If you can't take the heat...

Everyone knows Iraq is one of the hottest places in the world. Today it will be 118 degrees outside. When it has been consistently over 100 degrees, you begin to think that every day is equally hot and you don’t really care to know the exact temperature. You can’t imagine that there would be a significant difference in experiencing 108 and 118 degrees. I’m not sure where the threshold of significance is located; it is probably different for each person.  Today I crossed my threshold.

When I arrived in Iraq in May, the night air was still a little chilly by my reckoning.  I was worried that I wouldn’t have hot water in my shower. After a week of shivering cold showers, I figured out how to turn the hot water on. Now I’m longing for one of those refreshingly cold showers.

My apartment is an enclosed rooftop, also home to a flock of filthy pigeons. The last few days the pigeons have almost ceased cooing and hardly stir. Heat waves radiate off the rooftop.

“It’s like jehenna (hell) in here,” said our office manager as she mopped the sweat off her brow. We stood opposite one another in my roof top apartment, looking at the scene before us with the same listless expression. It had to be at least 100 degrees in there.  

“There’s obviously an electrical problem in the building,” I said impatiently after a minute or so of silence.  “Look,” I said, prompting the office manager to stand on her tip-toes and peer inside the outlet. For the second time in two weeks, the plastic outlet cover had melted over the wires. This rendered my AC unit inoperable.

“Yeah,” she said, “but we’ve already paid to repair it once. I don’t want to spend any more money on it without checking with the boss.”

I stared stupidly at her for some seconds before I said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Sleep on the sofa again in my office. It’s too short for my legs.”

“You only have a couple weeks left,” she said archly.

“I know I only have a couple weeks left here, but…I can’t.” Her assessment was pretty accurate. Entering my little rooftop apartment was like opening an oven door, which let out air hotter than the sweltering hot stairwell which leads up to the third floor and roof. It was a taste of hell. Thankfully some friends have provided a cool place with a bed for me to sleep at night whenever necessary.

This morning I walked 15 minutes in the sun without realizing just how hot it was until I entered our building and weakly sat down on the office manager’s sofa. 

“You must take the heat seriously,” she chastised. I was sick to my stomach shortly thereafter.

“Don’t worry. I won’t do that again,” I promised her. For three hours we had no electricity, and when the generator kicked in, there wasn’t enough to run any of the AC units. Every time I tried to rise from the sofa, my head swam and my knees shook. Stepping outside is like getting slapped in the face. I have to fight the impulse to just sit and stare at the white-grey sky and brown, jagged mountains outside my window, listening to the wock, wock, wock of the ceiling fan.  Just two more weeks, I tell myself. I can’t imagine living in this heat all my life, especially in the conditions after the first Gulf War when people had no electricity and laid in misery, sweating on their beds, fighting the panicked feeling of claustrophobia that comes from the extreme heat and no air flow and the knowledge that there is no relief.

Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, begins tomorrow. In Iraq, people will abstain from food and water for approximately 17 hours a day. In this heat, you can imagine what kind of health problems people will suffer.  But, as several people have said to me here, “This is the life.”

Go tell it on a mountain

Aerial View of Hewler (Erbil) Citadel, an inhabited tell (mound) in the center of Hewler

 Last week I was in Hewler (Erbil), the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, for job-related meetings. After three or four days of meetings and interviews, I took an afternoon to visit the Citadel (Qalah), a tell, or mound, that some argue is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement (7,000 years!). The Wikipedia article is actually pretty informative, and I'm not eager to summarize it here since I've been writing reports a lot lately for work.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_of_Arbil

The Citadel has been under major renovation since 2007, when the Kurdistan Regional Government partnered with UNESCO and other international groups (donors, archeologists, etc.). Until then, there were still inhabited houses on the citadel, but the families have since been temporarily relocated during renovation.

It was a hot afternoon, and beads of sweat stood out on my forehead as I hiked up the stone stairs to the top of the tell. Only a handful of locals and maybe a few tourists were wandering around, snapping photos and straggling along the main avenue which runs North-South. Fairly deserted and dusty, the Citadel under renovation has become a ghost town. The UNESCO staff wouldn't open the Kurdish textile museum for me to take a peek. (I tried using my employer's name; they were unimpressed.) The alleyways were cordoned off and I was warned not to enter them, though I may have sidestepped a few ropes and poked my head inside a couple of houses. One in particular boasted a nice veranda and colored glass windows. A teenage boy followed me into one alley and I promptly returned to the main avenue. The only sound was the flapping of the large Kurdish flag above.

I entered a dark tourist hut on the main avenue. Predictably, it contained orientalist kitsch, objects covered in layers of dust, like clunky metal jewelry, scarves probably made in China, and bric a brac elephants (why?) and Aladdin lamps. An assortment of travelogues, maps, and English and Kurdish language books, also, dust-covered, tumbled over the shelves and onto the floor. The only two people in the shop seemed drawn only by the air-conditioning unit, which they stood languidly beside.

Without placards explaining the history and without any kind of props, and with no background knowledge which I could have drawn upon, my imagination was as blank as the site. Although I knew the Citadel to be of some significance to a succession of empires, people groups, and religions, I could not imagine what life must have been like there. Hopefully the renovation efforts will provide future visitors with more information.

After some minutes wandering up and down the main avenue, I looked below at the garden and decided to explore the old bazaar (the arches to the left and right of the park).