Beyond the Canvas

Would a masterpiece still be a masterpiece if you found out someone else had painted it? 

In the past, I might have said yes, but now I would answer that question with a resounding no. From my experiences of traveling around and visiting ancient sites in Iraq, I know that for example, the main reason why I got so excited about exploring Shanidar Cave was because of what was found inside it in the '50s. The reason why I love exploring the citadel so much is because of its sheer oldness. If someone suddenly revealed to me that those Neanderthals weren't authentic, or that actually the citadel was a fake, built just a hundred years ago instead of between five and eight thousand years ago, my interest in those sites would plummet without a doubt. 

It's not always just about what you're seeing. Sometimes, the worth of things is based on intangible aspects, like the story behind it, or simply its age- how much time and history it has seen and withstood. It's like judging an old woman not by her wrinkles, saggy boobs and salt-and-pepper hair, but by what those blue eyes have beheld, such things she must have seen.

Vodka, I Need Vodka

May 28, 2009

“You need a drink or something?”

How did he know? After an extra long day of staying at school until 7:30 in the evening for the spring concert, and changing 20 5-year-olds into and out of their costumes while trying not to breathe in the fetid smell of kid feet, and getting rewarded for my hard work with a most diplomatically-worded accusation from the school director-

“You are not supposed to take responsibility for the children.”-

damn straight I needed a drink! I followed him to his room and downed 3 shots of vodka at his kitchen counter and felt so much better as the ice-cold vodka seeped to my head and worked its masseuse-like magic, overpowering the scarily venomous anger and hatred that was coursing through my veins. The two of us and F and T went down to the big gym to shoot some hoops then. When I got there, though, my drunken self was immediately drawn to the small, netted trampoline in the corner. My head in a haze, I climbed onto the tramp and recklessly threw drunken back tucks into the air. Only, on the third landing, I rebounded too hard and smashed into the barred window behind me. Ouch, my back. I stuck to shooting hoops and grading exams after that. Still, nothing like throwing your body around like a ragged doll and smashing it against a few walls to take your mind off of more painful, more hurtful events. Sigh. My emotions are much too fragile for this administration. 

* * *

It is evening now. After a very Korean dinner of dried seaweed and rice (we even ate with chopsticks I stole from the Sheraton and the not-so-great Chinese restaurant in Ainkawa), I am washing the dishes, while ND is opening her balcony.

“It's the weekend! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” she squealed.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” I squealed in response. 

She said weekends make her feel like she could fly. I second that! We hung out on her balcony watching the sun sinking slowly, its rays bursting radiantly (and radially) from a central orange sphere hovering low in the immense sky smoking with curly-edged clouds. I snapped some photos of ND silhouetted against the painted sky, painting her nails a bright red and talking about the degeneration of her faith in Islam, while the call to prayer sounded hauntingly from far-away speakers. She said the call to prayer used to scare her stupid when she was little. To me, hearing it in this isolated compound surrounded by imposing mountains, its ghostly, exotic melody can register as either comforting or lonely, depending on my mood. 

Later, I caught a ride with our shuttle driver down to the coke shop across the street. I walked around the back of the shed through shadowy piles of crates and leafy plants as tall as me, the sky now a dusky cornflower blue and peaceful, hushed. Inside his shop, the shopkeeper treated me like someone special, as usual, handing me a free Magnum ice cream bar as I was heading out as if he were handing me a bouquet of flowers. It was better than flowers. You can't eat flowers. And even if you tried, it wouldn't taste creamy and chocolate-y with a hint of almond, yummmmm. The coke shop is a pretty magical place. I always manage to leave it happier than when I went in. 

Made Up

May 26, 2009

Today, I wore make-up to school for the second time. Aland, the class clown in my grade 2 class, caught up with me on the way to my KG classroom.

“Miss, are you a clown?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Why? You mean because of this?” I gestured around my made-up face.

He nodded, “why did you do that?”

“Because I felt funny,” I replied, “like a clown.”

The two clowns shared a laugh before heading into their first period classes. 

Clarry's Clues: Epilogue

May 16, 2009

I can just imagine the conversation around the dinner table tonight. The driver returns home. He sits at the table where his wife is waiting with dinner she had spent over an hour preparing- rice, flatbread, soup, and lamb. He tastes the soup. “This soup is cold.” He tastes the bread. “This bread isn't flat enough.” His wife rolls her eyes and contemplates stuffing a fist into his mouth. Instead, she tries to divert with a conversation: “So how was your day today, honey?” He doesn't answer at first because he is too busy scarfing down the food with gusto, despite the coldness and the bread that isn't flat enough. As she watches him eat like a beast, his wife remembers that one time he tore into a chicken leg so impatiently that one of his teeth came out of his mouth with the leg. She tries to will it into happening again. Finally, after a huge, manly, reverberating burp and fart, a piece of chicken still hanging off his moustache, but teeth still intact, he remembers that his wife had said something. He answers inadvertently, “You won't believe what I did today.”

“What's that honey?”

“I drove a bunch of crazy Americans to a monastery.”

Great. How many of those sluts' breasts did he fondle? She wondered to herself. 

“Honey, did you hear what I said? A monastery!”

“We have a monastery?”

....

Curtain.

Clarry's Clues Part II: Jerwana Aqueduct

 May 16, 2009

It was no easier to find than the monastery. 

“Did we pass it?”

“Did we pass it yet?”

“Which bright building is it?”

“Was that uphill enough?”

It didn't help to that our driver was a petulant child. He grumbled in Kurdish- something about foreigners with their maps, among other complaints and useless comments. Suddenly, though, “the clues came together nicely” as J put it. We saw the bright building, the road inclined upward noticeably, and J saw what could pass as a dirt road. These clues were spot on! Of course, the driver wouldn't believe us so we ended up driving on for another half mile before he obliged us map-touting foreigners and turned around to follow the dirt road. It turned out to the be the wrong dirt road, but the right one wasn't that far off, and we managed to find it, thank heavens. 

As the cab crept over the narrow dirt path, jostling our guts with every bump and hole on the unpaved surface, Oscar the Grouch grumbled:

“I bet we're the first ones to ever set foot in this place.”

It wasn't true of course. Obviously, Mr. Clarry had set foot here in the recent past. But really, Oscar probably wasn't too far off from the truth, from the look of the place. We were creeping along a dirt path in the middle of an enormous, endless field of wheat under an enormous sky. It truly felt like uncharted territory, and the only thing we could think was...”what's an aqueduct?” What in the world were we even looking for? A bridge of some sort? What was it made of? How big was it? Was there still water there? Questions and doubts flooded each explorer's head until-

“There it is, I see it!” T said suddenly, pointing.

“Where? Where? You mean in the fields? Oh, I see it! Oh my god! Wow!...” First we saw a pile of stones. And then the stones grew more numerous and orderly. We got out of the cab and stared. A few local teenage boys stared back at us. They had been lounging around on top of the beginnings of the stone structure as they probably did every day, and suddenly a band of foreigners had appeared. 

“First one to find the cuneiform inscriptions wins...(wins what?)!”

We all scrambled to begin the search, plowing through scratchy plants and colonies of huge ants going about their daily business, and keeping our eyes peeled for inscriptions in the stone. 

“Found it!” ND cried several times and laughing in jest as we looked up the first time, startled and fooled. 

“You should sound a lot more excited if you've really found it, you know,” I told her the next time she cried foul. Two minutes later, J, who'd been exploring the very end of the long structure along its side, cried out,

“Oh my god, I've found it!” I jumped down and joined her and cried out in excitement “Oh my GOD! This is SO COOL!”

Of course, ND wouldn't believe us. But we weren't lying. There, inscribed onto the surface of dozens of the large, block-like gray stones, were cuneiform scripts, a writing system invented 5000 years ago, employed by Akkadians and Assyrians and Babylonians during the beginning of human civilization, and by King Sennacherib, nearly 3000 years ago, in order to record details onto the surface of this aqueduct. What sort of details, I had no clue, since I had only studied this script for a few months a couple years ago. People had made fun of me for studying such a useless language. I had made fun of myself! Now, I wish I had studied more. Who knew I'd be in the cradle of civilization two years later, standing in the middle of a field of thistles and ants before an ancient set of stones inscribed with my useless, dead language? 

We took pictures of our amazing find. As I mentioned, I nearly killed our driver because he touched me, and all-too-soon, we were heading back to the car. T and I looked back and oohed and ahhed at a strip of sky just above the horizon, burning a fiery, iridescent yellow and orange. Above this firelight strip, the rest of the enormous sky, blue and wet-looking and full of clouds hung over the dry yellow and orange plains, some of the clouds pulling downward toward the plains like cobwebs hanging down from the sky. 

“The sky looks quite angry, doesn't it?” commented J.

“Like our driver,” I replied, “Angry sky, angry driver.”

Around us, birds chirped merrily and sheep grazed in the distance, and the acres and acres of wheat, now golden with the light of sunset, made me think of Sting's “Fields of Gold”, which was not a part of Corbin's imaginary world either. As we were going back down the stone blocks of the aqueduct, ND's picked up her phone, and I heard her say to the person on the other end of the line: “Oh my god, we went to the most amazing place ever.” I laughed and shook my head. This is how she described every place that she ever went to. If we'd found a one-room shack with a filthy hole-in-the-ground toilet inside with flies buzzing around the decaying feces in these fields instead of an aqueduct with ancient cuneiform writing on it, she'd still tell anyone who asked that it was the most amazing place she'd ever seen. 

I wouldn't say it was the most amazing. It's hard to compare when you've seen so many amazing things. What would you rate as more amazing, cuneiform inscriptions on an ancient aqueduct older than the famous Roman ones, or an ancient 4th century monastery atop a mountain with an amazing view and a really nice monk inside? Which would you rate as more amazing, that monastery, or a huge, limestone cave where 9 Neanderthal remains were unearthed, also with an amazing view? That cave, or an ancient thousands-of-years-old citadel in the middle of a bustling city with beautiful views of sunset? It's hard to say...

What's easy to say is that the experience of seeing these cool sites in Iraq far outweighs anything I've seen in other countries (except maybe Oman...they had water! Beautiful waters and cave pools and secluded desert beaches). Even Egypt with its ancient pyramids and hieroglyphs and glorified cemeteries couldn't match up to our discoveries in Iraq- because of exactly that reason. In Iraq, we were discoverers; few others have ever seen what we were seeing, nothing was mapped out with tourist maps and road signs and guides, no site was swarming with tourists. We were like true pioneers, hunting for things that others were telling us didn't even exist, and others still were wondering how we even knew about these things when even the villagers one village over had no clue. We were showing the local, middle-aged taxi driver places he'd never even knew existed in his own country. We were true pioneers, paving the way for tourism in Northern Iraq. According to the locals, we were a bunch of crazy foreigners. According to the taxi driver, we were fools, but fools who you could actually lend some credence to as he found out. Still, his grouchiness barely waned by the end of the trip.

“He hates us,” ND said again as he bellyached once again, even as we were heading home. “Don't worry,” I reassured her, “that's his way of showing happiness and gratitude. Ten years later, he'll really thank us because he'll be the only one who knows how to get to these places.” We passed by the Arbella/Gaugamela battlefield again.

“There's the battlefield again.”

Wow, how ever did she recognize it from all the other fields? We pondered strange things in the car while the sky grew dusky, then dark. Like how we had been only 30 km from the most dangerous city in Iraq. Or the difference between “long” and “tall”. Or how sheep never look the way they're portrayed in cartoons. T nearly hugged Grumpy at one point. Grumpy only got grumpier. The constant complaining continued right up to our doorstep, as he demanded more than the agreed-upon sum. Well, at least you couldn't say he wasn't constant in one way or another. We tossed in another few thousand dinars just to mollify him (he thanked us by saying it wasn't enough), and walked into our apartment complex, another day gone, and tomorrow we had school. 

Clarry's Clues Part I: Mor Matti Monastery

May 16, 2009

“He hates us” ND kept saying in the beginning, of our driver. “It's okay, we hate him too- it's mutual.” I've become quite the acidic person since coming to Iraq. I used to care if someone appeared to be angry with me. Now I couldn't give a flying rat's ass, as long as I know it's not my fault. It was a waste of my time, I realized, trying to appease assholes and bitches. Better to just buy them some ice cream and give them time to cool off, and wait for them to come around, if they ever came around. But it was nice to have ND there- she still cared, so her presence brought out the small part of me that still cared and still tried to understand despite all my tough talk. It was important to not let acceptance of asshole-ness tip into actual hatred.

“Get ready,” ND told the driver in Kurdish, “we're about to take you on an amazing tour of your own country.” She was right, and he knew it. Yet, you would think we were dragging him across a bed of nails the entire time. Even when we could tell that he was amazed, he still, like an obstinate child, refused to lighten up and quit his constant bellyaching. I knew instantly what type of personality he was- the happier he was, the more chronically he complained. Sigh. I felt bad for his wife. Especially when he kept trying to find excuses to get close to and touch me and J. I nearly pounced on him and gave him a fistful when he impatiently tapped me three times on the underside of my upper arm (the flabby side, no less!) as I was holding up my camera to take a picture of the amazing aqueduct. Lucky for him, instead of following my deadly jungle cat-like instinct, I merely gave him a dirty look and yelled at him. Asshole.

The driver was making the journey so difficult, that we weren't even sure we would ever make it to the monastery. So when we actually did find it, I was overwhelmed with surprise, relief, and excitement. It actually existed! It was no “Na Koja Abad”, a Persian term meaning “land of No-where”, which I had come across while reading Henry Corbin's Mundus Imaginalis. The monastery did exist in the realm of the real, but when we first spotted it from the road, a tiny structure embedded high up on Mount Maqloub, and of a similar light brown color, I was not so surprised that we had such a hard time finding it. It seemed a part of the mountain itself, a chameleon structure barely visible from hundreds of feet below and beyond. Even the driver betrayed interest, his eyes unbelieving. These crazy foreigners (that would be us) weren't so crazy after all. We crept up the steep and winding road, passed by a pointy M-shaped archway whose ends hung incomplete in mid-air, parked and got out of the cab, cramped and sweaty from the summer's heat. 

I balked at the view over the rail. Below me was a sea of brown, vast and desert-like with slender roads weaving through like white ribbons. The sun alighted on the landscape in irregular patterns of light and shade, turning the uniform brown into a colorful canvas of burnt red, pale yellows, beige and grayish-brown. Far in the distance from the valley's relatively flat surface rose rounded brown mounds imprinted with whirly patterns like the imprints on human fingers. If I had been religious, I'd have believed that they were the fingerprints of God, evidence that he had shaped the mounds of the Earth with his own two hands like a potter leaving his mark on the clay. 

Of course, I am not religious. My heathen feet climbed the steps to the veranda and eventually entered the monastery. Inside was a golden-brown atrium that was surrounded by arches galore and had the wonderful feel of open air and lightness. Looking back, I could see the imprinted mountains framed by the doorway's dark brown wooden frame. Above the door were glass-less apertures for windows enclosing the bell tower, above that a pumpkin-like round dome topped by an Eastern Orthodox cross, and then the blue sky. It felt like heaven up here, so light and airy. 

We spent a long time in there, exploring the atrium, the cellar, the chapel, and the most beautiful crypt I've ever seen (again, not saying much). This was the crypt of Saint Matthew (known as Mor Matti here), an Assyrian monk who'd escaped persecution in Diyarbakir (in eastern Turkey) and came seeking shelter in this secluded mountaintop structure 30 km from Mosul. The crypt was a room within the chapel, a small, square chamber built of a lovely white stone mottled with pale gray, deliciously cool in the summer's heat. Attached to the walls and ceiling were wishing scarves like lacy bridal veils, and in one corner lay a shackle and chain. I put it on for fun, and T looked at me as he always does, as if I've committed a grievous sin. If I had, the shackle would not come undone on its own and my wish would not come true. This was how the wishing shackle worked. Of course, after he got the OK from our unofficial Baghdadi guide, he was eager to get a photo of himself choking on the shackles, to which I, as the stereotypical camera-wielding Asian tourist, happily obliged. Later, our guide showed us her family's temporary room for the duration of their pilgrimage, and I got to meet her fat, golden-haired, peachy-pink cherub-like nephew, George, and cover him with camera kisses as he laughed and squealed with pleasure, my own heart nearly melting like 21st century ice caps affected by global warming. I love happy babies!

Ahem. Anyway, this Syriac Orthodox monastery, founded in AD 363 by Mor Matti, but built even earlier, had housed hundreds of monks since its founding, but now only housed 6. We met one of them, Monk Yusuf, and chatted with him in his study. He was an amiable, peaceful man, who could probably put the most timid person at ease with one look of his kind eyes. I mentioned Mr. Clarry, as he had directed me to in his Clues. 

“Do you know him?”

“Sure, I know him. He's my best friend,” he replied with a smile. I didn't realize until later that he was being facetious. Gee, I'm so gullible, even a monk can fool me! I've been bamboozled by a man of God. After checking out the view from the second-story veranda and climbing down steep old steps outside the monastery to explore Mor Matti's prayer chamber and the wishing tree on the way, we said goodbye to our Baghdad tour guides and Monk Yusuf, and I sat in the cab as it rolled down the steep incline, thinking how cool it must be to be able to say, “my best friend is a monk”. 

We'd spent a good two hours at least in that monastery, so by the time we left, it was past 4 pm. Despite the late hour, we decided to keep going, on to the next item in Mr. Clarry's instructions- the Arbella Battlefield, where Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian King Darius in 321 BC. It was exactly as Mr. Clarry had described. Just a field where an amazing event had taken place more than 2000 years ago, but which was in essence and totality, just a field. We weren't even sure if it was the right field. No civil war re-enactments here, my friends. We did our best to imagine Alexander dealing the final blow to the great Kind of the East, and moved on quickly to the next item on the list: the Jerwana Aqueduct.

Clarry's Clues: Prelude

May 16, 2009

On May 14th, I had a long chat on the phone with Stafford Clarry, the Humanitarian Advisor for the KRG. I spent the entire time listening to him telling me about all these places I could go to in Northern Iraq, places very few people knew about. But he'd been here since 1991, when he worked with the UN in their resettlement project. He knew the lay of the land better than anyone, even the locals. After the conversation, he sent me the following email:

Angie,

 

Mar Matti (St. Matthew) Syrian Orthodox Monastery

On Maqlub Mountain, below are some photos

On the Erbil-Mosul road, turn right to Bartilla and head toward Bardarash

Much before Bardarash, turn left where there is a checkpoint, on the south side of Maqlub mountain.

Drive all the way up to the monastery and go inside.  There are WC facilities here.

Ask for Monk Yusuf (Joseph) who speaks good English.  Mention my name.

Don't miss the church upstairs towards the back, and the crypt with the chain and collar attached to the floor in one of the corners. The chain and collar are for making wishes.

Afterwards, drive out to the main road, turn left and head toward Bardarash, Rovia, to Jerwana, Shekhan, Khanis, Lalish.

 

Gaugamela battlefield (where Alexander the Great defeated the Persian King Darius, 321 BC)

Beyond Chhra, a big village, look left, that's the battlefield

Also known as the Battle of Arbella (Erbil) because it was the closest known town at the time.

 

After Chhra there is a restaurant on the right for food and clean enough facilities including separate WC for women.

 

Sennacherib's aqueduct at Jerwana, 700 BC

Here's the link to the 140-page report with photos:

http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/oip/oip24.html

It's just 2 minutes off the main road to the right.  You can't see it from the main road because it's flat.

The turnoff is before the junction where you turn to Shekhan, a well-known district town.

Before going up a hill on the main road there is a bright colored building on the left.  The road to the right is sort of opposite this bright building.  It's a dirt road, but you go only a short distance.  The aqueduct carried water across a shallow valley.  The cuneiform writing is on the side at the bottom.

 

Khanis - Assyrian rock carvings and statues

This is where Sennacherib's canal to Nineveh begins.  It ran 37 kilometers.

Go through Shekhan (Ain Sifni) town and after 15 minutes or so there is good paved road to the right.

Take the road for about 15 minutes, look at the huge statue fallen into the waters edge and the sculptures on the wall above.

Return to the Shekhan road and turn right.  Ahead on the left is the road to Lalish.

 

Lalish

You can go inside the main temple. Take off your shoes.  Do not step on thresholds; step over them.

Go down to the crypt of Sheikh Adi and don't miss the room with the clay jars of vegetable oil for the oil lamps.

Wander around outside to the other temples. 

WC facilities are available where you might be invited to tea.

 

Enjoy yourselves.

 

Best,

Stafford

It was the prelude to a big scavenger hunt around Northern Iraq that we have yet to finish. Two days later, T, J, ND and I hitched a ride to the Masif garage to catch a cab that would take us all the way to Lalish. We bargained hard for a decent price and paid for it all day long with a Bitter Betty, a peevish, grouchy, pervy driver who smoked like a chimney.

The Burnt Faces of Saddam

May 16, 2009

We had to beg our way into the citadel today. It was passed closing time and they were getting more strict about sticking to the rules. But they gave in at last, and what did I do to repay their leniency? I broke into the burnt-down antique shop. The shop had burnt down last November, and every since, I've been meaning to explore the ruins of the fire. At last I was there, and it wasn't too difficult to get in. All I had to do was climb over a short, slightly unstable wall of stone bricks blocking the arched entrance. It didn't exactly spell “Do Not Enter”. Okay, it sort of did, but nothing like yellow tape blocking off a crime scene. They make it too easy, it's almost boring.

On the other side of the stone bricks, I straightened up, dusted myself off, and looked around. I had stepped into a black-and-white world of ashes and burnt pages, freed from their ancient binds, charred rugs, their vivid colors dimmed by the fire, broken bits of ancient teapots and other ancient household items,...The normal reaction would have been to be at least somewhat upset that such priceless artifacts had been utterly destroyed in one fell swoop of fire, but initially as I gazed around at my surroundings, all I could think was what a beautiful shot it would have made for my camera, which I had regrettably forgotten to take with me that day. The dominating colors were black and white, which would have made for perfect contrast. The whitewashed pillars and staircases and walls, and other architectural structures were streaked with soot, and with the black, wrought-iron rails, looked haunting. Pieces of the building hung half-broken off edges; a frayed, burnt rug hung down from the  second-floor rail. A pile of broken framed pictures had been stacked against one wall. The floor of one room was scattered with burnt woven shepherd bags.  Loose pages from books containing Arabic script lay scattered and strewn all over the place, yellowed with age and blackened by fire. 

I wandered carefully up the short flight of charred, unstable, white-washed steps leading to a room where months ago, during my very first visit to the citadel, I had found a cool, electric blue dagger adorned with the evil eye, hamsa, and strange scripts. This time, I found nothing but broken tea sets in piles on the floor amongst broken wood planks and other scraps. What a shame. Back out in the main room, I explored the mess on the ground and in a pile of rubble, discovered a wad of old Iraqi dinars with Saddam pictured on the front of every denomination. Wow, these were supposed to be impossible to get a hold of nowadays! I pocketed the wad and left soon afterwards, climbing back over the stone brick wall and dusting off my jeans. Just in time, too, as one of the friendly guards was coming to look for me. I was taking too long and my friends were waiting outside, wondering where I'd gone. This was Citadel Survey #5.

Kids' Drawings

Last Thursday, the last day of the school week, I gave out pictures of Marie the Cat for the kids to color. On Sunday morning, Shene gave hers back to me colored, and with the name "LuluCaty" scrawled all over one side in several colors, and just the letter u (or is it n or h?) scrawled all over the other side. 

Whatever could it mean?

I kid about this, but sometimes I do wonder...kids' drawings can reveal a lot of what's on their mind. For instance, there's this kid, "Farmer" who in the beginning, was one of the most troublesome kids in the class- purposefully just scribbling all over his paper just to irk me, saying other kids hit him so he can get a sticker- once he figured out the whole positive reinforcement thing, pissing on himself so that he wouldn't have to wait to use the bathroom. I tell you this kid is wicked and conniving by nature. He's a good student now, but I don't think he'll ever lose that bad nature of his. It's lucky that he's got a kindergarden crush on Shene- sometimes, I use that against him, though he doesn't know it. He doesn't seem to realize that adults can be even more conniving them he. Anyway, the interesting thing about Farmer is, he has a major habit of scrawling his name along with select others all over his worksheets. Usually, he'll write the names of those that sit at his own table. Yesterday, when I switched him to a different table, he wrote the names of the kids at his new table all over his math worksheet.

Whatever could it mean?

For the first few months, whenever I gave out paper for them to draw on, the majority of them would draw a "happy face/sad face" list, a replica of the one I have on my board every day to reward good behavior and deter bad ones. Only in their list, they would write their own name under the happy face side like 5 times, and then the name of a typically badly behaved kid on the other side. Sometimes, they'd have fish and other drawings on the side, but this list would be the centerpiece of their artwork. It made me realize what a big deal it was for them. I sincerely hope I've widened their world a bit more since then. Can you imagine that list being your entire world? That's just sad. I've moved on to a star chart- giving stars to each table for being good, rather than to the individual. This group-rewarding system is definitely encouraging cooperative behavior, but I wonder how it's affecting their mentality?

They also like to draw me a lot, with slanted eyes, doing various things like taking a zebra for a walk. Man, they're so funny! Hoz in particular has become so irresistibly cute days, with his munchkin size and huge, open-mouthed grin, and his puppy-like playfulness. He's quite the acrobat too, throwing himself into cartwheels and break dance-like moves, so fearless for such a little guy. I ran into him a few minutes before school began the other day, so we walked to class together hand-in-hand, Hoz positively brimming with pride and happiness as he trotted next to his teacher. I love how they get so excited about seeing me on the outside- anywhere outside the classroom where they spend the majority of their day. I can't get over how small their world is.

KG has improved drastically since I got my new helper, Miss Valentina. It feels more like a partnership now because she actually enjoys being with the kids and playing with them, which my old helper never had the energy, patience, skill, nor desire for. I love going into my classroom to find all the kids crowded around her, uncharacteristically silent and entranced, as she relates a story to them in Kurdish. We make a good team. 

Not Just a Myth

We caught a “camel spider” (actually a scorpion) wandering in our hallway today. It was the size of my palm- and it was a baby. You could see its black jaws clamping open and closed as it wriggled around frantically under the tupperware in the poison powder and Dettol. My next-door-neighbor had seen its mother last night on her balcony. It was the size of a man's thigh. While she was inside searching futilely for a pan or dish large enough to trap it, it vanished. 

The Horrors Within

Horror Stories

I pulled off my flip-flops before sitting down on the ledge. If they happened to fall off my feet, there would be no getting them back for the drop was too far down. The rugged, red mountains rolled into smoother, dimpled green and brown slopes as the eye traveled westward toward the setting sun and back up the path L and I had just wandered down. From beneath my dangling, bare feet, the lush, green valley extended unimaginably far, its incredible vastness taking my breath away as good as any view of the ocean, its hillsides dotted with red poppies like drops of blood on the endless sea of green.

“In the early mornings, in the light of the rising sun,” said L, “it looks like a red carpet spread all over the grass.”

A poppy carpet? I liked the image of that. Over the jagged tabletop of the more rugged reddened mountains to the east, hung a mound of puffy white cloud with a hole in its underside that appeared artificially carved out- as if clouds were solid enough to be carved. Strange. It looked as if someone had been curious to see what lay inside a cloud. Further east along the rugged reddish slopes and far, far above the hole-y, hollow cloud mound hovered the day moon. It was perfectly spherical and the color of very very very light oil, a luminous white-yellow, so pale against the still-light summer sky which blushed an ever-so-pale shade of pink. Usually, I love when the sky is awash with all the colors of the rainbow, but this more subtle variety of sunset was just as beautiful, especially with the serene moon hanging above, a mother-of-pearl waiting patiently for its turn to shine.

As I sat at the ledge, just a hop away from being immersed in the very landscape itself, I listened as L told me horror stories of marrying into the family of a closed society. She was such a strong person. I don't know if I would have been able to bear the burden of hate and inacceptance without resorting to escape from the whole thing. I'm a regular Houdini when it comes to dealing with people problems. But, she says, for all the adversity they faced from the outside, their own relationship came out all the stronger for it.

She told me other horror stories about trying to eradicate the plight of working children that to this day afflicts Kurdistan, and discovering that some of those CD shops in the bazaar that played ripped dvds all day long was no ordinary CD shop, but rather a house of horrors for the poor working children who sold packs of gum all day around the bazaar. You can imagine what sort of dvds a bunch of repressed men would be watching as the youthful salesboy wandered in to sell his cheap 15 cent packs of gum. If caught, both the offender and the child-victim would get thrown into jail for homosexuality. Not all the CD shops in the bazaar were of that kind. But even though the government was making efforts to shut them down, they continue to crop up here and there, and that horrified me because such nightmarish thoughts never occurred to me as I wandered wide-eyed and amazed every week through the maze-like outdoor market, so thrilling in its bee hive-like busy-ness. How could such things be happening before my very eyes? How blind and naïve I could be!

It seemed strange to me that we were talking about such horrible things while sitting in front of such a gorgeous landscape. The contrast between the beautiful and the horrible was jarring and incomprehensible. Yet, I felt in awe of L, that she had done real, concrete, grassroots work to put a stop to such horrors. Although she was not the least bit Kurdish in blood, she had a deep claim to the place because of all the work she put into making it a good place, a place worthy of the beauty of its natural landscape. We needed more people like her everywhere. For all the work she's put in to bring serious change to Kurdistan, though, she has an interesting view of the nature of people:

“I don't try to change people. I don't think people can be changed.”

I stared at her aghast. “But what about all your work...?”

But I realized the answer even before I finished my question. How do you bring openness to such a closed society? How do you ensure that the change will be permanent and not an isolated case, an individual success story that will die out with the few people involved? Lasting change is made generation by generation. To bring change to a society, you have to influence an entire generation so that the effects of the influence will get passed on like a gene to the next generation- a cultural gene flow. This is why L looked at her job as an English teacher as more than just a job. After all, if we were so keen on helping the ones who really needed help, what were we doing exactly by educating the rich kids in Kurdistan rather than the ones living in village mud-brick homes with tattered clothes and no books? Of course, we shouldn't punish kids for being born into a world that was not of their own choosing, whether rich or poor. And yet, it galls me sometimes when my KGs tell me about the latest expensive toy they've got at home, or when I hear that the PM's son who's only in grade 6 has a $7000 phone. WTF? Even iPhone's don't cost anywhere near that much! It must be made of 100 dollar bills. On the other hand, these kids are the ones who will be running this region in the future. What better way to change a society than to expose its future leaders to alternative ways at a place of learning, while their minds are still young and impressionable? I feel like I'm doing a good thing at this school by showing my kids that dresses that show some leg are a thing of beauty, not shame, and that female teachers can be just as smart (or smarter!) than male ones. And about recycling.

“Where does paper come from?” I randomly asked my grade 2's the other day as I was handing out worksheets.

“I know, I know! (They always say that, but it's almost never true.) From the printer!” (See what I mean?)

In all these months, this job had settled into “just” a job. Now I recalled the sense of higher purpose that I had used to partially justify my taking this job in the first place. Since then, I've wavered from believing in higher purposes to tossing the idealistic concept to the dusty winds as a bunch of bullshit. I was wavering again. Besides that, the cool thing about teaching is that there are now 26 kindergardeners and 26 8-year-olds in Kurdistan whose brains are filled with the contents of my brain. Hm, I can just hear the jokes now. Uh oh, now we've got a bunch of dumbasses running around Kurdistan, blah blah blah.

One bad part about teaching is, sometimes I just don't feel like being up front and center stage entertaining the crowd. But as a teacher, the spotlight is on you everyday, every hour you have class, and you have to be ready and energetic no matter how you feel. That constant drive can be pretty exhausting by the end of the week especially with the kindergardeners. Sometimes, when I come into the class toward the end of the day feeling pooped, and I see little Miran or one of the other kids laying across the table on his back watching the ceiling, instead of giving him the Glare and making him sit properly in a chair, I join him with the ceiling-watching. In a matter of seconds though, without fail, my view of the ceiling is blocked by the faces of a dozen little rugrats climbing all over me and trying to tickle or strangle and suffocate me, sometimes it's hard to tell which. Crazy kids. And then somebody starts crying because a stray fist knocked into his eye, or because one kid pushed another who fell into another and so on like dominos until they all fell on top of the one unfortunate kid. They bring almost all violence upon themselves, I swear.

More Horror Behind the Beauty

Today, a couple of my grade 2 students tagged along as usual as I walked back to the apartments for lunch. The walkway is lined with leafy, thin-trunked trees growing from the imported grass surrounding either side of the stone bricks. As I leaned against a pillar about to send them back to recess before entering the apartment complex, one of them asked me to test him on times tables so I started firing away with difficult ones since he was so eager.

“What's 17 squared?”

“3- no 2...89!”

“What's 16 squared?”

“2 hundred...”

As he was struggling for the answer, the other one I call AR, who was not so into memorizing the larger squares suddenly cried out, “Wow, look on the tree!” We both turned to look, squares abandoned. There were berries dangling from the leaves of the nearby tree! Some were still green, but a lot of them were turning a dull shade of red. They were like raspberries, but longer- mulberries.

“This one is especially beautiful!” breathed AR, stepping closer to the tree, pointing at a ripe, black one. He probably meant to say 'ripe', but I love it when non-native English speakers use “beautiful” for things we don't usually call beautiful. They only do it because of lack of better vocabulary, but all the same, it sounds poetic. I pulled the “especially beautiful” one off its branch and popped it into my mouth. Mmm, sweet! I popped in a couple more, my fingers already stained red with the mulberry juice.

“You guys like the green ones, don't you?” I joked. For some reason, Kurds adore all things sour, and now that it is springtime, I see kids going around during lunchtime with ziplock bags of tiny green apples, crispy green cherries, and other fruits picked long before ripening, and also those long sticks of what looks like celery with herpes which is both sour and bitter. It's really good with salt, they claim. They never believe me when I say I don't want to try some, yet again. Why anyone would want to eat things that make their face pucker and cringe is beyond my comprehension- unless it was sweet, too, like sour skittles, mmm. Possibly, it's like how Koreans love all things spicy. Why would you enjoy eating something that burns your mouth and makes you cry? It's hard to say...I think Koreans are genetically masochistic. I bet if it weren't for the cultural repression, a lot of Koreans would enjoy the whip and handcuffs in bed.

Anyway, horrors of horrors, later in the evening, I found out that these mulberry trees are watered with toilet water. Holy SHIT...why do they not tell us these things??? Why do we have to get this sort of information by chance from one of the Bangladeshi cleaners? The kids were all over those berries during school today! Great maybe they'll all get sick and we'll get a few days off from school. Holy shit, holy SHIT, my blood is going to be so contaminated by the time I get back to the States. This one year in Iraq is going to take years from my total lifespan, I swear to God, w'allah, w'allah...

Shanidar Cave: Adventure Through Time

Today, I took a temporal journey into prehistoric times.

It was 11:30 in the morning on a Friday. We could have waited for hours for an empty cab, but we were saved this eternal wait by a large, old, boxy-looking white van that pulled over off the highway to offer us helpless highway loiterers a ride. The first thing I noticed about the driver was that he had these amazing cerulean blue eyes that contrasted strangely with his dark hair.

“Could you give us a ride to the Masif garage?”

Of course he would!

“Could you give us a ride all the way to Shanidar Cave?”

We didn't really believe he would actually say yes, after all, the cave was more than one hour away, driving at the normal speed of 120 km/hour. I mean, didn't he have a job, a family, or something to take care of? But say yes he did! Perhaps all he had was his rickety old white van. Perhaps we underestimated his curiosity, as well as the irresistibly curious appearance of 4 Westerners loitering along the highways of Kurdistan. Clearly, an adventure was forthcoming, if only he stopped and seized the opportunity. Carpe diem- and what an amazing day it turned out to be, for this was no ordinary van, but a time machine that would take us eons and eons into the past.

Before journeying into the past, we stopped by the nearby town of Shaqlawa to buy some of their famous sweets. I tried this glutinous roll covered with green flakes. It tasted so familiar! After a minute of thoughtful chewing, I figured out that the familiar taste was cardamom. Imagine me being able to identify cardamom! Before my tea brewing days, I couldn't have told you cardamom from my own mom. Now I can tell you that one is flat, oval, and greenish with a bitter aroma, while the other...is flat in a way, but definitely not oval, greenish, nor bitter-smelling.

Anyway...onward to Shanidar Cave! It was in this cave that archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered 9 Neanderthal skeletons in the 1950's, showing intriguing evidence that they ritually buried their dead, and that they healed their sick rather than heartlessly ditching them. Neanderthals, like grieving elephants, were much more “human” (by this, they mean “compassionate”) than was previously thought. Besides the adult remains, the remains of a baby Neanderthal were also dug up from the layers.

The discovery of the Neanderthals inspired an entire fictional book series called “The Clan of the Cave Bears”. It's fun to imagine that hundreds of thousands of years later, our own bones might be dug up by futuristic archaeologists, and fictional accounts written about our own lives by futuristic authors. No matter the dramatic stories they may weave about us, though, I wonder how much of the actual complexity they would be able to capture from a bunch of old bones. Only time will tell. What an awesome coincidence it was that this landmark cave happened to be just an hour or two away from where we were working and living for the year!

Soon, we were driving deep within the mountains of Kurdistan, occasionally sprinkled with red poppies, and that's when I began to get this eery feeling that this was no ordinary van we'd piled into so eagerly, but rather a time machine set to take us back eons and eons into the millennia before the dawn of man. I couldn't stop gaping, like the caves that yawned here and there from the mountainsides, out the dirty window at the sheer enormity of the stone-embedded mountains and endless green valleys, interrupted by absolutely no human establishment for miles and miles and miles, so pristine, so untouched, so very prehistoric. Any second now, a dinosaur was going to pop out from behind one of the gigantic slopes, rawrrrr, I was sure of it!

Eventually, though, we began to see marks of civilization- the occasional shepherd herding his mangy-haired sheep along the mountainside, a women in black flowing robe and veil treading heavily over the uneven, stony fields, a bridge, and Bedouin tents! They come from the south, ND informed us, and it was the northern side's turn to play host to these vagabond travelers, its lush green mountains feeding their grazing animals and providing an open, unoccupied space to pitch their large, elaborate, dark brown tents. A cloudy looking river ran swiftly through the valley- the same river that fed the waterfalls of Gali Ali Beig. Near the cave, we made a stop in a tiny convenience store, where J found “Iraqi dinar rubbers”. “Say what?!” I cried. And then I remembered she was British and that they call erasers “rubbers”. We piled back into the time machine and soon, we'd arrived at the stairs leading to the legendary cave.

It looked pretty average-sized from the bottom of the stairs- like all the other caves we'd seen from the car during our various road trips through the mountains. Everywhere we'd read about it, it was said that the steps leading to the cave numbered over 400. What a major exaggeration. It took like 25 minutes to reach the cave, and that was with my camera in tow, which meant I was making long pauses to take loads of pictures of the same thing at different angles in order to capture the best one. I avoided straying too close to our driver, and politely allowed him to move on ahead every time he came back for me. By now, he had already shamelessly proposed that I marry him and take him with me to America.

The stairway was lined with tall, wild weeds and grasses and those ubiquitous red poppies, and there were these huge beetle/grasshopper-like insects (cicadas) hopping around everywhere, ew. I kept pausing and turning around to gape at the incredible mountainous vista behind me. The two mountains in the foreground formed a V-shape as they came together, like Jesus and the disciple in the Last Supper painting. The author Dan Brown would have seen more than just a natural, geographic formation there. Behind those two foreground mountains, several more faded away into the mist. Eventually, my camera and I made it to the mouth of the cave.

WoOW. It was huge. Looking into the triangular-shaped entrance was like staring into the jaws of a T-Rex right before it clamped down on you for lunch. I heard my friends inside already, disembodied voices echoing from some hideout within this huge cave. T was pretending to be the voice of the Barzanis' ancestors. They crawled on all fours out of a hole deep within the cave, close to the inner wall, but even when 6.5-foot T was standing, he looked absolutely miniscule against the sheer height of the cave. It must have been at least 50 feet high, and three times as wide, three times as deep. The white limestone inside walls were streaked beautifully with shiny black, I guess from all the fires burned from the time of the Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago (when was fire discovered?) up until the present day. In the rear was a space encircled by a low stone wall- a corral, maybe for their sheep, goats, and cows? I'd read that this cave was still in use by present-day Kurds who came back every cold season and went away again in the spring. The floor was covered with light gray sand-like dirt.

At the entrance to the hole that the others had just climbed out of, I crouched down and made my own way in. It was so dark and felt slightly damp, and I hoped that there weren't any creepy-crawlies in here as I stepped forward awkwardly on my haunches like a primate. I took a picture with flash and saw that the tunnel opened up into a larger open space that was perhaps tall enough to stand straight up. The ceiling was spiky with limestone frozen in the act of dripping down. I didn't stay in there long though. It was slightly creepy and I couldn't see what sort of things lurked in the dark, if anything. I made my way step-by-step on my haunches back out of the hole. By now, my clothes were a lost cause- good thing I wore my old jeans today.

Outside of the tunnel, the enormous entrance to the cave was lit so brightly by the sun as if with divine light. There were a few other tourists visiting, standing silhouetted against this unearthly light. I meandered around, taking pictures of the streaked inner walls, the cobwebs strung across the shiny, blackened ceiling, old cow poop, and a rock pillar that looked at first glance like a man-made statue of a woman. Facing the entrance from the inside, the left-hand wall of the front of the cave looked steep but climbable. So I climbed it all the way to the top- about a dozen feet high-, where there was a window-like hole that gave an amazing view of the miles and miles of mountains and valleys below and beyond the cave.

This trek to the cave was about the coolest thing I've done in Iraq so far, I thought as I sat cradled within the frame of the natural window. It was so cool to think that I had stood where pre-human Neanderthals had stood tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, making fires and tending to their animals, scratching their heads, burying their dead. I had breathed the same air that Neanderthal lungs had breathed, seen what Neanderthal eyes had seen. I wondered if so many thousands of years ago, a Neanderthal had marveled as I marveled now at the geography of the landscape. Were their brains complex enough yet to be able to appreciate beautiful things?

Soon, it was time to go. It was a bit more precarious on the way down because I couldn't see the footholds, so I ended up just sliding down basically. By the time I left the cave, I was covered in ancient dust and dirt from Shanidar Cave. As we were about to leave, a big family of Kurds were wandering in and stood around exploring the rear of the cave. I took a picture of these modern humans whose ancestors had inhabited the cave, whose cousins continued to come back every winter season. The Kurds were a timeless people, half of them living the same sort of lifestyle lived by their ancestors, except maybe with a satellite dish in their home.

On the way back, we stopped at the river and made our way down to it. The murky, gray-brown water rushed madly by. There was the tiniest patch of dark, wet sand at the shore. This would be as close as we would ever get to a beach in Kurdistan. It stunk of cow manure and buzzed with flies.

“Oh my god!” said ND with that characteristic angry passion in her voice, her eyebrows knitted fiercely together over her huge, intense eyes. “All this cow poop just smells so good!” She stood angrily with her hands on her hips, enjoying the smell of her youth. I doubled over in laughter. “Good” was not the adjective I was expecting to hear. She had spent her childhood in a poor village in Duhok, north of Erbil, a world away from her present home in San Diego. The smell of cow poop was a source of nostalgia for her. Her wild, curly hair was positively electric with passion as she wandered barefoot along the muddy shore among the flies, determine to stay much longer than the rest of us wanted to stay.

We ended up climbing back up pretty soon though, and having tea with the Kurdish family that lived in what looked like a single-room shack- large for a shack, but small for a family with so many people. One of the older women was quite a lively character. She was dressed in the flowing dark robes of Islam, but sat with her legs spread out, chattering animatedly with J despite the language barrier. Her face looked weathered and was starting to sag, but she still wore her hair in long youthful curls that hung carelessly out of her scarf. There were five girls in the family, all very sweet and quiet while we were there at least, their serious gazes and cheap old clothes setting them so far apart from the kids we taught at the school. They sat in one row on the ledge and let me take a picture of them, one of them blushing adorably and hiding her smile with her hands when I said something to her. We left after two cups of tea. The flies were unbearable and I felt filthy from my spelunking adventure.

On the way back to the present, I stuck my earphones in my ears and watched the prehistoric landscape roll by to music from my 21st century ipod nano. Sometimes, a lone Kurdish man in the traditional baggy jumpsuit with cummerbund, or a lone woman in flowing black robes would be ambling through the plains, looking so small against the backdrop of the enormous, green, rollercoaster-ing mounds. These lone figures suddenly appeared to me to be so beautiful for their timelessness. They ambled through the plains as their ancestors ambled, wearing the same clothes their ancestors wore, living the same way of life their mothers and mothers' mothers lived- which is to say, they lived to survive and nothing more. In less than two hours, we had arrived back in the 21st century. I was back in my 21st century apartment taking a long, hot shower with running water, screaming and killing spiders with my electric vacuum, and clicking through the photos of our journey through time on my digital camera, while music streamed from my ipod into my ears. Those Bedouins have no idea what their missing out on. After the toilet, the ipod has got to be the greatest invention in human/pre-human history.

Naz City Tales: A Wandering Party (Apt. G938)

The night before, I'd been in the Naz City apartment complex, but in a different apartment. V and SJ threw an awesome joint birthday bash there with lots of people from the expat community. I took a couple shots of Yager- one with the NYer and one with SJ- and that was enough to give me a good buzz for the rest of the night. The Brit and I stood over the 9th floor balcony with our arms leaning on the ledge, watching the cars zoom by below, the tiny red light of a cigarette flurrying down 9 stories, hitting the ground and going out without a sound or a struggle. I was reminded of that one night during our way to Muscat that SJ and I spent in Dubai on a balcony, eating cheetos and grapes and watching the Arabs in their starchy white dishdashlas pacing and lounging around in the balmy night. This time, however, the Brit and I saw something even more interesting than Arabs in dishdashlas. We saw Gregory Mendel in the flesh. He was one floor below us, dressed in his brown monk's robe, and serenely watering his pea plants and simultaneously eavesdropping on the party conversations one floor up from his balcony (that would be our balcony). I contemplated watering his plants from above with beer. “YEAH, let's do it!” the Brit cried with zeal. I grabbed his bottle before it could tip upside-down. Idiot! Only he...only he would agree to such a stupid idea like that.

Wandering inside, I started up a dance party with a Baby Mickey Mouse stuffed doll, soon to be joined by a few real people. The birthday girls, for instance, the DJ, and a French expat who was here doing an internship in international law. She was the one with gorgeous, long dark curls I'd met at a previous engagement. Wandering around some more, I found myself chatting with many interesting people about their work and my work and Kurdish politics and even found myself confessing to a complete stranger my nervousness about committing to studying one thing for so long when I have so many other interests, which is exactly what I'll be doing in a year if all goes as planned. Oh well, by now, I figure I can do anything intensely for a year, even if it means hunkering down and studying my ass off at one subject- nursing. The fact that I'll get to heal sick babies and the fact that this is a universally-needed skill will be my motivation. Once equipped with it, I can take it with me wherever I go and put it to use. Oh to feel needed and useful.

Wandering back out for some fresh air, I sat on the ledge with my back against the wall, one foot on the ledge, and the other on a chair in order to keep my center of gravity on the inside of the balcony, as the unusually high-shouldered host put it. At night, this was a fairly pretty view, with lights twinkling from the buildings, many only half-constructed, or fully-constructed but vacant. At one point, the generator shut off briefly, all went dark, and I imagined the collective sigh of all the occupants in all the buildings across the city. Rising higher than any other building was the round form of the ancient citadel. In a few weeks, all this will be nothing more than memories, eh Ang? Of course this was the fate of all events no matter how major, no matter how inconsequential. Time marches inevitably on, and whatever is, was, and whatever will be, is, like an endless procession pointed in a single direction forward- or backward if you're from the Aymara tribe. Why did I find that so damn interesting? Too bad useless philosophical wonderings like this won't help save lives.

“I've never met a girl like you,” said C. Oooh, he'd hit me in a weak spot. It's been awhile since anyone's said that to me. I jumped off the ledge, suddenly nervous about the closeness.

“Wait 'til you meet my sister- we're twins.” I walked away laughing. Taxi was here. Time to go home.

Naz City Tales: The Incredibles (Apt. D314, aka the Pie Room)

I visited a family today in Erbil, at one of the Naz City highrise apartments. When the father opened the door, the first thing I saw was a tiny little girl in a tiny little yellow sleeveless dress with colorful rhinestones on the front. This was D's little sister, the image of a little South Asian pixie with short, glossy black curls and dark eyes alight with merriment. She was a mere 2-and-a-half years old, but she was feisty and fearless. The dress was from India. They were originally from Kerala in South India, also known as “God's own country” because of it's stunning natural beauty. I googled it later and saw that it looks a lot like Oman but greener and even more paradise-like, and with elephants. Looks like I'm adding another country to my list of travel destinations.

D came out of the bathroom. “Hey D, how's it going?” I gave him a hug. We sat on the couch and he told me about how he had visited two friends today, and they had played hide-and-seek and Gameboy. He's such a sweet kid. I never noticed this before, but I discovered that he has a nervous laugh. I don't think he's even aware that he does it, but it's very endearing. His sister is a riot. She stood at the doorway to the living room and wouldn't stop laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. I couldn't help laughing back. I love it when kids do that. Too bad when adults do it, they just sound crazy.

His father was opening up a Majidi Mall from Kuwait here in Kurdistan. They'd lived in Kuwait before coming to Erbil, and every holiday, they returned to Kerala to visit their homeland and family. As I asked them questions, I was shocked to discover that all of D's academic brilliance and hard work, particularly in math and science, was self-driven. His parents had both studied humanities and seemed to have no particular interest in math or science, and neither seemed terribly curious about D's academics. On the contrary, his father had been wondering if D picked a lot of fights with the other kids because that's what he had done at D's age. Wow, this kid was even more amazing than I'd figured.

His sister never stopped roaming around the spacious living room, and we watched amused and amazed as she climbed to the top of the couch and jumped fearlessly down into a sitting position, over and over again. She was a born thrill-seeker, a born mountain climber with not a scared bone in her tiny little doll-like body. What an incredible family. Most of all, I loved how the parents were so nonchalant and relaxed about their amazing children. Later, over dinner at Bakery & More, I noticed that his father seemed to know quite a few Kurdish words. It turns out he could speak Kurdish* after just one year here, as well as 9 other languages. Christ, they weren't human, this family; they were the Incredibles in disguise! Who knew there was a family of superheroes living in the middle of Erbil?

Before leaving for Bakery & More, I'd mentioned that I might buy a bag of bread while I was there. As we were getting up from the table after the big dinner, D asked “Did you say you wanted to buy bread downstairs?” I was surprised that he even remembered I'd said that. It's a nice feeling when you don't think anyone's really listening, but it turns out someone was, even if it was a really inconsequential comment. It's an amazing feeling when the one who was listening was an 8-year-old kid. Before leaving the table, D went around pushing all the chairs in while even his parents and sister were already going down the stairs. I stayed and helped him carry out this ritual of manners which he'd probably learned at school. During the car ride home, he held a CD in his hand, which his father had just given to me because I'd said I liked a song on it.

“Look,” D said suddenly, pointing to the back of the passenger seat. A milky reflection in the shape of a CD was cast on it. I told him if he held it under other lights, it would make an entire rainbow of colors. We held it under other lights and watched as thin, web-like neon lines spun in circles as the car moved quickly from one light source to another. Years later, I thought as I watched him, he was going to remember how mesmerized he'd been by lights on CD surfaces when he was little, just as I'd remembered years later how I would squint at various degrees from the darkness of my bedroom to change the shape of the light in the hallway, and then squeeze my eyes shut and pretend to sleep as I heard my father coming home from work. By the time he remembers, though, maybe CD's will be extinct.

*Kurdish is similar to Malayalam, their native tongue, which I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by, since they are both from the same Indo-Iranian language family. They both originated in the Caucasus, brought down by the Aryans, so it makes sense that a lot of their words sound similar.

The Panda

I've got this kid in my KG class who looks like a baby Panda bear. He's got the Kurdish pale skin and dark eyes and hair, but moreover, he's an adorable chubby one. Round and pale, with dark patches, just like a panda! When I met his mother at the Mother's Day party we threw, I was shocked. How did he come out of a tiny thing like her?? And then, my reason returned and I remembered that Little Panda wasn't always so round and chubby. Even the fattest man in the world (currently in Mexico, I think at 1200 lbs) started out as a tiny little newborn babe. 

The greatest thing about Little Panda is, like the gentle giant of stories of yore, he's quite sweet and gentle- you can see it in his huge, dark eyes even. It's almost funny when he cries because he's so much bigger than the rest of the kids, it seems like nothing should be able to hurt him. But of course, as REM sang, "Everybody Hurts," even kids like Little Panda. He has not cried often, but the most memorable time was that one day he didn't look too well. All day, his big eyes looked worried, the corners of his lips were turned down slightly, and his arms cuddled his pudgy stomach. 

"What's wrong? Are you sick?" I kept asking, modeling sickness with my body and asking in Kurdish just in case he didn't understand.

He kept denying it, but I finally figured out that he was indeed feeling ill, but didn't want me to find out because then I would send him to the doctor. Little Panda was afraid of the doctor. The doctor stuck needles where needles did not belong, in his opinion. I tried to coax him into getting out of his seat and to the doctor's office with smiles, words, pats on the back, rubs on the stomach, and all the enticement I could think of. But honestly, there's nothing really enticing about going to the doctor for a kid who has yet to learn about "mind over matter" or "no pain no gain". Besides Alzheimer's patients, little kids are the most successful at seizing the moment and living in the present. The future? Who cares how much better it will be?

So he stayed put. How do you make a bull budge? This was no philosophical inquiry, nor was it a riddle with a witty punchline. Whenever I tried to pull his arm toward the door, he started making crying noises. Finally, with no choice left but force, I crouched down with my back to him and loaded the bull onto my back, no joke. Heaving and breathing heavily and bent over from the enormous weight on my own not-so-enormous back, I carried him piggy-back style to the door, kicked open the door (the other kids loved that), and heaved him into the hallway towards the doctor's office. He was crying all the while. 

15 minutes later, he was back in his chair in the classroom, smiling and no longer holding his stomach looking like he was gonna hurl any second. See, that wasn't so bad, was it Little Panda?