My older stronger brother is called Cain. You might remember hearing about him from eons past at a time when there was more good than evil in the world. My name is Abel and this is my story.

I am a 10-year-old Iraqi street boy. I make my living selling gum and begging on the streets of Baghdad. Beggars do not do well these days as the majority of the people are worse off than poor, they are desperate and have no where to go and no one to turn to. Rumor has it that the smart and wealthy Iraqis have long ago fled the country, leaving behind the ruins of a once great nation.

Before I was old enough to remember, the Americans bombed my country during the war Westerners fondly labeled "Desert Storm." This year, during the Holy month of Ramadan and not too long before Christian Iraqis celebrated Christmas, the Americans again bombed us. I am old enough now to remember how destructive and terrible bombing is. Believe me, it is the worst form of terror and there is simply no refuge from a bomb. Ask my father, for it was an American bomb that took his life.

I don't remember my father. He was killed during Desert Storm. He was a professor of English Literature at the University of Baghdad and as my mother tells us, used to quote Shakespeare, especially Macbeth, the eve all this madness began. But our tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows have come and brought us nothing but death, disease and despair.

I am considered one of the "lucky ones." I have eaten enough garbage and drunk enough sewage-polluted water to give me resistance to simple germs. You see, children like me, 5,000 to 6,000 a month, die from a variety of ailments and only the strongest survive. After all, we have neither medicine nor adequate health facilities to treat animals, much less humans.

Sometimes I feel I am not so lucky to be alive after all. I am forced to spend most of my time out on the street begging for a few pennies that I take home to my mother at the end of the day. It is winter and the wind on the streets of Baghdad goes through my young bones. Other street boys like me, some of them orphans too, gather together and build a bonfire to warm our hands and bodies. But nothing warms our hearts. Our childhood is denied us. Everywhere I look, I see ragged mothers carrying ragged starving sick babies with sores seeping all over on their tiny hands and faces and I wonder if this is the way things are supposed to be. My older brother Cain says it is. He says that might is right and that power once it falls into the hands of the wicked, knows no justice and certainly no mercy. Cain should know for he has much experience in such matters.

I, like many Iraqi children my age, do not go to school. I stop cars and try to beg a penny or two from drivers that look little better off than myself. "Please sir, have a penny to spare for a boy who has to support his family. My mother is sick and unable to beg and my sister has diabetes."

Sometimes I feel a cold penny plunk into my frozen hand and if I am terribly hungry, I take a few more pennies and try to buy a stale sandwich. You know the kind, the bread that has little green spots growing all over it. But sometimes my stomach hurts so bad from hunger pangs, I will eat nearly anything. Fasting teaches the full in Ramadan really nothing like what the starving already know. And Cain tells me there are so many full people in the world. Full, happy stomachs sitting around warm fireplaces. A fireplace where children can dream of what new excitement tomorrow will bring. My tomorrows have come and gone and I am only 10. My evenings are filled with nightmares and I have come to determine that peaceful dreams are dreamt and owned only by the prosperous.

Meanwhile, there are almost daily clashes between American planes and Iraqi forces. Each boom makes me shudder and my future is more uncertain than ever. But Cain is happier than I have ever seen him. Some inner sense of scenes replayed an infinite number of times gives me the feeling that he is trying to kill me.

On a cold night while fellow street kids and me try to keep warm over a few wooden matches, I just might welcome the vision of my father opening up his loving arms, inviting me to a world where there are no Cains, no war, no hate.