Reconstruction workers seem to be just as exasperated.
Reconstruction workers spent most of last year making emergency repairs and assessing the problems.
During the Reichstag's reconstruction, workers uncovered graffiti, in Cyrillic script, scrawled by Red Army soldiers on second-floor walls.
Politically well-connected companies got lucrative contracts, Bush rolled back wage protection for reconstruction workers and citizens were stuck in the Superdome.
By midafternoon, a similar protest outside the heavily guarded complex that envelops the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, a home for hundreds of Western reconstruction workers and journalists across the Tigris River in east Baghdad, turned violent.
Week after week, month after month, it has served free hot lunches to residents, volunteers, reconstruction workers and anyone else in search of a simple meal and some company.
That group claimed an infiltration attack in the city of Karbala in January 2007, in which fighters dressed in American uniforms and driving vehicles like those used by American reconstruction workers broke into the provincial government headquarters and kidnapped five Americans, all of whom were killed in the ensuing shootout.
But James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Centre, suggests FEMA's rent subsidies themselves are helping to fuel the rush for apartments in and around the city.The housing shortage has been hard on newly arrived reconstruction workers who know nothing about the geography of New Orleans.
In a swath of land along the Helmand River Valley, where there has been an enormous focus by NATO troops and international reconstruction workers, the acreage open for cultivation of vegetables and staple crops increased somewhat, according to a counternarcotics expert from the British Embassy, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.
In 2004, more than 40 health and reconstruction workers were killed, including 5 who were murdered specifically for being health care workers.
