Editor’s Note: NEWS staff writer Alicia Anstead is sending periodic dispatches from Iraq and points along her itinerary to Baghdad, where she is traveling with fellow journalist Peter Davis of Castine, who is on assignment for The Nation magazine.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – At house 14 on Street 18 in Section 360 of Baghdad, there was a celebration last night. It was not because of the announcement that Saddam Hussein’s sons Odai and Qusai had been killed in a gunbattle with American troops several hundred miles north of the city.

Nantha Al-Chokhachi and her son, who once lived in Tennessee but are now homeless in Baghdad, told me they were celebrating because they did not have to spend another night outdoors near a garbage heap where scorpions and snakes threatened them. Last night, they slept in a shelter recently established here to assist homeless women and their families.

“It was the first night of peace for my family,” said Al-Chokhachi, who is staying temporarily in the broken-down house on a street with an enviable view of the Tigris River. She was thrown out of her state-sponsored house more than a month ago, and, when I asked, she reguided the question of why she left America, where she has family. “I was stupid to come back to Iraq,” she said. “I left paradise and came to hell. I don’t want freedom from American troops here. I want freedom in America.”

The river, clearly, is the only enviable part of the lifestyle of the 15 women and their children who have found refuge in this haven run by Essam Al-Chalabi, an Iraqi peace activist who was jailed three times by the former regime for his work protecting women. He moved his operation from a city in the north to Baghdad after the war to expand the efforts that once earned him the wrath of the country’s leader.

Now, he and members of his board of directors are paying for expenses out of their own pockets because human services for the poor are at least as slow coming as the restoration of jobs, electricity and security in this city of 5.5 million. They hope soon that money and resources will come from the American government, nongovernment organizations and others who want to help support their efforts to help women.

The house, formerly an annex of the Iraqi defense department, was looted after the war and bears the scars of a rapid clean-out. The walls are crumbling where appliances have been ripped out, the fixtures in one bathroom lie sideways on the floor, the windows are shattered into spears of glass. In one room, two mothers and two children sleep on the floor. One woman here has four children. The oldest is 20 and the youngest, who was asleep on a blanket on a dusty tile floor, is a toddler. The woman’s husband died from natural causes in the last year, the woman said, and now she feeds her children from a portable stove, and keeps their food cold in a Styrofoam carton.

While the families in this house slept safely last night, much of Baghdad was on the street shooting victorious bullets into the air to celebrate the killing of Odai and Qusai, whose cruelties reached far and wide in this country. In the street beyond my hotel window, a round of bullets rattled into the air, and flares could be seen in the sky. One Baghdad resident compared it to the Fourth of July – even though the shots were sporadic and hardly the size of holiday fireworks or the blasts during the bombing of Baghdad.

What is explosive, however, are the stories of nearly everyone I have spoken to about the Hussein brothers, and now the Iraqis feel free to tell their tales. Even the translator who subtitled American films for Odai tells of the fear his boss inspired – and he never was beaten. Others relay details of severe torture and injustice at the hands of the Hussein progeny.

“I am very, very, very happy,” said Awattif Muhrib, a Baptist who was dismissed from her job in the Ministry of Agriculture under Hussein’s regime. “I would have preferred that Odai and Qusai would have been caught alive, stuffed and put in a zoo where people could come from all over the world to see a symbol of evil. Last night was a jubilee.”

Al-Chokhachi, who is homeless and covers her body in a traditional long dress and veil, and Muhrib, who is hopeful and wears Western clothes, have one thing in common with many Iraqis today: They are relieved to see the elimination of two monsterlike brothers whose crimes against Iraqis are notorious.

While others continue to call for the immediate departure of American troops, these two women want them to stay and secure their city. Indeed, countless Iraqis want the Americans to stay and just as many have bitter, patriotically fueled complaints about the continuing presence of the threatening American tanks on their streets and in their government buildings. Some say the foreign military has simply replaced the dictator.

In a crowded press briefing Wednesday at the Convention Center once owned by the old regime’s Republican Guard, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez was both proud and cautious about the Hussein killings – labeled by some as an unnecessary show of force against men who would have surrendered in time and then might have provided useful intelligence.

Sanchez was resolute, however. “That was the decision the commander made and it was right,” he said. Sanchez reminded reporters that three American soldiers had been killed in the past 48 hours and that the war is not yet over.

“This is a turning point for the resistance and for the subversive elements,” Sanchez said. “But our mission is not complete … the ultimate objective is Saddam Hussein.”

Instead of showing photos of the dead brothers, as some have called for, Sanchez offered this as reassurance to the Iraqi people: “The Saddam Hussein regime will not come back to power … we will ensure the freedom of the Iraqi people and that is our purpose.”

The war is still on in Iraq, said Sanchez. He was talking about the continuing guerrilla attacks on coalition forces. But at house 14, I witnessed another war – about poverty.

A 10-year-old boy living there with his mother, a piano teacher, approached me hopefully and said, “I want a PlayStation.”

The one he once had was destroyed in the war, said his mother. So was her piano. Tonight, it is unlikely that their thoughts will turn toward the fall of a regime and the elimination of two of its high-value targets. Instead, mother and child undoubtedly will be nestling near one of two air conditioners donated to the house by a hospital, and praying that they still will have a house, no matter how crowded and inadequate, to call home tomorrow.

Alicia Anstead’s “Notes” and articles she plans to write after her return from Iraq will be based on conversations with Mainers and Iraqis with common ties, and her perceptions of daily life in that troubled and volatile region.