A Secret (Note: Not THE Secret)

I went mountain climbing today! It was so beautiful and adventurous! It was just me, New Day, and the cab driver. And the fine, misty rain. And the hail. And the mud and the rocks. Around mid-day, we called a trusted cab driver, a peaceful man who writes poetry in his non-native Kurdish dialect (Badini) which he picked up while living the mountains up north for a few years. “We want to go hiking in the mountains,” New Day told him in Kurdish. He drove us through Masif- where I got extremely violated by the female pat-downer at one of the checkpoints (”Did she feel up your crotch too?” No, my colleague was not so lucky)- , and into Shaqlawa, made a right turn, trudged up some extremely rocky terrain, and parked at the flat base. We got out of the car, looked up, and there it was- our mountain to climb. An actual staircase curved tortuously like a snake through the middle, but turned into a regular dirt/mud/rock path somewhere in the middle of the climb. It was hugged by jagged peaks on either side- rough, black, barnacled ridges sprouting tufts of green grass on the left, and smoothed-out vertical beige walls smudged with gray climbing steeply to the smoky white clouds on the right. The very top of the beige mountainside resembled the evenly-spaced, right-angled, nubby ridges that ring the top of a castle piece in a chess set.

It took us a long time to make the ascent- not because it was a difficult climb, but because we stopped to take pictures every two steps and marvel at the view looking outward. From up here, without considering the third dimension of spacetime, the land of Kurdistan was made of six distinct layers. The top layer was the sky, full of puffy white rain clouds that day; the second layer was shadowy blue mountains too far away to form any distinctive patterns or details; the third layer was the range of rolling hills, smooth and round, and of the lightest brown shade, generously inlaid with green like the handle of yesterday's hookah; the fourth layer a darker shade of brown, not so generously green, but streaked, instead, with iron red dust dribbling down its smooth, rounded surface; and below these mountain layers lay the tiny village houses, a motley crew of varying color and size, but all looking rather tiny under the shadow of the looming slopes and the sky above. And below the layer of village houses, forming a sharp V and rising high on either side of me, was the mountain I was currently scaling- a dark, chestnut-brown studded everywhere with gray stones, making it a rough climb indeed. 

On the way up, we saw a vine plant, its branches coiling and curling like tendrils of a woman's hair, a nearly dried-up well about 6 or 7 feet deep, and a spigot which someone must have installed long ago to collect spring water, I guess, and a doorway. No joke- close to the very top of the mountain, there was a man-made doorway carved right into the rocks so that it blended in (almost) imperceptibly, an arched frame about 10 feet high, but with no door. (An aperture.) We climbed up the rock-staircase that led to this arched doorway, crossed through it, and on the other side was a cave! Its rocky roof was black with soot because as it turned out, it was no ordinary cave, but an “eshkawt murad”- a wishing cave. People made the trek up to this secret alcove in order to light a candle and make a wish. Possibly, this is the place where some villager had a vision of Mother Mary, and now It was all sacred and magical. At any rate, dozens and dozens of candles had been ritually lit and left to burn and melt inside this grotto, and so all the coal-colored rocks were dripping and oozing with old, solidified wax in different colors- honey-yellow, grassy green, lilac, scarlet, pale carnation pink, orange and basic white- it was as if the rainbow that we'd seen on the way up had melted onto these jet-black rocks. I couldn't stop marveling at the beautiful drip patterns that the candlewax had produced. But this was a wishing cave! What was I to wish for? I thought for a minute, but could not think of anything worth wishing for. 

Some Wishful Thinking

If you wish for something, it must be worth wishing for, meaning it must be something you can't get just through hard work or other human powers. It must be unattainable by human powers alone, thereby creating the need for intervention by a higher power- by a superhuman power. If you make a wish, and it comes true, and it is conceivable that you could have made it come true of your own accord (through your own hard work, your own mental or creative genius, your own money), then the wish was not worth wishing for. It must contain an element of chance, of randomness, and if by chance, your wish (worth wishing for) comes true, it means you got lucky. In other words, a wish worth wishing for is by definition unattainable unless luck is on your side. But doesn't every situation require a bit of luck? Even geniuses go unrecognized; even rich people need stuff deemed “priceless”. Hence, all wishes are worth wishing for. So why did I have such a hard time coming up with a simple wish? Hmph, as if trekking up a mountain, discovering a hidden cave, and seeing with my own eyes the beautiful effect of everyone else's wishes wasn't enough. I wasn't really in dire need of anything. I didn't have enough foresight to think of what troubles may lay ahead in my path that I might want to wish away, and I didn't have enough selflessness to think of wishing things for others who may actually be in dire need of something. Plus I didn't even bring a candle. Hence my wish-y washiness, harhar. And maybe I just don't believe. Contrast this with the little girl in San Francisco who threw a penny into the large pond just outside a park and wished for a unicorn. I'm positive, I could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes and in the way she wouldn't tell her mum at first what she wished for, for fear that it wouldn't come true, then- she had so much faith that the unicorn would appear, that she could almost see it standing, staring at its horned reflection in the water shimmering with rainbow. Next time, I'm gonna wish for a unicorn, dammit- unless by then my pet hamster is dying. Then priorities will have to change.

It was a rocky, stumbly descent back down the mountainside, and I watched the ground the entire way down to avoid going back to school with a broken ankle. As I reached the stairs portion of the path, my eyes were still focused on the ground, and so I noticed that the bricks that were used to build these stairs looked very much like the bricks that line Locust Walk on the Penn campus. Then I laughed as I remembered how girls would get their heels caught in the cracks between these tentatively laid bricks. Back in the cab, the driver asked where we wanted to go next. We decided only that we didn't want to go home just yet, though it was raining a bit harder, and the air was getting more and more frigid with each passing hour. He drove us past Shaqlawa to a place called Hiran, and along the way, he pulled over on the side of the road, saying this was a nice place to take pictures. I stepped out of the car and was overcome with this feeling of having just stepped into a painting. An utterly flat, grassy landscape stretched before me, aflame with wintery, barenaked trees whose skinny orangish-brown branches stuck straight up skyward, vulnerable in the openness. A few stray, golden-orange leaves dangled fragilely here and there, shivering in the damp and bone-chilling air. I shivered with them. At the feet of these trees lay gray stones, boulders large enough to sit and stand on, and hundreds of smaller ones too, plunked haphazardly across the grass as if there had been warfare between giants throwing stones at each other. (Possibly, this was the dwelling place of Hagrid's folk.) This stony expanse of flaming, bare-branched trees stretched flatly all the way to the base of the mountain range whose forest-green slopes rose suddenly and dramatically into sharp, craggy peaks shrouded softly in mist. 

We went camera-crazy with this beautiful landscape and then hopped back into the warm, toasty cab and drove off again, past mountains and vineyards with their thick, dark, low-creeping vines, past cherry blossom trees and pomegranate farms. We drove into a quaint village where the women sat by the roadside in full-length black chadors holding their babies, their faces serious, solemn, unsmiling as they watched us driving by. The slum roofs here were covered with a tarp of sorts, and hanging off the roof from these tarps were plastic bottles- to collect rain water? I couldn't think of any other reason. As usual these poverty-stricken slum dwellings were outfitted with a satellite dish. Even the poorest of the poor must have access to Korean dramas and such. Strangely enough, the popularity of Korean dramas seems to have reached every corner of the Earth- even remote villages in Kurdistan. I finally figured out that what the locals were shouting out when I passed by was no Kurdish word, but the name of one of the characters in the Korean drama “Sad Love Story”. Ironic because I have the biggest aversion to Korean tv, and though I have never seen it, I am willing to bet that the drama would have been more aptly named “Cheesy Love Story”. Anyway, before I go on a rant about Korean dramas- 

We stopped in the village to buy some of the famous Shaqlawa sweets, wandered around the village, took pictures in front of a Kurdistan flag painted onto a stone ledge, and then climbed back into the cab and headed home. On the way home, our cab driver confided that he liked to write poetry. We sat back and listened while he recited some of his love poems in Kurdish to us. New Day attempted to translate parts of it for me. One of them was about him falling in love with a Yezidi girl- truly a sad love story, given that Yezidis are forbidden by pain of death to marry outside of their ancient, ancient faith. Actually, a Yezidi cannot even use a spoon used by an outsider of their faith, let alone marry one (an outsider, not a spoon). Thus, the cab driver's crush on the Yezidi girl was doomed from the start, like a regular star-crossed attraction between a Capulet and a Montague. Ho hum, what would we do without religion to create so much strife and tragedy in human affairs? Half the world's problems would disappear like a bad dream. But then again, so would the poetry, and the candles. A small price to pay, really...Upon returning to the school, we handed the driver-poet 80,000 dinars, thanked him with heartfelt thanks, and trekked back inside with mud-encrusted boots and bags full of sweets, with images and poetry in our souls, and best of all, with a discovery, a secret, hidden high up in the mountains, where stands a wishing cave, colored wax dripping over its black rocks.

Gin & Sprite Nite

My days have been pretty dry lately, but tonight I poured myself a gin and sprite, and played a few rounds of drinking card games. Eventually, people passed out or left to pass out on their own couches, and card games abandoned, the New Yorker and I had a rare real, one-on-one intimate chat. You know the kind I'm talking about- open as a prairie, comfortable silences planted here and there that solder the bond rather than tear it awkwardly asunder. The drinks and the cards reminded me of my summer at Pi Kapp, and I found myself sharing back-burner memories with him- my rooftop nights at the house, my childhood piano lessons where we learned to play rummy, swatted at house flies with rags, salted slugs in the garden, ate peanut butter & honey sandwiches, got experimental haircuts and flowers painted on our nails. Later, we took a break outside on the balcony where I sat with my guitar and played a fingerpicking rendition of Greenday's Time of Your Life. After he left, I continued playing, though it was a frigid night, and my mind drifted to my summer nights at the Snug in Seattle, right before I left for Iraq, where we stayed up all night belting out House of the Rising Sun. Singing Landslide with an intoxicated heart woke the latent longing for something special, all the while knowing that everything, no matter how special, is fleeting. My mind drifted to one of my last nights at home in Tacoma, where I'd lain on the rooftop alone, counting shooting stars during the Perseid meteor shower and wondering what lay in store for me. Love and memories, mortality, a touch of sadness,...this is the gin & sprite talking. Tomorrow, I will take a randomish road trip to Rawanduz, and my thoughts will settle once more in the present, and this night will be but another memory in the back-burner of my gray matter as I fly against the mountainside on a rollercoaster and scream and stare in awe at the formidable view. 

Serious Ali & the Hobbit-Child

The kids were particularly inattentive today- the skinhead was even loonier than ever, and though I've considered that he has Turrett's or something, I believe deep-down that he is just a serious attention-seeker because once he is taken away from the other kids, he transforms into a normal human being with a rather serious face. But then again, I think it is a fine line between normal and loony. Oh, my loony loony skinhead child! I don't know what I would do without kids like Ali. 

Ali is one of the few kids who don't hang all over me and demand constant attention and gestures of affection like hugs and exaggerated smiles. He just does his work with care and watches me attentively when I'm teaching, takes his sticker when it is given to him, but never whines for one when a sticker doesn't come his way. For a while, I could not even tell if he enjoyed school because he has such a serious, introverted demeanor, but one day his father came to pick him up, and told me how he and his cousin talk incessantly about school at home. 

Now I notice the subtlest gestures from little Ali that let me know in his own un-showy way that he's not wholly indifferent- the nearly imperceptible smile whenever he accepts a prize from me, the care with which he writes his letters and numbers, the willingness to take my hand when offered, the interest he shows when I showed him a coloring book page that I'd found lying on the ground. He has a way of sulking that frightened me the first time I witnessed it- his whole face turns as dark as a thundercloud, and black pupils glare up from under his thick eyebrows like he's about to unleash a hurricane and murder someone. But overall, he's the student any teacher would dream of having- requiring as little attention as possible, and yet getting a lot in return. 

Mina's another one that has grown on me quite a bit since the beginning. She's the one with the coquettish head of blonde locks that she would sometimes top with a lurid hot-pink animal-shaped cap, which clashes horribly with the baby-sized fuck-me boots she wears every day to school. She was a latecomer and so had a horrible time adjusting, until one day I nearly blew her curly locks away with the force of my scolding after she hit or pinched a classmate for the millionth time. Sure, I made a little kid cry that day, but from that day forth, she turned over a new leaf- behavior-wise anyway. She was still a shit reader and consistently scored zeroes on her exams.

Or so I thought! Today, though, Mina shocked me when I gave her yet another reading assessment. As she took her seat on the kiddie chair next to me, I studied her doll-like appearance- her huge almond-shaped eyes shaded by long blonde lashes, her pouty little mouth, and the mass of curly hair which had recently been cropped short so that they hung and sprung wildly about her ears and neck. Suddenly, I was charmed by this little girl who, with her new hairdo, resembled an adorable little hobbit-child, and who had blossomed into such a pleasant human being in the last few months. 

When she started sounding out the words, I was even more charmed by the way she tilted her head her head up at me and sprang forward each time she sounded out a letter, her mouth opening and closing on the sound. She reminded me of a baby bird grabbing for a worm from its mother's beak. But the surprise came when I realized that once she painstakingly discerned the individual letters, she could actually string them together and read the entire word. Wow, no more zeros for my little Hobbit-Child!

The Stories of Rocks

Today, SJ accompanied me on my walk into the sunset- only it was too early and too cloudy to catch any brilliantly-colored rays. I am really glad she came with me because together, we discovered some cool- well new things along the way. My companion grew up on a farm in Redding, CA, so she knew a good deal more than most about animals. Running into dogs triggers the same reaction in her as my reaction with babies, and so at the entrance of the workers' compound, we paused for a minute to scratch the tummies of the puppies that help the workers guard the back entrance. Jonga and Johnny are a mix of Saint Bernard and something else, and so they have really adorable pointed rabbit ears and a boxy shape that is softly rounded by their white fur. Johnny has a black mask over his face like a raccoon, while Jonga has a white one. We cooed and scratched their tummies and then moved on through the compound and onto the open road. 

Before we reached the fork in the road, we took a detour into the hills on the left, following a pack of five wild dogs that ran away from SJ's coaxing kissing and clicking sounds. “Yeah, they're definitely wild,” she decided, as they trotted away from us. While we picked our way through the rocks, I spotted a snail shell in the dirt, and picked it up, utterly surprised. What was a snail shell doing on this desert land? Shells belonged on beaches, not waterless Kurdistan mountains! Or so I thought. Apparently there are beach snail shells, and there are ordinary snail shells that just inhabit your average garden and other dry land. I guess that makes sense, but I had never seen these conch-shaped shells anywhere else but on the beach. Clearly, I have not spent enough time outdoors as a kid. I told her this as she looked at me with uncomprehending eyes. Hey, not everyone has the luxury of growing up on a farm! 

Further up the hill, we ran into even rockier terrain, and had to watch the ground closely as we worked our way up to the top. Suddenly, SJ paused and bent down, studying a particular rock in the grass. I bent down next to her and saw that it had several beautiful spiral shapes impressed into it. “Are those fossils?” I asked. Yes, indeed, they were fossils of shells- evidence that this rock had been underwater thousands of years ago. “We used to have a bunch of these around this lake near our house,” said my companion. I clearly have not spent enough time outdoors as a kid. How did I manage to go almost 25 years without seeing a shell fossil-embedded rock that told the history of the land thousands of years back? Hm, actually, aren't sand dollars basically the same thing? I've definitely collected a few of those in my childhood. I guess I just never fully appreciated the sheer oldness of rocks and the stories evidenced, or embedded, into their very skin. 

Boy if rocks could talk, if mountains had eyes and ears, the ones in Kurdistan would have the most sorrowful tales to tell. Tales of genocide, of mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of an innocent people who had unwittingly earned the hatred of Saddam Hussein and the Baathists. Of a people who suffered through all manner of torture from slowly baking alive in metal-topped pits underground to getting their heads razed off by tractors while the rest of their body lay squirming helplessly beneath the ground, and through chemical attacks that wiped out entire villages of Kurds and sent the injured survivors with burning, blinded eyes and boils popping up all over their contaminated skin- not just Peshmerga freedom fighters, but civilian families, including women and children- fleeing for their lives into the treacherous Kandil Mountains that border Iran. Iran is not seen as a friendly face to the rest of the world, but during Saddam's raging campaign against the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Kurds, Iran was really the only one who lent an ear and a helping hand to the refugees, despite their own suspicions against Kurds. Does that sound like an act carried out by an axis of evil?

In truth, there is no good or bad government. All governments, it seems, work for the sole benefit of their own nation. If it helps their own cause, they will help others- not in the spirit of true altruism, but because their own nation, and their own personal reputation will benefit from it. This goes for the Iranian, as well as for the US government. Why did we create a no fly-over zone in Kurdistan? Certainly not because we cared for the welfare of the Kurds. See how we back Turkey in their own campaign against their own population of Kurds? Well, I exaggerate: some governments are better than others. The current Talabani/Barzani administration is thousands of times better than Saddam's insanely murderous regime, or Kim Jong-Il's totalitarian one. But all governments have skeletons in their closet, and therefore have no right to point fingers at another and call it an “axis of evil” when, in truth, their own acts of evil are just more neatly swept under the rug. Saddam deserved his death sentence, but I question the right of the executioner who mandated that the deed be carried out. How much more innocent is the executioner than the executed? Really it is a case of the guilty executing the guiltier. Who really had the right to carry out the execution? I don't know, perhaps the Kurds themselves. 

I was thinking about the death penalty later this evening, while eating (home-made!) fried rice and watching an episode of The Wire and getting pissed off at a foul-mouthed prisoner. Horrible statements were issuing from his mouth and I was yelling “pound him, die, die you idiot!” at the tv because he was making me so angry. I used to think I was totally against the death penalty. But in truth, if I were the one who was wronged, I would wish death on the wrongdoer with all my heart, with every fiber of my being. But then again, if I were asked to do it myself, I don't think I would be able to carry it out. To think it, to wish it is one thing; to actually physically do it is a whole 'nother ballpark. I read in a book once that the only just death sentence is the one in which the victim himself carries out the execution. I kind of understand that now. 

Paranoia & A Few Lose Screws

Yesterday after school, I went for a third walk toward the setting sun. Like the last two times, I walked around to the front of the school (opposite the apartment complex which is south), through the workers' compound and made a right turn off the school grounds and onto the open road, surrounded by sloping rocky mountain on either side. The first sign of life I saw was way up high on a peak to my left, where a man sat, partially masked by trees, chilling in front of a roaring fire. Last time I had passed by this peak, Kurdish music and whooping and hollering had tumbled joyously down the mountainside because it had been just after Ramadan, I think, and everywhere Kurds were celebrating with side-of-the-road picnics, traditional music, bedazzling costumes, and circle-dancing. Now, the man sat alone next to his shack and his old car, probably smoking a cigarette and watching me watch him. 

I continued on and passed by a couple wild puppies and groups of people hanging out on the green slopes to my left. I continued on, and this time, I did not pause at the fork in the road, but continued walking all the way to the nondescript factory towers at the end of the right fork. It was fenced in, and I asked the men standing around if it was closed off beyond. They said yes, it was closed, and that I could take the other fork in the road if I wanted to continue on. So I turned back around to take the other fork, but when I was halfway there, they called me back and told me it was dangerous to go that way. “Terrorists,” said one, making the knife-slashing-throat motion. “Kurdish terrorists?” I asked. He nodded. “What about the other way, away from the sun- is that way dangerous, too?” One said no, then changed his mind and said yes, “Terrorists. Russian terrorists.” So the school was surrounded by Kurdish terrorists to the west, and by Russian terrorists to the east? Hm...I turned to go back to the safety of the school, but then the men stopped me and invited me into their trailer for tea. Hm, yes, I could see where this was going. I said thanks, but no thanks, and began making my way back to the school before the sun set completely. 

On the way back, I passed by the slope loiterers again, and the gang came down from the hillside out of curiosity. They were a gang of boys my age and appeared harmless and so hilariously pretend-nonchalant, that I greeted them to break the ice. “Excuse me,” I said to one with really large front teeth, “is it dangerous here?” They threw back their head and laughed. I knew those factory men had other things on their mind! Damn them. At least my instincts about human motives were improving. “So no terrorists?” They laughed even harder. “No danger here! Only at night- wild animals they come.” I shivered, recalling the vicious, unreadable barking that had frozen me in my tracks during my last walk this way. The young men told me I should head home before night fell, and also that I shouldn't walk along the road alone, even though there were no terrorists. I thanked them and continued on back to the school at a quicker pace. 

On the way, made paranoid by all the warnings, I avoided passing too closely to a man who had stopped his car by the side of the road and was pacing around with a phone or something in his hand. As I rounded the mountainside out of sight, the pacing man suddenly burst into song as loud and reverberating as a call to prayer from the mosques. What in the world had induced him to sing all of a sudden? My mind immediately jumped to one of my KG'ers who likes to make random noises to disrupt the class, as if he has no filter between his brain and mouth. I used to get mad, but now I honestly think the kid is actually missing a few screws in his head, and it makes me laugh because here I am, a sane teacher, trying to teach a class of 25 other relatively sane students, and this mad five-year-old is yelling incoherent syllables with a lolling tongue and crossed eyes, insolently yelling “no!” and daring me to get angry, and mocking my sternness. It's really quite hilarious, and now more often than not, I just roll my eyes, keep my laughter in check, and stick him in the dunce chair in the corner next to the bathroom, where he finally shuts the hell up. 

On Sunday, he- along with about five of my other boys- came to school with a new haircut. For some reason, kids around here get haircuts at the same time, as if there are designated days of the year to get haircuts in Erbil. The other boys had gotten decent haircuts, but this crazy kid's barber had taken a razor and shorn his translucent white head bald. So now, I have an insolent 5-year-old skinhead babbling and crossing his eyes and lolling his tongue at me during my lessons. Teaching just doesn't get any better than this.

Land of Muddy Skies

I'm living in a land that is so dusty that the sky turns a faint brown like a muddy river when it is full of clouds and about to rain. In extreme cases like today, the brown darkens and morphs until the entire sky is glowing orange. When I look out the window and see a radioactive orange sky, I can't help contemplating apocalypse. In fact it thunderstormed and hailed muddy ice chunks tonight, while I lay in bed in the dark thinking about an incident that occurred a few days ago at the checkpoint near the school that has shaken us all, and serves as a severe reality check. Erbil is not Mosul, or even Baghdad, but still, part of the security that it boasts is provided by under-trained teenage boys. Since when is it ever a good idea to stick a loaded Kalashnikov into the hands of a 20-year-old boy? Mad-Eye Moody's sound counsel comes to mind now: Constant vigilance must be taken when living in a land in which "that could have been me" is no longer an empty fear, a statistically insignificant phrase. 

Misty Mountains of Masif

On Thursday after school, I shot hoops with Lona, the Danish teacher who is married to a Kurd. I ended up going to her house on Masif Road and making origami butterflies, dragonflies, and frogs that flip and jump, with beautiful watercolored paper. Masif Road is where a lot of the International School kids live. It is supposed to be the safest place in the region, and as we drove through it, I oohed and ahhed at the sculpture of a giant vase and another of a young girl, at the cool, cave-like rock structures next to the cemetery, and at the traffic light that designates the heart of Masif. They were all signs of a city trying to be not just inhabitable, but attractive. We passed by a large construction site which will house a shopping mall and cinema. Wow, a movie theatre in Kurdistan- unthinkable! 

The best part of the drive to Lona's house were the mountains. Masif slopes up into the mountains, so that the peaks are at eye-level and seem only a stone's throw away. From this view, the mountains were a lovely icy-blue shade, brushed over by snowy-white clouds, and dissolving into the mist so that its peaks seemed to be floating unsupported in mid-air. I asked Lona if she and her husband spent hours sitting on a hill and watching these misty mountains and eating nuts, chucking the shells into the grass- because this is what I would do if I lived here. In fact, said Lona, they do often do exactly this- picnic on a grassy spot near the mountains and eat nuts. Kurds have a real passion for nuts- cashews, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, almonds, you name it- and if they are ever bored because, say, the electricity is gone for the next few hours, and there's no heat or water, as happens on a regular basis everywhere in Kurdistan except at our school, then they will just take out a bowl of nuts and start cracking and chewing. My favorites are the pumpkin seeds- large, white, flat teardrop shaped seeds that are deliciously salty. Really, if I lived here, I think I couldn't get enough of pumpkin seeds and the misty mountains. 

But really, I would never live here. Lona said things break easily, and get fixed un-easily, and they were avoiding having a second child for now because having a baby in Erbil was not safe, to put it bluntly. They had struggled to get permission to fly out of Iraq for the premature birth of their first son. I spent the day and night and the next day eating homecooked meals- a mix of Danish and Kurdish-, painting and making origami creatures, talking with Lona and her husband, and playing with their adorable baby son, Yunis, who is going through his selfish terrible twos stage, but is generally, and genuinely, a happy, cheerful, and curious child. Her husband works as a PR guy for the KDP party (mainly with journalists), so we talked a lot about the political situation here and about religion, and I learned some useful Kurdish phrases. Can't wait to go back and see the misty mountains again and eat more pumpkin seeds!

Scissor Story, Love Story, and Why Kittens Love to Attack Balls of Yarn

February 15, 2009

Today, I used scissors to cut up 250 squares and a few Valentine's Day hearts. Then just now during my lunch time, I came across this verse in one of the 1001 stories from The Arabian Nights:

Albe to lover adverse be his love, 

And show aversion howso may he care;

Yet will I manage that their persons meet,

E'en as the pivot of a scissor-pair

And that made me wonder, when were scissors invented? Was that analogy of two lovers meeting like scissor blades an anachronistic translation by Sir Richard Burton? Not in the least: according to Wikipedia, the oldest pair of scissors was found in the Middle East, dated around 1500 years before Christ! However, the pivoting cross-blade kind of scissors that we use today, referenced in that verse above, was not invented until 100 AD by the Romans. Still not anywhere near an anachronism! 

I'm finally getting into these Arabian Nights stories. The one I'm currently reading is pretty interesting, about two impossibly beautiful people who fall in love, then lose sight of each other and go mad as a result, only no one realizes they are smitten by love, not by insanity. (Or maybe they are one and the same, as the story seems to imply) A third party comes into the picture and figures out the root of the problem, and goes about his work, bringing the two lovers together like “the pivot of a scissor-pair”. 

From reading these stories, I gather that a long long time ago in the Middle East, when people were depressed, instead of drowning their sorrows in alcohol and eat whole tubs of Ben & Jerry's, they wept and wailed and recited verses, using words like “smite”, which I figured out by context means “to strike”. For example:

“I smote his ruin upon the mountainside” (LOTR- Gandalf the Grey). Heehee! I love that line.

Or, instead of “love-struck” you can just say that you are “smitten”.

It was written that a kitten

Was smitten with a mitten

'Til it was bitten 

By the mitten

Which was smitten by the kitten

To this day, kittens love to smite balls of yarn, which remind them of that mitten that bit'em.

I had a lot of fun today, teaching my kids about Valentine's Day. “Who do you love?” For some reason, everyone loved Shene. She is a very fun girl, I'll give her that! Then I learned that my 2nd graders got top marks on their most recent exam!

Weekend Escape: Part II

Still, I was not up for returning home, so I moseyed on down the street, studying the murals on the bomb wall, crossed the street and climbed up the shallow stairs of the small fountain park next to the Citadel. At the top was a giant mosaic-mural which I had never taken a close look at. I plopped down on the edge of a fountain and stared at it and the ground for the next hour or so, with water shooting up behind my back and on either side. I'm not much of an interpreter of art, but this one was clear and artless in its message: looking from left to right, I saw turbaned men with shields and weapons- warrior men, a couple speared in the heart and dying in the creek in the foreground of the mural, and one on horseback riding to the right. As my gaze swept further to the right, I saw more men on horseback riding in the opposite direction, toward the warriors on the left. Sweeping even further to the right, the path of warriors on horseback curved upward, growing smaller and less detailed to convey distance, and led to an image at the top right-hand corner of a citadel- the very citadel that sat perched on top of the hill next to the mural/fountain park! So (according to the mural) sometime in history, a battle had been fought on these very grounds, and one band of warriors had stemmed from the Citadel of Erbil. The riders had surged from the fortress walls and rumbled with their horses and bows and arrows down the steep hill to meet their enemies, and these Citadel-dwellers were the victors, it appeared- or at least they had a lot more man-power, an intimidating factor during wartime, unless you've got Thomas Paine to boost up morale with some pretty words. 

At the foot of the mural on the side of the victors was a patch of grass, with flowers and shrubs and a very low fence around it. There were two young guys laying in this quartered lawn just a few feet away from me that made me wonder once again about the nature of intimacy- how humans seemed to need it, and it did not really matter from which sex they got it from. If society banned a person from intimacy with one sex, he would naturally turn to the other to get it. These two men were lying intimately close to each other on their sides on the slightly declined lawn, propped on their elbows and facing each other like lovers do. They were in that position when I came, and they were in that position when I left an hour later, numb-fingered and hungry. With the help of the cab driver, I discovered a restaurant located near the big mosque, called Abu Shahab, that served cheap, yummy Kurdish food. Afterward I went home because I really had to go pee, but didn't want to use their hole-in-the-ground toilets. That was the only reason I finally went home, really!

The next day, I had lunch at little Doe's house (her real name means “doe”, a deer, a female deer; I told her this, and now she whispers in my ear every day, “my name is in the doe!”) in English Village- a beautifully furnished house (the father works in the interior design business) with soft carpets, bright, cheery colors, beautiful sheer curtains and a wonderful family inside. After lunch they took me to Shaqlawa- a remote village about an hour away in the mountains past our school in Khanzad. In Shaqlawa, we wandered through the main road of the bazaar and they bought me tons of sweets at the sweetshop- dried, candied fruits, glutinous Korean rice cake-like desserts filled with pistachios, sesame sticks, date-ropes stuffed with walnuts, and other Turkish Delights-type sweets. As we walked through the bazaar, the father told me about how in 1996 (?), he walked barefoot for hundreds of miles to Iran in order to escape Saddam's death wish for all Kurds. I was just beginning high school then. Jesus, the things that go on in the world while you're growing up, sitting in class, laughing with friends, worrying over papers and exams.

Doe's mother is quiet and serious, which I like. She is pregnant and Doe has already named the child growing inside her, Nishan. Doe, though, takes after her father in form and function- she's quite the chatterbox, animated, wildly imaginative, with the same baby cheeks and narrow, twinkly eyes. That day, she was dressed in an adorable pale pink skirt and pink boots over her white stockings, her long semi-curly dark hair tied up in pigtails which bounced up and down as she trotted shyly with her head down as we headed to her father's car from my room at school. At her house, she took me excitedly to the bathroom where she lifted the toilet seat and showed me the bleached, blue toilet water, her eyes shining. “Why is it blue?” I asked her. “Because Mommy put medicine in it. It was not clean.” Hehe- medicine. Perhaps her mother had more of a hand in Doe's crazy imagination than I thought. During the very Kurdish lunch (dolma, Middle Eastern soups and salads), she let out a tiny burp, which made her mother and I to laugh in amusement as the little girl grinned slyly. “Say 'excuse me' after you burp,” I taught her. “What is 'excuse me'? Why do we say that?” Good questions. 

In her room, as we were getting ready to go to Shaqlawa, I helped her put on her poofy red coat, which she called her “magic coat”, just like I call mine “Miss Angie's Magic Coat” because the kids pull out balloons and other prizes from its pockets. Visiting Doe, I realized how much of everything I said or did in class was brought into the kids' homes. Teaching was like stamping a portion of my self into 50 other little selves. They were like carriers of my soul- of the stuff of my mind. Today, for instance, I was studying a picture that one of my KG's- the midget- had drawn. He'd drawn a happy face and angry face list, divided by a line. On the happy face list, he'd written his name 5 times, with 4 or 5 stars next to each name, and on the angry face list, he had written (or tried to write) “Aland”. Around this chart he'd drawn a sun, as most kids do, some random scribbles which I could not make out, and a train of numbers 1-9 followed by the letter f. These were the contents of the little midget's head, the majority of which originated from my classroom. Gee, and from these childish crayon scribbles, I could surmise that what the little dude thought about day in and day out was my stupid little happy face/sad face list*. Well, I call it stupid, but without it, I confess, I would be powerless; the kids would run over me like a buffalo stampede. Ever thought about what most centrally occupies your own mind, day in and day out? Think it's something more important than a silly happy/sad face list? Thinking about thinking...thinking about thinking about thinking...makes my brain hurt.

Anyway, on the way back from Shaqlawa, we ran into some of Doe's family's friends, and they followed us back to Doe's house, where we had dinner and played a Kurdish card game until it was time to head home. I sat in the back of their jeep with Doe's head in my lap. For a while, as the jeep drove on down the road to Khanzad, she played at sleeping, but eventually she really did fall asleep, and I stroked her dark hair from her smoothe white forehead to soothe her dreams. She was a luckier girl than most in Kurdistan for many reasons. For one, Saddam was dead. She need not walk barefoot hundreds of miles to escape chemical attacks and other forms of ethnic cleansing. For another- “What do you hope she will do when she grows up? Where do you hope she will go?” I had asked her father during lunch. He had replied, “Whatever she wants. She is free.” Despite the rapid changes occurring in Erbil every day, women here are still living under the old rules. They are still powerless, forced to be submissive and to stay home after hours, and always under the watchful, judgmental stare of men. 

Weekend Escape: Part I

Febrary 13, 2009

“It says here that you “brushed her shoulder” as you walked past her.”

“I did what?”

“You gave her an attitude and brushed her sh-”

“She wrote you an email about how I brushed her shoulder??”

This is about the time I cracked. Almost. Before I re-enacted the scene from 2nd grade when I suddenly turned my head to the left and projectile vomited across the aisle, right onto the kid's desk next to me, I excused myself from the principal's office, half-blindly made my way out the admin building and, despite the fact that school was still in session, I found myself marching past the security gate, down the hill, and right off the school grounds. I was seething. So tired of the bullshit that goes on around here with my “superiors” who so love to go on their little power trips. So tired of the culture of spying and professional tattle-taling that the school has developed through the sickest managerial style I've ever encountered. I crossed the street to the gas station side and hailed a cab. Inside there was a man in shotgun and two men in the back, and normally I would think twice about getting in a cab filled with local Kurdish men, but I was not feeling the slightest bit normal at the time. I did not even tell the driver where I wanted to go because I didn't know. I just wanted to get away from this damn school and their petty games. 

It was a quiet ride. I stared out the window, my mind reeling. How strange that things could seem to be going so well for so long, and then one event makes the entire simulation of well-being come crashing down. This term was going especially well. I was getting the hang of this teaching gig, and my students were doing well for the most part. But now, sitting in the car, fuming, I could only think how tired I was of playing their petty little games. I could only think of all the horrible events that had occurred this term that seemed to all come together and weigh so heavily on my angry, reeling mind. One of my KG's mother had burned herself alive over Christmas. He never came back. One of my other KG's older brother- who'd worked briefly for the school and had just gotten married to the love of his life for 9 years- had shot himself in the head and was now in the hospital, blind and paralyzed from the waist down. The poor kid brother has been absent for the past two days. One of the teachers has effectively gotten fired because she gave the school an undesirable image. Forget that her teaching had been improving drastically, and that she's had no further incidents since that one last December. Other incidents that revealed ineptitude, lack of respect, and the cold, careless nature of business- for that was how this school was run- like a business. I was suddenly so tired of playing in their bullshit, being part of their bullshit, being a victim of the little power trips that these self-important people love to go on, watching my fellow teachers and helpers take their abuse. I won't be a party to their games any longer. I won't answer to anyone who does not deserve my response, and they will have to simply trust that I'm doing my job correctly. I will have has little to do with this school as possible beyond teaching my adorable, happy, oblivious kids.

These are all decisions I came to in the past two days of trying to resolve my sudden hatred of the school with the binding nature of contracts, loans, and teacher-student relationships. In the taxi though, nothing was gelling in my head, and it was simply mired in angry feelings and thoughts. I got off randomly at Sami Abdulrahman Park and wandered around its curved paths. This was my first time at this huge park. It was no beauty, but trees and other flora being a rarity in Kurdistan, I was struck by the tranquility of leaves hanging over my head as I walked beneath the branches, and refreshed by the sight of open grassy fields, despite how artificial they appeared. I passed by a plot of cement that was apparently intended to be a rollerskate park because there was a crowd of teenage boys there in their rollerblades rolling about, standing around in circles, and sitting on the high cement ledges that surround the plot of smooth, gray surface. I passed by a swing set where a grown man with down-syndrome swung with one hand holding onto the seat between his legs, the other on one of the chains, making a continuous Krusty-the-Klown noise. Having recently read up on anthropology, I couldn't help thinking how he seemed more ape than human in behavior, and wondering about neural circuits and where his had gone wrong. 

I passed by “restaurants” and a “lake”, and a group of college-age students. We took pictures with each other, and left the park together. I got on the bus with them, and laughed as four of them in the back started clapping and whooping the way Kurds do (Xena warrior princess style) at weddings and parties. We got off at the adap (university) and they showed me around their campus- worn-down, non-descript square, white buildings, a lecture hall with 140 seats and no stadium seating, and a couple whiteboards up front, an outdoor café where students sat at red plastic tables eating strange Kurdish snacks (huge boiled beans and square, dark brown pieces of something with the consistency of turnip, slightly sweetened), and an indoor cafeteria where we had tea and nescafe. Being college students, they spoke English okay. It was quite nice to meet Kurds in their twenties, unmarried, and childless- Kurds like me in other words- who could speak decent English.

Eventually, I left the group of college students and took a taxi to the bazaar near the citadel. Night had fallen by now. I wandered aimlessly through the bazaar streets and bought some da-hay-nee- that sweet, starchy dessert I first tasted at Lenga bazaar. I came out of the bazaar from its right-most side, facing the citadel, and discovered a café at the citadel's base that I had never seen before. It was closing down for the night, so I continued on along the citadel's base and discovered an unofficial stairway entrance a few steps from the cafe. I took a few tentative steps and perceiving that it was indeed unguarded, climbed all the way up to the top of the hill. At the plateaued top where the giant statue of the literary figure sat with his giant open book, a security guard stood chatting with a women with a British accent. He was apparently her last customer and the citadel was officially closed for the night. In fact, it should have closed a whole hour ago at 5 pm, but “official” is really a Western concept, yet to be fully imposed onto and grasped by the Kurds, thank god. The guard, who spoke surprisingly decent English, offered to give me a tour. I was wary because it was dark and he was a man, but I was also feeling reckless so I said “Ok, why not” and followed him through the archway and into the old, old fortress-city. 

He showed me along Citadel street, and we passed by a lone gun-toting member of the peshmerga heading in the opposite direction, out of the citadel. We turned and followed the path leading to the textile museum and antique shop. The textile museum was closing for the night; the antique shop had burned down in a bad fire last November. Shadows of its charred remains littered the dusty ground outside the shop. I recognized a baby's crib that I'd seen before on my first citadel trip that had somehow escaped the deadly flames. We stepped around these shadowy remains and he pointed out the modern German-style house and the modern Czechoslovakian one next to it- both finished products of the renovations that the citadel was undergoing as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I was confused as to why UNESCO would raze down the slums and replace them with German and Czechoslovakian houses, which are not in the least Kurdish, or Median, or Akkadian, or...I followed him up the narrow staircase of the Czech house, steep and slightly spiraling. Stumbling in the dark, I climbed up and up until suddenly I stepped out onto a flat open rooftop. Wow. How did he know I loved rooftops? To the northwest, I saw the Erbil skyline, and to the east, looking downward, I saw the shadowy forms of slum roofs extending like a playground before me. 

Rooftop views like this always make me think of the chimney-sweepers scene in Mary Poppins. I think that's when the idea of rooftops as another firmament- as another world besides land, the deep sea and deep space- first took hold. I was enamoured by the smoky blackness arising from chimneys and polluting the skies, by the soot-faced chimney-sweepers bounding and balancing on ledges, and by that smoke-staircase created with a push of Julie Andrews' umbrella, and the fireworks and the music. Then in summer 2006, I spent half my summer nights watching the Philadelphia skyline on the rooftop of Pi Kapp, sometimes alone, sometimes with a housemate, with or without my ipod, with or without my camera. And now here I was in 2009, standing on a rooftop within an 8000-year-old fortress in Iraq, admiring the view of shabby slum roofs extending lopsidedly before my gaze, enveloped in darkness so that they were but shadows of shabby rooftops. Impossibly romantic. I wondered what this view would look like in the brightness of day. I was glad, after all, that I'd followed this stranger into the depths of this ancient city within a city. 

Eventually we climbed back down, and instead of leaving right away, he showed me the house next door- the Mufti House. Hey I have a kid in my 2nd grade class who belongs to the Mufti tribe! This miniature palace probably belonged to his great-great-great-...-great grandfather. We entered the courtyard, crossed it, and as we passed under the arched entrance, the security guard (Yasir was his name) pointed out the year in Arabic numbers engraved over the archway: 1231. That was pretty old (although quite young when compared to the rest of the citadel!). Later, a friend suggested that maybe 1231 was the house address, not the year it was built. Whatevs- at any rate, it's old. Yasir led me to the wrought-iron balcony overlooking the shabby old roofs adjacent to the bazaar outside the citadel. He said the city had plans to raze down all those shops and homes and build a park in its place. So many changes to come in the near future of Erbil! We talked on the balcony for a bit, and eventually I stumbled my way out of the Citadel and onto the streets below. 

This Moment In Time

In this moment in time, I'm sitting on my couch in my room in Iraqi Kurdistan, facing the balcony, which is slightly opened to let in some fresh air. I've just spent the morning cleaning my apartment, and now I'm waiting for laundry to finish, and chatting with my sis online.

The mountains are visible through the sheer, white curtain, which is billowing gracefully in the cool breeze. My black guitar case leans against the curtain to keep the dust from getting in. The sky is a uniform, pearly white, and the wind is making the noise of a hundred ghosts- oooo, ooooo!- between the mountains. This moment feels ominous.

Holmesian Truth

How do you explain to a little kid why -1*-1=1? In other words, why does a negative times a negative equal a positive? I liked this explanation from Dr. Math:

So the real question is,

   (-1)(-1) = ?

and the answer is that the following convention has been adopted:

   (-1)(-1) = +1

This convention has been adopted for the simple reason that any other convention would cause something to break.

For example, if we adopted the convention that (-1)(-1) = -1, the distributive property of multiplication wouldn't work for negative numbers:

   (-1)(1 + -1) = (-1)(1) + (-1)(-1)           (-1)(0) = -1 + -1                0 = -2

As Sherlock Holmes observed, "When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I wonder if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was thinking of negative numbers when he wrote that line. 

I also liked how Dr. Math pointed out that visualizing was not the same thing as understanding. Wait...would analogies count as "visualizing"? But I think almost everything we learn is through drawing analogies- mapping from a known set to an unknown set. 

Mommy! *Whimper whimper*

Food poisoning incident #3. I've got to stop eating out. Damn dirty Kurdy foody.

KG Reading Assessment

"Ok, Zerin, what does this word say? Sound it out."

"H-u-g-s."

"Makes what word?"

"Shit."

"No, Zerin! H-h-, not sh-! Try again: h-u-g-s..."

"Shit."

"No, Zerin, please don't say that! Sound it out: h-u-g-s, hhhuuugz..."

"Hugs!"

"Very good, Zerin, good girl."

This may be one reason why I was found laughing out loud in the hallway today, if you happened to pass by. Every few weeks, we have to administer reading exams to the kindergarteners. Basically, I call them out one-by-one and have them read a few sentences and sound out some words while sitting in the little kiddy chairs in the drafty hallway. It wasn't as funny when one of them kept spitting all over my face as he tried to pronounce the words.

"Bleh! You have got to stop spitting all over me, Walat!" I cried, as I gingerly wiped my face with the back of my hand, praying I wouldn't get sick yet again. He just giggled gleefully, the little doofus. Sigh.

All the same, they are adorable.

I have discovered some interesting things about the way kids learn to read through my experiences as a KG teacher. Sometimes, they read by sounding out each letter and just stringing them together into a word. But a lot of the time, they just either look at the word for a few seconds, or sound out the first couple letters/get the gist of the sound, and then link it to a word they've heard a lot in class lately, and then make the educated guess. They are not so much "reading" as recognizing the word. Does that distinction make sense? I suppose that's what we are really doing when we are "reading". Hence our ability to read words even when all the vowels are eliminated. 

My First Hijab

Today I bought a hijab at Lenga bazaar and took a passport picture with it for Iran. The photographer said I look like an Azeri girl with the black hijab on. I think I look like a ninja.

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.

Codeine-Induced Dreams

What in the world was in that cough syrup? I thought codeine was supposed to be a mild opiate...Do mild opiates induce wild and vivid dreaming? Here are the two that I remember:

My co-workers and I were hanging out outside our balconies. I turned toward the mountains and exclaimed at the view. Suddenly, everything had turned a light muddy color, as if a photoshopper had clicked on the sepia-tone option on the scene before me. The mountains were of this color, and so was the sea- for now, we were no longer standing in front of our balconies, but on a sandy shore by the sea. The sky was filled with thin, white clouds strips that were scattered all the way down past the mountains and into the sea. I stood amazed because I had never before seen clouds scattered in this manner, descending so low into the Earth.

Suddenly, the clouds began melting. They oozed down from the coffee-tinted sky and morphed into strange, penguin-like birds, still misty and hologram-like from their cloudy nascence. Curious, I started approaching the misty penguins. They were so cute! I thought. Rather than shying away, one of them waddled toward me, threw itself onto my right leg, knocking me down, and latched its beak onto my calf. I lay there in the sand, crying out for help, and one of my co-workers came and tried to pull me by my arms away from the murderous penguin. When he saw it wasn't working, he got up and walked away to go find a first aid kit. You bumbling idiot! I thought. Just pry the penguin off with your hands, you ninny! I lay there in the sand trying to reach down and pry the crazy bird off myself, and woke up suddenly. I was face down on my couch with my legs in the air, crossed and really tense.

I swear, this dream has something to do with my kindergarteners. Awww, look how cute th- argh! ARGH! They're trying to kill me! Get them off me! I realized I've compared my KG's to several different species of animal by now- sheep, puppies, and now killer cloud penguins. Believe me, they are all of these, and more. Sometimes I wish I could just give them each a boost of codeine, or a quick pinch of the tranquilizer, but neither is allowed, which is why I have to resort to insidious means of making them sleepy and more manageable, such as this phonics-friendly lullaby (sung to the tune of “Hush little baby, don't you cry”):

Shene sells seashells at the seashore

Shahan sells fish at the seafood store

Hush little baby, don't you cry

Mama's gonna buy you a fish with no eye.

Shhhhhhh....shhhhhh....

Shene sells seashells at the seashore

Shahan sells sheep at the butcher store

Hush little baby, don't you cry

Mama's gonna buy you a sheep with no eye.

Shhhhhhh....shhhhhh...

In my next dream, I was shopping around at a Costco-like warehouse, when suddenly, I saw my first grade teacher from Arlington Elementary. She saw me a moment after I saw her and called me over, immediately pulling me into a giant hug. She was so glad to see me, she said. She'd always wondered what had happened to me in all these years (it's been 18 years!). She gave my tummy a friendly, nostalgic rub, saying she'd always loved that tubby watermelon tummy of mine (Yea, yea, I was a chubby kid, let's all forget that now). We wandered around the store, catching up, and suddenly we weren't inside Costco anymore, but walking along South 74th street, my childhood street. It was nighttime, and the navy sky was clear of clouds. As we walked past my old apartment, I pointed it out to my old teacher. “This is where I used to live, and remember that corner where old Mrs. Manacough used to stand every day to help us cross the street?” When I parted from my old first grade teacher, I felt regret. I'd wanted to take a photo of us together, but totally forgot, and what if something happened to her before I saw her again?

I woke up soon after, and thought about this dream. I don't remember being particularly attached to my first grade teacher, or any of my kindergarten/primary school teachers really. I was always a shy kid, and not much of a hugger, or an openly affectionate person. I began thinking of my kids, and what sorts of impressions I was leaving with them. How much of everything I do for them would stay in their memories 18 years later? All these songs and games I make up, the stickers, balloons, and other prizes I give out from my “magic coat”, the special objects I bring into class to show them. Shells, bells, chestnuts, imaginary ice cream cones, and cd's. I barely remember anything from kindergarten myself- naptime, bible verses, learning my address and the alphabet, and my teacher's wedding, during which she cried, and I sat there in the pews wondering why. 

Right now, as their teacher, I make up a huge part of their world, just because they spend more time with me than almost anyone else, even more maybe their fathers who are busy with important jobs. I even got a call from one parent last night because his child wanted to say good night to me before going to bed. Yet, I know that 18 years later, few of all these impressions will remain in their memories. The memory landscape, from such a young age especially, is like an archaeological ruin. You find bits of pottery here and there, broken chunks of columns, ruins of an empire that was once grand and whole, but which now only shows remnants of the whole experiences of the past. Early childhood experiences, like empires, they come and go, leaving only fragmented testaments to whole days of hard work and stress and fun and crying and laughing, playing and learning. 

Sometimes it feels like a waste of time because of this fleeting nature. But then I remember that there is nothing in the world that stays with you forever. Everything and everyone is subject to the wearing effects of time. Look at what remains of Persepolis in Iran, or the great Incan empire of South America, and especially Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, aka Iraq. What they have left is a crumbling citadel-turned-slum. Teachers, friendships, and crushes come and go; empires come and go; and if you want to wind the clock up way back, whole species like neanderthals, and dinosaurs and the lives of stars- they all come and go. And later perhaps the universe itself will go. Beyond that, there is no time, of course, so coming and going becomes irrelevant.

Back to reality. I got two whole days with no killer cloud penguins...Peace out! (Time's a-tickin'.)

Dananananananana...

There's a place called "Batman" in Turkey!

"On November 7, 2008, Batman Mayor Hüseyin Kalkan began looking into the possibility of suing Christopher Nolan, director of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and Warner Bros., distributor of the films, claiming the studios had been using "Batman", the name of the superhero, without permission from the city, and "placing the blame for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on the psychological impact that the film's success has had on the city's inhabitants." No lawsuit has actually been filed."

"Midnight, Meet Drama." The Naming of Kurds

February 1, 2009

What's the cutest thing you've ever seen?

Kindergarten pillowcase race! They were like little bunnies hopping across the floor in baby-sized sacks. Hop-hop-hop! Hop-hop-hop! So, so adorable. Some couldn't get the hang of it and kept getting their feet tangled inside and tripping. Others reached the end, and just stood there confused, like ...now what? Why are they making us do this? Hehe. I know kid, sometimes grown-ups make you do senseless things like hopping around in pillowcases. Trust me, you look ridiculous(ly cute), and it'll come in handy later on when you're trying to pass a highway alcohol test. See, watch, I can hop for miles in a pillowcase without falling! Tally-ho!

Last Saturday, we held a carnival-type event in the large gym for all the Kindergarten and preschool students. I wore my Halloween costume and clowned around with the kids, took candid pictures, painted faces, and finally met many of my kids' parents, not just their drivers. I found out that one of my Mohammeds- the really intelligent, skinny one with huge deer eyes- is actually neither Kurdish, nor Iraqi- he is Algerian! I also learned that Liya's mother's name is Jwan, with a soft French “J” sound, and it means “pining, as for a lover”- literally. Isn't that lovely?

The Kurds have an interesting naming tradition. Like hippies who give their kids literal names like Summer, Rain, and Flower, instead of names that just remotely mean those things, the Kurds christen their babies with literal names (that, or else with the usual Muslim names like Mohammed, Ali, Ahmed, etc.). Jala's baby's is called Hema (the Kurdish word for “midnight”); there is a girl called Frishta (translation: “angel”) in my grade 2 class; Balkwareen, the girl I met in Duhok, means something like “falling leaves”; Diyar means “clear, vivid”; Jotiar means “farmer” (not sure why you'd want to name your baby Farmer!); There's a terror-child in grade 1 called “Mountain” (Chia); a girl named Shirin, which means “sweet”; Shano, who is the splitting image of her father, the school accountant, means “drama/play”; her two younger sisters are Tablo (”painting”, like the French tableau) and Savo (”soap”- another strange one); Zozan, one of the Kurdish-American teachers here, is the Kurdish word for “Meadow”.

As a kid, I remember doing the girly thing and browsing forever through the list of baby names in the middle of my mom's huge English-Korean dictionary, wondering things like: why would you give your kid a name that means “lame girl” (Claudia) or “bitter” (Mary)? Anyway, when I was young, my favorite names were always changing with the wind, but as I grow older, my preferences have become more steadfast, and in particular, the list of favorite names has held steady over the last few years, tending toward the poetic hippie/Kurdish tradition of names that conjure up immediate mental images of a beautiful summer's day, or an open field, or a little stream winding through a forest. 

Of all the Kurdish names I've come across so far, the one that translates as “Midnight” is probably my favorite. It's so mysterious...so “dark angel”. But I also like the one that means "Meadow", just because I like the English equivalent, and Shano because it's against the grain, ie: not in line with the usual nature theme. According to Niroj (”New Day”), the prevalence of nature-y names among the Kurds reflects their longtime nomadic existence. Like Bedouins, they would just wander from pasture to pasture with their sheep, going where the grass grows.