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.”