Changing Lifestyles : Getting Back to Living: Kuwaitis Shop, Dance, Rebuild : Not everyone is satisfied with the pace of recovery. Still, people in Kuwait city are rediscovering the good life.

KUWAIT CITY —  At night, as the glow of burning oil wells hangs in the southern night sky, a different kind of light, of neon signs, glowing store windows and the headlights of dozens of slow-cruising automobiles, blinks and flashes and wheels through Kuwait’s fashionable Sulmaniya district.

Here, amid the broken plate glass of looted stores and piles of trash that are the reminders of seven months of Iraq occupation, Hamad al Mobarak Street, Kuwait’s version of Rodeo Drive and Hollywood Boulevard all in one, is a lively reminder that the Kuwaitis are still the most cheerfully conspicuous consumers on Earth.

Gucci and Carrera sunglasses are stacked seductively in shop windows near displays for Christian Dior’s Poison cologne. T-shirt shops offering “Scudbuster” and “Kuwait is Free” designs can be found on every block. Seductive negligees are top sellers in the newly opened boutiques.

From the music shop, the sounds of Dire Straits pour out onto the street, competing with the soulful strains of the popular Saudi crooner, Mohammed Abdu, from a slow-cruising Camaro gliding by in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Just up the street, at the Hardees hamburger stand, a line of Kuwaitis in long, white dishdashas stretches out to the sidewalk, approaching a similar line at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Young men stand in a circle around a portable tape player while three teenagers in the center of the circle, wearing backward baseball caps and unlaced, high-top tennis shoes, bop to the beat.

“Every night we come here because the Iraqi army took all the other places to go,” said one of the youths, Khalid Bechir, pausing to catch his breath. “Now, everything is OK, and everybody is happy. We listen to the lambada , to some club music, and we dance, dance!”

Two months after liberation, through the blackened, towering frames of burned-out buildings, amid the hulks of wrecked and stripped cars that still line the motorways, under the haze of smoke from hundreds of burning oil wells, Kuwait is coming back to life.

Electricity has been restored to 90% of the population, and cold running water is available on most days. Much of the time, you can call across town, and about a tenth of the country’s outgoing international phone lines have been restored as well.

Four gates have been opened at Kuwait International Airport, and amid the ruined terminals and burned-out control tower, Kuwait Airways is operating daily flights to Cairo and Bahrain and preparing to expand the service to other Arab capitals, then on to London and the United States.

Hard-hatted engineers and construction workers are measuring and hammering feverishly at the Meridien and Sheraton hotels, which suffered heavy fire damage from retreating Iraqi troops, just at the time when thousands of foreign construction workers, journalists, engineers and oil-well firefighters are driving lodging rates sky high.

The Sheraton plans to open 200 rooms in a less-damaged rear wing in the next six weeks by using workers on three alternating shifts, 24 hours a day--all in hopes of sharing the wealth. “We have to think how to participate in eating from the cake,” explained the profit-conscious general manager, Adnan Ahmed Said.

At the Kuwait International a few miles away--a hotel that a month ago was forcing guests to climb stairs to their rooms, where guests were issued two tall white candles at check-in and toilets often had to go unflushed for days--a chic Patisserie bistro with a view of the Gulf now offers coffee for $6 a cup and a plate of croissants for $12. The new cappuccino machine arrived Thursday. But clean sheets are still unattainable luxuries.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials who have advised Kuwait on its reconstruction say the country has substantially completed its emergency recovery, a month ahead of schedule, and slightly under budget, at a little more than $1 billion. Longer-term recovery--the restoration of sewage treatment, telephone service, full television and radio broadcasting capability, full banking services, and schools, beyond the first 300 scheduled to open in September--will likely take much of the next year.

“Kuwait was damaged, but it was not destroyed. It is not like a World War II Dresden or Stuttgart, where you had to come in and completely rebuild the city,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Kelly, commander of the U.S. Defense Reconstruction Assistance Office in Kuwait. “When you consider that two-thirds of their population is not here and they’ve only got one-third of their native population, the emergency phase has, I think, gone magnificently.”

Government officials this week put out the call for the estimated 400,000 Kuwaitis living abroad to begin coming home in May, hoping that returning civil service workers, shopkeepers and technocrats will be able to propel the country further along the road to recovery.

“How can you run a country if all the citizens are abroad?” asked acting Planning Minister Suleiman Mutawa, who predicted that Kuwait’s total population could reach 1.25 million by September. Kuwait Airways plans to ferry home up to 75,000 Kuwaitis in a monthlong airlift beginning May 11.

Not all Kuwaitis have been satisfied with the pace of recovery, complaining that restoring basic water, electrical, and food distribution services took weeks longer than the government initially promised.

Moreover, the devastating environmental impact of the oil well fires has continued virtually unabated, with only 42 of the more than 800 gushing or blazing wells capped so far. Many have put the blame on the Kuwait government’s delay in signing contracts for fighting the fires.

The delay has been costly in economic terms as well: An estimated $100 million to $125 million worth of petroleum a day is going up in smoke. Kuwait’s oil minister, Rashid Amiri, says he expects Kuwait to resume production of enough oil to meet domestic needs, about 50,000 to 60,000 barrels a day, in the next three months. Oil for export will take much longer; full refinery operation may be several years down the road.

“It has gone well enough,” said a senior government official, who asked not to be identified. “If there are delays, then maybe it is because of the inadequate planning that went on prior to the implementation, when people actually arrived on the scene.”

A key to how well Kuwait pulls out of the crisis may lie with the Kuwaitis themselves and how quickly they move to restore the country’s ravaged private sector. The government has nudged the process along, offering 500-dinar grants (worth about $1,540) to Kuwaitis who remained in the country, and announcing that all private loans owed to Kuwaiti banks would be forgiven--a stunning gesture worth, according to some Kuwaiti economists’ estimates, up to $1 billion. Maintaining the exchange rate of the newly issued Kuwaiti dinar at its prewar levels has helped hold down inflation.

But rebuilding entrepreneurs complain that they are still having to pay their Filipino, Pakistani and Indian laborers much higher wages to lure them away from competing companies. Many foreigners fled the country during the occupation, and obtaining housing and visas for their return has been difficult--particularly with the Kuwaiti government’s policy of reducing dependence on foreign workers.

“Who was getting 300 or 400 K.D. ($1,160) a month before the invasion, now he’s getting 700 ($2,030),” sighed Emile Barakat, a Lebanese who is feverishly rebuilding Kuwait’s oldest restaurant, Mais Alghanim, scheduled to open in the next six days.

“It will take long time,” he admitted, “but I think Kuwait people now they want to start to build the country again.”

On the east side of town, where a long block of once-gleaming automobile showrooms stands in ruins, with row on row of cars leaning akimbo with their tires, stereos, sometimes even entire engines and transmissions stripped, Mustafa Karam last week found a dozen next-to-new cars from his former stock that had been hidden in private garages, polished them up, fixed his air conditioner, put up new signs outside and opened for business.

Only in Kuwait, perhaps, would you find it difficult to buy toilet paper but, at least in Karam’s showroom, easy to buy a pair of gleaming Chevrolet Corvettes for a mere $36,000 apiece. Karam is also offering new Chevrolet Caprices, Toyota four-wheel drives and Suzuki motorcycles. In car-crazy Kuwait, Western diplomats say one of the first shipments into the newly reopened Shuaiba Port will be a cargo of 1,000 Buicks. Karam is putting in his order for new Suzukis next week; they’ll arrive three months from now.

As the largest leaser of automobiles in Kuwait, Karam figures he lost $87 million in inventory, warehouses and garages to the Iraqi plunderers. Now, his mechanics are pulling spare parts off the 1990 wrecks to service new customers.

“Never mind!” he says, sailing through the wreckage in the back lot toward the new showroom. “Nobody die! It’s OK. What we can do? Already happens. I don’t want to kill myself. We’ll start again.”

At the Sultan Center supermarket on the corniche along the Persian Gulf, customers who three weeks ago were thrashing each other in government co-op lines to grab 50-pound sacks of rice already are pushing shopping carts past a seeming pirate’s treasure chest of fresh oranges, apples and peppers, rows of spices, imported shampoo, coffee filters, hair color, frozen pastry, Dream Whip and fake fingernails.

Of such stuff are countries reborn.

“By September, we expect that the schools will be running, the majority of Kuwaitis abroad will have come back, the country will be running smoothly,” said one official. “If that doesn’t happen, then there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”