Another one bites the dust.

Perhaps my previous posts and photographs misled you. Not everything here is bright and beautiful.

During my first week in Dohuk, I awoke one morning to what I thought was fog. (Sewanee fog!) But it was so hot and dry. It was a blanket of dust. Since then, I've experienced three dusty days like this one. My eyes are dry and itchy. It could be my imagination, but I tend to feel more sluggish when we have this dusty weather. When I ask people to explain the dust, they offer a variety of ideas.

 "It didn't start until 2003," one young woman told me. "The occupation [coalition forces] stirred up all the dust moving their tanks around."

I found that a little hard to believe. In Baghdad, maybe, but all the way up north?

 "It's climate change," another person told me. "All the deforestation from the time of Saddam until now has caused the land to become drier and dustier."

That seemed more reasonable. Other sources, like this news article (http://www.kurdishglobe.net/display-article.html?id=0C5FA83E2340146AC008B118C606B393) attribute the dust to weather patterns from the Arabian peninsula.  Whatever the origin, the dust is causing respiratory problems for many people: (http://pukmedia.co/english/77/kurdistan-region/880-dust-storm-blankets-kurdistan-region-cities )

A dusty day like this makes me feel "like a lonely sparrow on the housetop." Or a pigeon in this case.

Caving In

As part of the sightseeing near the border with Turkey (see post "There are mountains beyond mountains"), we also explored a cavernous area with two interesting caves.

The first cave (above). Mullah Mustafa, the Kurdish nationalist, reportedly hid in this cave some time during the various struggles against the Iraqi state. 

 Nearby we visited another cave which houses an Assyrian (Syriac) church built into a mountain side.

 Some members of our sightseeing group lit a candle.

 The Montessori school I visited in Barzan (see previous post "Hotel for Cows") graciously organized a special field trip for Grades 1 and 2. I had requested to see the Shanidar Cave, mostly so I could have bragging rights next time I am a TA for an introduction to anthropology course.  Here's the Wikipedia article on the cave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave

Approximately thirty children, ages 6 and 7, piled into two mini-buses and a pickup truck. They were ecstatic,although I doubt they understood the significance of where they were going. No matter, they were going on an adventure with snacks tucked in little plastic bags. On the thirty minute drive along the Great Zab river bank, they clapped along with Kurdish songs the elderly driver played on an old cassette tape. He smiled a very toothy grin back at his happy passengers. At one point he abruptly pulled over on the shoulder of the road and ducked into a small convenience store to buy a bottle of water for me. Already I'm caving into the Kurds' famed generosity and hospitality. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)

 I was charged with keeping watch over four bright-eyed Kurdish girls who bounced alongside me and bounded ahead only to be told, "Wara, wara!" (Come, come!) They were adorable.

 Here we are exploring the cave and picnicking at the entrance. Of course, we didn't attempt to wrangle 30 kids through the narrow passages to see more of the cave. Loading the vans, hiking up to the cave, and keeping watch over the herd was adventure enough.

 Cliff swallows (birds)!

 A view of the cave from below. You can see a similar photograph (below) on a page of a KRG Ministry of Education issued Kurdish textbook. I wonder how many Kurdish children actually visit the cave, which seems to have little to no security and is covered in graffiti and litter.

Hotel for Cows

Shortly after the hornet incident (see previous post), an idea occurred to my employer. "Why don't you go back to Barzan with Helga* and Vanja* (pseudonyms) to visit their Montessori school?" I turned to look at the silent passengers in the backseat. Helga blinked and said in her thick German accent, "Ok, yah." Before I knew it, I was bouncing along in the backseat of a pickup truck with the two women on a four hour drive to rural Barzan. Helga, a rotund, motherly German type drove and did most of the talking. Vanja, a wiry, tall and strong Bosnian refugee who has lived in Germany, mostly listened and made brief remarks in between puffs on her electric cigarette. Vanja's eyes were squinty and dark but her tanned face was covered in laugh lines. Every time we neared a pothole, Helga, who had worked for an NGO in Greece exclaimed "Opa!" Vanja, in her low, raspy voice said, "Opes." The potholes knocked the breath out of me, so that I said "Omphf." Soon Helga and Vanja fell silent, and the only noise was our chorus of "Opa! Opes! Omphf!" We stopped for food and supplies, and I realized that Vanja, in addition to her Bosnian, German, Russian and little English could speak Kurdish.

Four hours later we pulled into a dusty, dark carport and climbed out of the truck. Helga pushed open a creaking iron gate, and I stumbled into a dark garden pulsing with flies and bats. At the doorstep, Helga and Vanja removed their shoes before entering the building, as is the custom. However, they picked up their shoes and carried them inside, rather than leaving them on the door step. Puzzled I followed them inside and asked, "Why do you carry your shoes?"

"Oh, yah," Helga said locking the door. "Sometimes we have ze scorpions."

Pause. "Would you please open the door so that I can bring my shoes." They laughed.

Bearing a flashlight (torch), Vanja escorted me to an empty mini-hotel adjoining the school grounds. It had been built to be a nurses hostel for the local hospital, but that plan fell through. The old hotel sign, now lying on the ground outside the building, had been painted over with the word “Jasna,” or “Cows.” Dodging the wasps that had built a nest in the ceiling, Vanja showed me my room, which unfortunately did not have air conditioning. Since the building had been shut for some time, it was hot and stuffy inside. The smell of a dirty toilet had filled the building. "Yah, ok, goot night," Vanja said. If you know me, you know I'm no camper or outdoors-woman. Thinking a cold shower would be a relief, I shuffled down the hall in large slippers borrowed from Vanja. The faucet strained and gurgled until a dirty trickle of water came out and disturbed the graveyard of flies beneath the faucet. I set up my flashlight nearby, as the electrical wires were hanging out of the hole where the outlet cover should have been. Anyone who has ever lived in a hot place where you could only take a freezing cold shower will understand: You think a cold shower is going to be a relief, but a freezing cold shower is still miserable. Shivering violently, I lathered soap haphazardly. Suddenly one of the shower knobs shot off like a bullet and I screamed. It would have been a good setting for a slasher film.

 Roses planted outside the school building

Things improved the next morning. I joined Helga and Vanja for a teacher's training session in their Montessori school. 

A three year old girl demonstrates the Montessori method of associating the symbol of the number with material objects by counting pearl beads and placing them next to the number placard.

  

 The Montessori school in Barzan where I visited for two days.

 

Helga and Vanja have planted a lovely rose garden for the children to tend.

After a long day participating in and observing the school, I took an evening walk down to the river. Remember, I'm not an outdoors person, so like a fool I tramped through a pile of mud trying to get to the river. Out of nowhere two Kurdish guys appeared, laughed, and beckoned, saying, "Wara, wara!" ("Come, come!") I followed them hesitantly to a garden faucet where they enthusiastically started washing my shoes and attempted to bathe my feet. Embarrassed, I apologized profusely with the few Kurdish words I have learned, and astonished they asked, "You speak Kurdish?"  (Um, no.) Before I knew it, there were at least ten Kurdish young men gathered around asking me questions and inviting me to tea. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but "blonde" came up quite a bit in the frantic conversation. Laughter. Winks. Cell phone calls and more Kurdish males started appearing around the gate. I quickly thanked them, said goodbye, and with my cheeks burning, I hastily made for the river. Perhaps the whole village knew by sunset that a stupid and blonde American woman had tramped through the mud like a cow and had let some Kurdish guys wash her feet.

 Sunset over Barzan and the river

I decided that this species of ant must be the aforementioned "scorpion." Ok, I hoped it was the scorpion.

There are mountains beyond mountains

 There's still some snow on the mountains in Turkey, beyond the border with Kurdistan.
 

Shivering in the darkness, I pulled the blanket tighter around my neck and moved to the couch, where I hoped it would be warmer away from the window. Dohuk has been so hot and dry that I hadn’t thought to pack warmer clothes for the mountains. After much tossing and turning, I burrowed beneath the blanket, which was shortly thereafter pierced by invading sunrays at what I thought was 8am. Apparently, in the village the sun rises with startling intensity at 5am. Gathering the blanket around me I walked to the windows and watched the village of Shemsayyida turn golden under the peaking sun, then greener as the sun rose higher and the sky grew bluer. 

After a busy week visiting schools in Dohuk for my job / research, I had joined my employer for another weekend trip to her village. This time she had invited eight guests to her village home for a holiday. Because each guest has some stake in reforming education in Kurdistan, the discussion over breakfast became passionate and the gathering seemed more like an education summit rather than a weekend getaway to the village. 

Although the education problems we discussed remained unresolved, the group, invigorated by the debate, turned the conversation to sightseeing. It was decided that we should drive up to the border with Turkey where we could see Turkish mountains beyond the mountains of Kurdistan.

Late spring wildflowers, bursting forth in golden clusters and lavender and pale blue blooms on stalks.
 

Loaded into three vehicles, we set off for the border. In the 1990s only brave humanitarian caravans would have made such a trip, as my employer recounted. “Up ahead I will show you where the PKK stopped us,” she enthusiastically pointed out as we lunged around the mountainous hairpin turns in her BMW.  She was one of the first, if not the first, female drivers in this part of the country, and she drives with the same dexterity as other drivers in Iraq: dodging enormous potholes, passing cars in blind curves, and braking hard in gravel. There are no lanes. It might be argued that there are no rules of the road, just civility and experienced risk-taking.

 Men dressed as peshmerga (Kurdish freedom fighters) headed to a picnic. No doubt these men were freedom fighrters.

 

It seemed to be a happy reunion. Too bad I haven't attended a picnic, and the season is almost over.

“When they pulled us over, I was thinking ‘go ahead and kidnap me!’ I wanted an adventure,” my employer was telling me, her eyes wide and sparkling, her hands gesturing defiantly. I watched her with a mix of admiration for her bravery and fear for her driving habits. At that moment a yellow and black hornet the size of a hamster tumbled into the open passenger window and collided with my hair. The sound of the wind whipping into the open windows of the BMW muffled my shout, which my employer mistook for a reaction to her story. “Yes, it was a very exciting time. You know at that time the PKK was kidnapping everybody and exchanging them for prisoners with the KDP,” she explained as she took another curve a little too fast. Frantically swatting at the hornet, I knocked it to the floorboard where it became lodged next to my shoe. I stamped wildly at it, then swatted it with my sunhat. “My American friend who was with me then,” she continued, “was telling me, ‘Just speak English, pretend you’re a foreigner. ‘” Desperate to dislodge the hornet, I jerked the car door open and saw the jagged cliff edge rushing past. With one last swat the hornet tumbled out and over the cliff edge as the open car door took out several small bushes and clumps of weeds.  Meanwhile my employer had been scanning the opposite hillside for the spot where the PKK detained her. “There’s the spot!” she said, then looked over at me with her eyebrows raised as I pulled the door shut.  “You have to remain calm in these situations,” she said demurely. Whether she was speaking of being captured by terrorists or defending oneself from a beastly hornet, I wasn’t sure.

 

 

 We returned to the house for a delicious lunch and more discussion. Oh, the view from that house...

Bi xer hati (welcome) to my office.

This mundane post is for those who care to see the day-to-day environment where I do online research on education, write up notes, and schedule appointments. 

Bi xer hati (welcome) to my office. Like many desks I've encountered in the Middle East, this one is an ego trip. It puts quite a distance between the person behind the desk and the person on the other side. Often the desk chair elevates a person higher than the surrounding furniture. Observing rank and order is important in this culture. Oh, and that's an air conditioning unit on the wall (top). Alhamdulilah (Thanks be to God) there's AC in my office.

The entrance to the development firm where I work and live. The building was clearly designed to be an impressive house, but it's being used as an office (and for me, also a residence).

The kitchen on the first floor where I'm having adventures in food prep by sterilizing everything with boiling water.

This chandelier hangs from the third floor, where I live, to the ground floor lobby. Pretty, huh? Too bad it generates the heat of hades. Thirty minutes of jogging up and down the spiral staircase is also my substitute for the gym. I could have titled this post "How to stay fit in a confined space."

The view from the roof. Kurdistan is experiencing tremendous growth, like Maxi Mall (left of the photo). Construction is everywhere. 

Also a view from the roof. Here is one of the nearby mosques, although there aren't as many as I expected. In Jordan the call to prayer seemed loud and clear wherever you went, as there were so many mosques which broadcast the call through loudspeakers on the minarets (towers). Within the building where I live and work in Dohuk, I can barely hear the call. 

You can see how the city of Dohuk lies in valley between two parts of a mountain range. The only direction to build is out, so the city sprawls in a ever-expanding corridor. 

Michael Jackson in Dohuk

 

 (Above) The village of Shemsayyida, my employer's ancestral lands in the Zagros Mountains near the border with Turkey.  The Sayyids are descendents of the Prophet Muhammad.

As some of you know, I'm working as a research assistant to a Kurdish woman interested in starting a school. I'm sure I'll be writing more about her vision for education and our work in later entries. But for now, it's picnicking season in Kurdistan! After only a few days in the city (Dohuk) sitting at my desk most of the day, I was ready to join the flocks of Friday picnickers. (Friday is the day-off during the workweek, like Sunday for many Americans.) My employer invited me to join her in her usual Thursday evening trek to her ancestral lands, the village of Shemsayyida. There, she, with hundreds of other Kurds, has built a new house on ancestral land. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has been providing loans for families interested in building homes in their ancestral lands, where years of war razed and emptied many of the villages.

Getting places in Iraq can be a little slow, as many roads need repaving. In our case, the Zagros Mountains necessitated a long, winding road. Our happy group - my employer, her friend and two daughters, myself, and the staff - made the two hour trek from the city to the village after sunset. By the time we arrived at the house, my stomach was churning from the hairpin turns, elevation changes, and general disorientation from being crammed in an SUV full of Kurdish speakers blaring Michael Jackson and dodging potholes and taking hairpins turns at a frightening speed (for me, at least). After a very late dinner and fireside chat, we all turned in for the night.

 

And we awoke the next morning to this view of the mountains and village from the back of the house.

 

 My employer, an architect and visionary, designed this beautiful house, which sits on a hilltop above Shemsayyida.

After a sumptuous breakfast of freshly baked bread from a clay oven, yogurt, cheese, and fresh fruits, we took a walk down the hillside and into the village and adjoining woods and agricultural fields. 

 I knew Kurdistan was no desert, but the landscape was breathtakingly beautiful: lush woodlands, streams and springs, and wildflowers. This tree (above) was delightfully gnarled and reached over a stream. I imagine generations of Kurds have climbed across it.

How cool and clear the water was! I couldn't resist rolling up my pants legs and wading, trying not to slip on the smooth river rocks.

The girls went for a swim in the stream! If I was their age, I would have jumped in too!

 Perfect weather for a hike. And here's me with the ancient chezar tree again. With its distinctive maple-shaped leaves and flaking bark, the chezar is the Kurdish equivalent of a Canadian maple.

 There were the most melodious songbirds trilling up there. Maybe one day I'll create a guide to birds in Kurdistan.

 This fellow was moving cautiously in the grass beside the river. I'd never seen a crab this big (about the size and apparent texture of an Idaho potato). Glad he wasn't in the vicinity of my toes when I was wading about in the stream!  The ecological diversity was astounding.

For Americans, picnics are usually casual affairs. In Kurdistan, they one of the main social events of the year. On the return to the city (Friday night), we passed scores of picnickers: sprawled on the grass or shaded by trees, dressed in the distinctive clothes of their tribe or village, some dancing the traditional dances. Inshallah (Lord willing) I'll be going to a picnic myself.

I just hope Michael Jackson won't be accompanying us.

Istanbul on the Fly

It may have been a little risky, after all, to make a mad dash for the tourist area of Istanbul during my four hour layover between Istanbul and Erbil. My plane had flown over Turkey from the southwestern direction of Eastern Europe, and I had seen clearly the outline of the Black Sea and the Straight of Gallipoli. As we approached and the plane descended, my heart soared. We flew low over the city and I could see "Ataturk" barges in the bay and minarets dotting the skyline. When our plane pulled into the gate and I saw it was only 7:45PM, I decided to make a dash for the tourist area. 

Four hours sounder like sufficient time before I waited in the long, snaking passport cue, only to find out that I had to get in another line to get a visa, and then get back in the passport line. As the official held his stamp poised over my book, the fear nagged me that things could go wrong and I could miss my flight and upset my employer in Erbil. But as the stamp came down and the passport was shoved under the window, I snatched it and lumbered toward the exit with my overstuffed backpack and briefcase and purse. Scampering through the traffic, I hailed a taxi and negotiated terms. I had roughly an hour and half, maybe two hours, to get to the tourist area, sit in the Blue Mosque (I figured the Hagia Sophia would be closed, since it's a museum), snap some photos, and get back to the airport. I wanted the same driver to take me, wait for me, and then return me to the airport. 80 US dollars? No way. I didn't take the time to look up the exchange rate, but I had a recommendation to pay no more than 40 dollars. The guy wouldn't budge, so I  made to leave and he shouted, "Ok, ok, 40 US dollars, yallah, let's go!"

The taxi driver, as taxi drivers are apt to do, expertly weaved through the traffic that followed the shoreline, honking and snorting and saying things in Turkish under his breath, though I couldn't have understood him if he had shouted it to the darkening Istanbul sky.  It was a clear, chilly night. He made several sudden adjustments, redoubling and changing the route according to the flow of traffic. We zipped around corners and through dark alleyways on streets barely wide enough for a car, dodging stray cats, rubbish and the occasional car coming the other direction. Suddenly we burst out of a dark street and onto a street exploding with color and movement: neon signs advertising fish restaurants, jewelry stores, windows with appliances, cafes and people strolling about. The driver stopped abruptly, gesturing toward a cluster of trees with lights shining behind them saying, "There, the Blue Mosque." He turned to me to renegotiate the terms. I was afraid of this. We argued and I finally agreed to pay him half now and offered to pay him 25 dollars later if he would wait for me one hour. He nodded, taking the 20. I wondered if he would stay. I set off down the street and arrived at a gate. Because of the treeline I couldn't see much of what lay behind the open gate where an elderly woman with a scarf tied over her head and crutches at her side sat feebly begging. There it was:

 Sultan Ahmed Mosque, aka the Blue Mosque

When  I came around the corner and through the gate, I gazed up at this (above).

I don't know how long I spent standing in the courtyard, gazing up. At the entrance, a man instructed me to take off my shoes and put them in a plastic sack. I retrieved my scarf from my backpack and wrapped it around my hair and stepped inside. I wish I had taken a photograph of the plush red carpet which felt so nice to sink my tired feet into.  If I hadn't been so disgustingly sweaty and exhausted from traveling through four airports, I might have been repulsed to think how many dirty, sweaty feet had tread that carpet. But the carpet was soft and cool, and a man walked about indiscriminately spraying some kind of aerosol can, probably with cleaner. 

 Two men praying. This is an active mosque and is closed to visitors during prayer times.

These pictures don't capture the beautifully detailed tile and calligraphy. 

After sitting for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only twenty minutes, I left the Blue Mosque feeling very satisfied that I had taken the risk. I left by a side entrance and, lo and behold, there was the Hagia Sophia. 

Unfortunately the Hagia Sophia, as a museum, is closed at night. I hope to visit Turkey again and see the inside!

My pictures of it are not so clear. Perhaps it is not as brightly lit as the Blue Mosque?

It turns out my driver friend had left me after all. I hailed another taxi and returned to the airport, wondering if I had underpaid or overpaid the previous taxi driver. Nevermind, Kurdistan awaited.