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...