The Other Side of the Fence

Yesterday was an unusually warm, springy day. I spent the afternoon chillin' on my balcony with my guitar, and chatting with my left-door neighbor, the Afghani-American who's been teaching with the school since its inception three years ago. Since the beginning of the year (August), I've seen many a neighbor come and go from this room to my left. First there was the Lebanese soccer fanatic, who decided to move upstairs during the hot season because he wanted an AC that worked. He's the one who gave me much good counsel on how to teach and also on the structure of soccer tournaments. Now he lives upstairs with his wife and two beautiful kids, and will move away to Lahore, Pakistan for a new post in a couple weeks. He will be missed. 

After he left, Khaled, the chain-smoking, bean pole-thin engineer occupied that room for a while. He was serious, loyal, and loved to give whimsical little gifts, but my opinion of him took a bit of a nosedive when I discovered the ease with which he said he would cast off the ring from his left hand, once it was placed there. Hm...people need to get their priorities straight. After Khaled came two engineers from Lebanon who were here on temporary assignment to fix the kitchen upstairs.  One was cowardly and uninteresting and laughed at everything because he didn't know what else to do, and the other was a Sleezebag. Good riddance! I thought, when their day of departure arrived at last. By this time, I was feeling wary around anyone with a Y-chromosome, and so when the next occupier moved in and stopped by to say hello, I deemed his eyes a little too bright and eager, and immediately put up a wall between us, so he wouldn't get any ideas. To this day, all we say is “hello” and “hey”, and it is so much better this way. 

Then one day, I was passing by to do laundry upstairs, and the door was wide open and inside was a girl! This was S, the Afghani-American seasoned teacher from the Bay Area who is my twin sister's namesake. Fairly tall, thin, with large eyes, sharp, angular face heavy with make-up, and high-lights in her layered bronze locks, she looks much older than her 24 years. It's hard to believe we are the same age. But no matter, she is friendly and makes amazing chai tea from scratch with a purported “secret ingredient”, and yesterday, we climbed mountains together. 

I was perched on the ledge that divides our balconies with Felix and a cup of her black tea. She sat on a chair with a bunch of papers in her lap, but the grading was going slowly as we enjoyed this lovely, leisurely, spring afternoon. The conversation took a pause, and my gaze fell on the security fence that stood about 50 feet in front of us, winding all around the campus, and creating a barrier between us and the rolling mountains that give us balcony-loitering teachers such an amazing show every sundown. 

“I've always wanted to climb over that fence, but it's actually a lot taller than it looks,” said I. Not only was it tall, but the footholds were too narrow for the width of the average human foot, and the material was weak and thin wiring, so I wasn't sure it could hold my weight. So many reasons not to climb the fence, let alone the fact that it was placed there for security purposes and manned from little outposts by guards with Kalashnikovs. 

“Is it barbed on top?” asked S.

“I don't think so.”

“Let's do it.”

“What, now?”

“Why not?”

Why not? I went inside, threw on sneakers and a sweater, and came back out. We hopped over the balcony and ran across the parking lot and down the small dirt hill that led to the fence. Hm...I thought as I looked up. The fence was built in staircase fashion because the campus grounds rose uphill, with a stone foundation that provided a ledge to step on that also rose with the fence in staircase fashion. I stepped onto the lower ledge, had to stretch my left leg way up to reach the upper ledge, held onto the fence, and pulled myself up. Now that I was standing on the upper ledge, the top of the lower fence was totally accessible. I threw my right leg over it and straddled the thin wiring, thankful that I was not a guy. The wiring was so thin and weak that it was shaking under my weight, but I ignored the shaking and reached down with my right leg for the upper ledge on the side of the mountains, and once I was standing with both feet on the ledge on this other side of the fence, it was cake from there, two hops away to solid ground. I waited for S. to climb over and then we ran up the mountainside. It was rocky terrain, and anyone with knee problems would have had to tread extra-carefully. 

We reached the top and strained our eyes at the village afar. Our next mission, we decided was to hike all the way to that village and have tea inside one of those houses. S. chose the bright red one, and I chose a castle-like yellow house with random turrets that so do not belong on a house, but one sees them all the time built into these mansion/castle-like houses in the open fields of Kurdistan. They make me think of the Weasleys' house- as if the builders were aiming to make them look like normal Muggle homes, but failed to grasp the full idea, so that there was something slightly off-kilter about them. Random, incohesive parts from different architectural time periods, different materials, and different types of buildings squished together to form a semblance of modern Muggle housing. I loved these misfit castle-houses of Kurdistan as much as I loved the Weasleys' house, and have always wanted to enter inside one of them. 

We continued scoping out the hills. On the next hill over, there was a tiny, gray, stone-brick shelter with sandbags on it's makeshift roof, as well as a larger trailer-type shelter behind it. I ran down the hill and up the slope of the next one to explore it, nearly twisting my ankle over the rocks. Circling behind the stone-brick shelter, I found a door and kicked it open. Inside was a hole-in-the-ground toilet with a generous pile of dried-up poop inside it. Siiiick! I ran away. There was no other sign of life neither there, nor in the trailer-type shelter behind it. Among the grass and rocks, though, there were dozens of disposable blue razors scattered about, as well as a man's shoe strayed here and there (but never in pairs), burnt-out cigarette butts and and a lighter, a half-consumed pack of pills, and an empty, unlabeled bottle. I took one last glance at the horizon and turned back to rejoin S. 

One of the guards had spotted us and was heading toward us with his gun swinging around ambiguously in his hand. Was he angry or not? We weren't certain, so we sat on the hillside, waiting for him to pass. He turned out to be harmless, as they all do. While we waited, though, Matt Damon came out to throw out his trash and saw us sitting there nonchalantly on the other side of the fence. “How'd you guys get up there?” As we watched him climb, we wondered how he would fare with the straddling the fence part, but genius that he was, he stepped right onto the fence instead of straddling it, and easily sidled his way down the other side. The three of us sat on the mountainside and contemplated bringing beers and grub next time. As the sun began its daily descent, we shivered even under our sweaters and hoodies. Soon, we were making our own descent down the fence, and back to the other side.

10 minutes later, I climbed back over- with Val this time- to catch the sunset. We wandered over the rolling hills with an opalescent egg on one side of the sky, and a hot pink globe on the other, which disappeared quickly and inconspicuously behind the white clouds. I showed her the shit pile, and she told me a riddle:

“John looks at Annie. John is a married man. Annie looks at Robert. Robert is an unmarried man. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?”

I'm so mad that I fell for the trick!

Later that evening, we ventured into English village for the first time ever. It was like an episode of the Stepford Wives. Why would you purposely build an American/British suburbia, with nice neat rows and cul-de-sacs, where all the houses look exactly alike? Hell if I know, but the house party thrown there by the International Relief Committee was really fun. We danced, played hopscotch on their large-tiled floor, and met lots of new people from all over the world who worked in international relief organizations. Inevitably, we came away from the party laiden with business cards and opportunities and new friends.