, they are all miserable. Why can't the Americans give us our electricity??? We still have no answer...

*The International Occupation Watch Center in Iraq

Given the lack of reliable, up-to-date information about conditions in Iraq under the occupation, and knowing that Iraq will receive increasingly less attention as media sources abandon the country for the newest "hot spot," an international coalition of peace and justice groups opposed to the occupation is launching the website www.occupationwatch.org and organizing a Baghdad-based International Occupation Watch Center.