Word: nadam
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...Nadam Hassien Mohammed is so poor that he cannot fulfil the most fundamental requirement of Arab hospitality: As he sits down to a lunch of rice and spinach, he is unable to offer food to his guests - a journalist, a photographer and their two government-appointed minders. There's barely enough to feed his family of four. Deeply embarrassed, he would prefer to postpone lunch until after we've left. But the photographer wants to capture the family going about their everyday lives, so Nadam sits on the floor with his wife and two grown children and toys with...
...leave as quickly as we can, to wait in the small courtyard. Nadam joins us within minutes, claiming to have finished his meal. More likely, he couldn't bring himself to eat while his guests went unfed. For a poor, 65-year-old chauffeur, that is one indignity too many...
...Poverty is a relatively new experience for Nadam, a barrel-chested man with bristly gray hair and thick glasses. He has been a chauffeur all his adult life, for various government departments. He has never been rich, but until the economic sanctions on Iraq, he did reasonably well. Although he lost two sons in the war against Iran, he regarded himself content. At least, that's how he remembers it. "I had everything I needed," he says, simply. "It would have been wrong of me to want more...