IRAQ: Many Iraqis remain unenthused by Sunday's elections - hoping for the best but fearing the worst, writes Jack Fairweather in Baghdad
They've managed to hide the fact that elections are taking place fairly well at Polling Centre 100.
No rooms have been prepared or ballot boxes delivered, and election officials rarely show up there. Like 5,000 polling stations across the country, there's not even a sign on the door denoting its status. Such levels of secrecy imposed by Iraq's electoral commission are one reason why the country's first democratic elections in over 80 years will be so extraordinary.
Thwarting terrorist attack will be as important as counting votes on election day, say officials. A nationwide curfew during the poll means shops will be closed, civilian traffic barred from the roads, and voters, if they dare, will have to make their way to polling stations on foot through multiple security cordons.
But behind the silent preparations there is also a deeper sense of surrealism surrounding the elections.
Politically, Iraq will be turned upside down, putting the country's Shi'ite majority in charge after decades of Sunni rule, although few believe a new government will be able to improve their daily existence.
Instead, they talk about how elections will change their country's battered psyche.
Since the US-led invasion 22 months ago, Iraqis have been asked for the first time to question what it means to be Iraqi, and for many the prospect of refashioning their own country is unbelievable.
For 30 years Iraq laboured under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Half the country has known nothing beyond the banal world of Ba'athist rule, with its nationalist slogans, grim socialism and obsessive sense of order.
It was a nightmare of repression and torture for many Iraqis, although for others the insular world of Ba'athism was their home.
"I used to look in the mirror and know exactly who I was. I was Iraqi. Now I'm not so sure what I see," is how one Iraqi put it.
Such self-examination hasn't proved easy. There are those who have sought refuge in Islamic fundamentalism, others in tribal values, or ethnic identities.
The country's raging insurgency - itself a vortex of Ba'athists, Islamists and foreign fighters - has further splintered the Iraqi sense of self, pitting Sunni against Shi'ite, government employees against former workers, and, in some cases, family members against each other.
In the Shi'ite south and Kurdish-controlled north, the renewed sense of religious and regional identity has fostered a quiet optimism, and visions of a federal Iraq that will accommodate their demands.
But for many Iraqis the only response to the violence and uncertain future has been to enter a kind of anaesthetised sleep.
"I feel like I am drugged most of the time, waiting for things to get better," said Abdul Karim, a shop owner on a busy Baghdad thoroughfare.
Few Iraqis like to talk about the elections. Some fear the poll will push the country towards civil war.
Few feel connected to Iraq's new crop of political leaders or think that their day-to-day existence of power cuts and car bombs will change.
"We're watching our country being transformed. We can see the glimmer of changes, it just seems very far away at the moment," said another Iraqi.
Back at Polling Centre 100, headmaster Abdul Karim Mohammed desperately tried to parry questions over what use the building was going to be put to.
During the day, the polling station is a bustling secondary school, on the edge of one of Baghdad's predominantly Shi'ite slum.
"I don't want my pupils to be targeted because we're taking part in elections," he said.
He reluctantly answered the question as to what next week's elections would mean to him.
"It's another day which we will have to live through to take us to a future where I can call myself a proud Iraqi again," he said.