Living in Iraq

Final message in this blog

2010-10-08T14:35:00.005-04:00

When Carolyn and I left Sulaimani in June 2010, we thought it would be forever. We sold what few things we had purchased here to make life a little easier, things like lamps, coffee maker, etc. We said our goodbyes to students and AUIS staff and faculty. Having been away from our home for 9 months, we were anxious to get home and re-establish life there as retirees. And indeed we headed home and relished the warm, long days and short nights of late June.

But a funny thing happened for me as the summer weeks passed. I began to miss the students who were a part of our lives here. In early August, we flew to New York City to be with a number of our students who had the privilege of coming to the US on a summer leadership program and enjoyed being with them once again. Shortly after this, I learned of a possible opening teaching English composition, something I had done many years ago in my teaching years at Manchester College. I suggested that I would be willing to return for the fall term, never expecting to be called upon because the university prefers to issue full year contracts, not half year contracts. But about 3 weeks after making my offer, I was asked to come back. Carolyn is not with me as she was already committed to a number of activities in Anderson.

I left Anderson on the evening of October 1, arrived in Suli in the wee hours of the morning of October 3, and am now settled into an apartment in an apartment building near the block that Carolyn and I lived in last year. I find myself having to purchase some of the very items we sold in June. Oh well.

Classes begin here on October 10, so I am attempting to get syllabi ready. This will be a busy term with four classes to prepare for and lots of grading as part of the bargain. It has been good to meet with students who are already beginning to come to campus to get books and schedules.

Carolyn and I do not enjoy the separation, but it will be only for a short time. (The fall term ends in late February and has a lengthy winter break that will allow me to travel home for Christmas with my family.) So as to distinguish between this blog, written mostly with Carolyn's involvement, and future posts when I will be sending on my own, I will create a new blog called "Living in Iraq, Part 2." It can be found at http://carlhoward12.blogspot.com/ . I do not anticipate as many posts as are on this blog, but will attempt to write when the spirit leads.

Thanks for your faithful reading of this blog.

Final Blog from Iraq

2010-06-05T12:48:00.004-04:00

28th blog

Gentle Friends, Family, and other Readers of this Blog:

As the summer temperatures begin to rise to unbelievable heights (we no longer can walk to the bazaar in the heat) and our assignment at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani is about to end, this will be our last entry sent from Iraq. God willing (Inshallah – as is said around here), we will return to the US on June 11. We will write one more after we have returned to our home, just to let people know we made it back to our home, but we do not intend to continue the blog after that. (Our world and our lives in Indiana are much too prosaic to presume on anyone’s time.)

For this last blog from Iraq, we have chosen to offer concluding comments on things we have missed or things we look forward to upon our return home. We do this with some fear that our listing of activities we have missed, or our listing of aspects of our lives here that were less than pleasant, means that we wish we had not embarked on this year of teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth. Knowing all we now know, we would do this again, no doubt about that. Yet we would be dishonest to say that every aspect of life here is perfect for us. But as is always the case in situations like this, our lists are much more of a mirror on us than on life in Sulaimani, Iraq.

Things we are looking forward to when we get home:
*Being able to visit directly with family and friends, and not having to do this by Skype and phone.
*Being able to drink water directly from the tap.
*Being able to drive ourselves in our own car whenever and wherever we want to go.
*Being able to hop on a bicycle and ride without dodging cars and breathing dust and fumes. (Here, the traffic, dust and hills are such that the use of a bicycle would be difficult. )
*Being able to watch movies of our own choosing, not being limited to what is available on satellite TV or in the local shops.
*Getting our hair cut by people with whom we can actually communicate. (This problem is our fault; we never mastered much in the way of the Kurdish language.)
*Being released from the demands of alarm clocks and everyday work schedules.
*Knowing that when we travel, we will not struggle to find clean, functioning toilets.
*Being able to go outside in a pair of shorts in warm weather. (To wear shorts in public in this area is considered immodest, even for men, even when the temperature is near 115 degrees. Yes, that has been the daily temperature for the past two weeks and we are promised it will get worse before the summer is over.)
*Being able to exercise in a great wellness center when the weather is foul.
*Being able to send and receive parcels and mail with ease.

Things we will miss:
*Interacting with students who are so grateful for whatever we do for them. We will never forget these beautiful young people.
*Experiencing evidences of the gentle Islam that pervades this culture. While we could do without being awakened by the pre-dawn call to prayer, the call from the minaret serves to remind us that many people quietly and unassumingly have vibrant prayer lives. They are the antithesis of the angry, strident Islamists that make it to the news programs in the West.
*Having the opportunity to help birth a new educational enterprise that is shaping a generation of leaders for this region.
*For Carl, as he taught, learning so much about the Middle East from students and from reading recent literature on the region.
*For Carolyn, as she taught, learning so much about the Middle East business culture and the huge difference of a cash based society rather than credit based.
*Trusting and being trusted in trade transactions in this cash-only economy. Where else could men, prepared to change money or sell a phone card, stand safely on the streets with four inch stacks of cash?
*Living in an academic community of people with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds. Some are local; some from abroad. They bring a rich variety of prior experiences from all over the globe.
*Walking through the bazaar, and hearing the variety of sounds and seeing the vibrant colors and activity.
*Buying fresh bread directly from the baker, and fresh meat directly from the butcher.
*Buying good, inexpensive, fresh vegetables, and delicious watermelon.
*Knowing and being welcomed by the man who runs the small convenience store in our apartment complex. “How are you Mr. Hemn?” “I am fine, how are you?” How many clerks do we ever know in Walmart?
*Being able to travel in a beautiful part of the world.
*Being treated with great respect simply because we are Americans.
*Seeing sunrises over the hills east of Suli; seeing the sun shining on the same hills as it sets in the west.
*Watching the mountains and hills around here turn a lovely shade of green in March and April after the brown of fall and the rains of winter. Then turning back to brown by June as the rain dries up and the temperatures turn very warm.
*Enjoying the contrasts of this city of nearly 1,000,000 people: in one block, a sophisticated mall like something one find in the West; nearby a block in which chickens move about pecking at the ground. On the circular road, modern, sophisticated automobiles sharing the road with a donkey drawn cart.

Things we will not miss:
*Dealing with the dust and pollutants in the atmosphere. On dusty days, it is hard to see the mountains that ring Sulaimani. The dust lands on everything, and requires weekly cleaning and mopping of the apartment. Who can ever know how much of this dust we have breathed in the past 9 months?
*Walking past electricity generators that are the size of a small box truck, knowing that while we need them for their electricity, they create much noise and belch huge amounts of pollutants into the air.
*Observing and stepping over the trash that seems to be present in many streets and vacant lots.
*Living through momentary outages of electricity. These are short-lived annoyances, but annoyances anyway, especially when we are on the elevator that carries us to and from the seventh floor of our apartment building. Or on occasion, walking those seven flights with a watermelon because the elevator isn’t working.
*Being frustrated with the narrow bandwidth on the internet that makes every program feel like someone is pouring molasses into the internet.
*Having travel interrupted by the requirement to stop at check points.
*Living in a world in which armed guards are present outside every public building and many private homes. We have never quite gotten accustomed to seeing AK-47 semi-automatic rifles slung over the shoulders of guards.
*Putting up with the inconveniences of living in an apartment block, e.g., the noise that comes through from the apartment above ours.
*Taking cold showers about once a week because the water heater isn’t working for the apartment building.
*Dealing with inconsistent banking services.

What we fear:
*Settling into a complacent lifestyle without remembering how we could get by with less.
*Being bored after living with so much change.
*Not living in a context in which we are valued for our contributions.
*Overlooking other great opportunities to learn about other cultures.

We close with these nighttime photographs of Sulaimani taken from the rooftop restuarant of a nearby hotel.

27th Blog, Transportation in Sulaimani

2010-05-29T05:18:00.006-04:00

27th Blog, May 29, 2010

This blog, like the last one, is more about everyday life here in Sulaimani than about individuals, groups, issues, or places. This blog is about how people move about and how they transport the stuff that is important to them. It involves animal and human powered vehicles, motorbikes, cars, trucks and buses. For those who care nothing about mechanical things involving transportation, feel free to tune out right now.

Every once in a while we would get jerked out of the 21st century by a sight from another time. The first picture I have posted is of a horse drawn cart in the middle of a busy highway. This does not happen often, but it does happen. Like the chickens we referred to in the last blog, the ones that roam freely in some parts of Suli, the horse drawn cart bespeaks an earlier, simpler time. That we see one so rarely is testament to the rapid change of this society.

The bazaar is a crowded maze of streets and shops. One of the common ways to get goods into and round the bazaar is by means of a human powered three wheel cart. These carts are everywhere in the bazaar, sometimes with light loads, sometimes with very heavy loads. They are sometimes perched on the sidewalk along side busy roads and from the cart an entrepreneur might sell cigarettes or hot tea. Car drivers and pedestrians alike appear to understand the importance of these carts, and grant them considerable freedom to move about.

The other means of getting stuff into the bazaar, and also into other parts of the city, is by the use of a three wheeled motorcycle with a truck bed in back. These “trikes” are all made in China, have single cylinder gasoline powered engines of around 200 to 250 ccs of displacement, and get power to a solid live rear axle by means of shaft drive. In order to use them year round, some drivers erect elaborate windshields to keep off the winter winds and rains. They are one of the work horses of this city, and one can find them creeping through narrow places in the bazaar or out on the heavily trafficked ring road which encircles the city. The men who drive them in the latter context are brave men, indeed, as they put-put along at a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour on a busy road where they are being passed by multi-ton dump trucks and semi-trailer trucks that would squash them in case of an encounter. On one occasion, I saw a trike that was so heavily loaded that quite literally the front tire came off the ground for a couple of seconds after the driver hit a bump. Obviously he was not steering the trike for those seconds.

The other workhorse of the city, and a vehicle that rivals small cars in number on the road, is the small four door pickup truck. Unlike pickup trucks in the US, many of which never see rough use, the small pickups here serve as both family car and utility vehicle. People seem not to worry about loading them with objects so heavy that the back end of the truck sits on the axle. They carry everything: sheep and cattle, construction supplies, fruits and vegetables, you name it. They are not pampered. And then on the weekend, the owner will load up the cab with family and the bed of the truck with tables, chairs, picnic supplies, propane cookers, any children that will not fit in the cab, etc., and head for the hills around Suli for a day in the country. The two most popular brands are Toyota and Nissan, though the Chinese are making inroads with their own name brands like GoNow, Deer, and Grand Tiger.

The most common car used around the city is a small 5 passenger car of the size of a Toyota Corolla or Nissan Sentra. One can find similar sized cars made by Mazda, Kia, Hyundai, Opel, Volkswagen and Skoda. These are used both as personal cars and as taxis. The older taxi versions of the cars are white, with orange fenders. The newer versions are painted a solid beige color.

Beyond cars and small trucks, the other vehicles in wide use are SUVs of all sizes. At the smaller end of the scale, Hyundai Tucsons and Kia Sportages are popular. But one can find mid-sized and large SUVs. The most popular large SUVs are Toyota Land Cruisers, but one can find SUVs made by BMW, Infiniti and Mercedes Benz.

American car manufacturers GM, Ford, and Chrysler sell cars in this market but at numbers far below the Asian brands. GM imports model lines of small Chevrolets called Optra and Epica that are Korean made. They also sell the crew-cab version of a small pickup truck called Chevrolet Colorado, but the numbers pale in comparison to Asian brands. One can also find US-made Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans. Ford seems not to be in the small car market, but offers both Ford and Lincoln badged SUVs: Ford Edge, Lincoln MKX. For some of our trips out of Suli, we have ridden in a mammoth Ford Expedition. Ford also sells to the government diesel powered F-350 pickup trucks that are used by the police to transport soldiers. Chrysler sells both sedans like Chrysler 300 and Jeep SUVs, but their numbers are very low compared to other brands.

Motorcycles are used around here, though not in huge numbers. The most popular bikes are simple 125 cc. bikes made in China and Iran under the names Gwei, Nami, Arshia, MTR. If you were to put one of these bikes alongside a late 1960s Honda of the same type, you would see great similarity: a single cylinder, carburetor-fed engine; enclosed chain; drum brakes front and rear. They are cheap to buy – around $800 – and require little fuel. Like the trikes discussed above, these bikes are used to haul both people and goods. They are used year round, even in the rain and cold weather of winter. A hefty engine guard bolted in front of the engine becomes a mounting place for a piece of heavy plastic that will keep feet dry in rainy weather.

For people without cars, there is a system of privately owned buses that operate within the city of Suli, and between some cities. Within the city, a ride on one of these buses costs between 5 and 10 cents.

Heavy trucks are in wide use, hauling goods to and from the area. Popular brands include Scania, MAN, DAF, Renault, and Mercedes. It would appear that many of these trucks were first put on the roads in Europe and have made their way to Iraq from Europe as used vehicles. There’s nothing remarkable about them, as the first photo suggests. But I was amused with a warning sign on the back of a gasoline tanker truck. The meaning of the sign is quite clear, even if the spelling is not quite accurate.

Hope you enjoyed this digression from the significant. Next time, as we close out the blog messages we write from Iraq, we will hopefully have something more substantive to say.

As always, thanks for reading.

26th Blog

2010-05-14T08:43:00.005-04:00

26th Blog Weekend of May 14-15

After one of our recent blogs, one respondent wrote back, asking about food: where it is grown and produced, how it comes to the local market. We will try to respond, to the best of our knowledge, and give you a few prices so you have a sense of what food costs.

Milk and dairy products: all of these seem to come from places other than Iraq. Yogurt comes from either Iran or Turkey. Price: $2.50 for a 3.3 pound container. The most widely available milk comes from Saudi Arabia, and comes in the form of 1 liter (just over one quart) paper containers. The yogurt is kept refrigerated at the stores and at home, but the milk is of the ultra high temperature (UHT) processing that allows it to be kept at room temperature until such time as we begin to use it. The milk in our cabinet right now was processed on March 14, 2010 and has a shelf life until October 10, 2010, all at room temperature. Milk is not cheap, about $5.50 for four liters or just over one gallon. We have found a kind of cheese we really enjoy, called Kashkaval cheese, that comes from Turkey. Cost: about $4.00 per pound. Parmesan cheese is available only in Erbil and is ghastly expensive. Eggs are sold by the piece and are not refrigerated in the shops. One of our AUI-S student’s father owns the big egg production unit just outside of Suli and that family is considered very comfortably situated. Our recollection of what we pay is about $1.80 per dozen.

Poultry: Chickens can be purchased either fresh or frozen. The frozen chicken comes from such far away places as Brazil. The packages of imported boneless, skinless chicken breasts all look pretty decent in the store, but our experience is the meat is tough and chewy. Sorry, I cannot tell you a price. People generally prefer fresh chickens and there are a number of poultry farms on the edge of Suli that provide the fresh chickens, but we have never bought a whole chicken because there is so much of a whole chicken we do not eat. There is an area of the bazaar where one can purchase freshly slaughtered and processed chickens or one can purchase a live chicken and come back later after it has been slaughtered and cleaned. It doesn’t get much fresher than this.

Beef: is raised and slaughtered locally. We have been told on excellent authority that the cows are delivered to the slaughterhouse, kept in quarantine for several days before they are slaughtered, and then inspected after slaughter and before they are delivered to the numerous butcher shops around the city. The meat is not kept refrigerated as it hangs in the shops, but is fresh as of the morning it is available, and is not kept from one day to the next. We have seen beef cuts in packages in refrigerated cases in the three large modern grocery stores, but we have never seen it purchased. People seem to prefer the hanging beef in a local shop. Beef is expensive: about $6.00 per pound, but what is made available is only the leanest cut of the meat, whether bought whole or ground. It is really quite good. Fresh lamb and goat meat are readily available but we have no experience in purchasing either.

Just as people prefer fresh meat, so too do they prefer fresh bread. The city is dotted with small two and three person storefront bakery operations that make large round pieces of flat bread called naan, or small loaves, about the size of an enlarged hamburger bun, called samoon. These are very cheap, about 80 cents for ten pieces/buns, and they are very good, especially if you happen to get to the bakery just after the bread has come from the oven. With the naan, no one seems to worry about packaging as we often see people leave the bakery with bare hands carrying a stack of unwrapped bread. The samoon lie loose in a bin, and are sold in bags only because it would be impossible to carry them loose.

Fresh vegetables: One of the real glories of this place is the availability of a wide range of fresh, inexpensive vegetables. These come from local farms, and from Iran and Syria. Eggplant, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, carrots, green peppers, cucumbers are in regular supply and cost in the range of 40 cents to 50 cents per pound. Bananas come from Guatemala and cost around 60 cents per pound. The watermelon is the most amazing fruit available—it is the sweetest we have ever tasted and comes from Syria. Cost: about $5.00 for a melon. Pomegranates are grown locally and are readily available in season. They have a wonderful flavor but we don’t buy them often as we find the seeds a real nuisance. What we have discovered about the local people is that many of them avoid the problem of seeds by just chewing them with the fruit and swallowing them. That is true for sunflower seed hulls too.

Olives are another widely available food product. There are lots of varieties of olives and of processes for seasoning them. Some olives are green; others black. Some are quite pickled, others are mild. Cost of large black olives: $1.80 per pound. Also available: dried apricots, raisins, figs, almonds, walnuts and dates.

Large scale farming: this area is part of the Fertile Crescent, an arc of land that starts in Israel and the Occupied Territories, goes north, sweeps around the east and then proceeds south along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It is not called fertile by accident; all along the foothills of the Zagros Mountains around Suli are multi-hundred acre fields with a rich, loamy soil of the type you might find in some of the large fields of Indiana and Illinois. Sometimes the fields are a bit rocky, but even these can be plowed and cultivated. Because of rainfall patterns these fields are mostly sown in the fall and harvested in the early summer, and are planted with either wheat or barley. Below photo of fields, note Iranian knock-off of a John Deere combine. We haven’t a clue about what happens to the wheat after harvesting. That is, how does it enter the food chain of products that we consume in products like bread and cereal?

Summary: we have no trouble getting good food. We can also get, but try to avoid, grocery store aisles full of all variety of cookies and candies, and freezer cases with Magnum ice cream bars -- giant hunks of vanilla ice cream formed around a stick and covered in chocolate.

Sorry we cannot you provide you with a description of another important historical site, or of an amazing story about a group of students, but hope that this is helpful in understanding our everyday living.

Thanks for reading.

2010-05-08T12:59:00.004-04:00

25th Blog

On Friday, May 7, three AUIS students accompanied us to an exhibition of Iranian life, brought to Sulaimani from Iran. One of the students speaks fluent Farsi, so could translate whenever we were trying to communicate with Iranians. (The border with Iran is less than two hours from here by car, so the cross-border traffic between the two countries is quite heavy.) Lots of stuff for sale, everything from books and DVDs to head scarves for women to knick knacks for one’s home.

The exhibition was a fascinating contrast between official hard line stances by the Iranian government, and the reality in Iran. On one hand, one young lady, in full head and body covering, let it be known that she wanted the Reform party to win in June of 2009, and that she demonstrated when they were robbed of the election. The Iranian consul to Suli was there and invited us to come to Iran. All very friendly. On the other hand there was an entire display set up by the Hezbullah, the Iranian-backed Shi’ite group in southern Lebanon, with lots of videos of gruesome war scenes of Israeli-caused atrocities in attacks on Lebanon. They cannot mention Israel without mentioning the US. There were vendors selling, in addition to lots of editions of the works of Ayatollah Khomeini, copies of anti-American, anti-Jewish books.

One fellow had a volume, all in Farsi unfortunately, of the documents found in the American Embassy at the time of its capture. Once people knew that we are Americans, most went to great lengths to talk about how we as people could be friends, but this book seller seemed to take a perverse pleasure in showing me this book, a sort of living proof of Iranian suspicions about America’s bad intentions toward Iran. Another vendor had copies of a collection, in English, of Henry Ford's articles from his own newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. The title of the book: The International Jew (The World's Foremost Problem).

I had long read that Ford was anti-Semitic, but this is the first time I actually read what he thought. He makes constant reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Jewish document forged in Russia early in the 20th century, and he even acknowledges that the book may be a forgery, but he says that it doesn’t really matter that it’s a forgery because the facts of the day are that the Jews are doing the very things that the Protocols say they are going to do. Then he goes on to quote the Protocols throughout his articles. Chapter titles like “How the Jews Use Power,” “Jewish Influence in American Politics,” “Bolshevism and Zionism,” etc. The book was edited in Iran and published by the Department of Translation and Publication, Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, in 1997. On reading the book, I can make two observations: it’s no wonder that Ford liked Hitler; it’s no wonder that Israelis don’t trust Iranians (or other people of the Middle East who still peddle the Protocols).

After visiting the exhibition, we went to a nearby restaurant for iced fruit drinks and conversation with the AUIS students and then walked with them along Salim Street, the main east-west street in town, until they turned off to the house where they live. We walked on to our apartment, a bit tired from being on our feet most of the afternoon.

24th Blog

2010-05-02T13:58:00.004-04:00

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Dear Readers,

You will recall that in our last blog, we posted a story about a young man named Zmnako, a student at AUIS. Until a few months ago he was presumed dead in the gas attack on Halabja in 1988. Since writing, I have talked with him, and learned that on the day of the gas attack he was three months old and was left behind in the family’s home in Halabja. He was not discovered until two full days after the attack when an Iranian soldier found him and placed him with a family in Iran where he grew up. (See last blog for details.) He is a wonderful, gentle, young man who enjoys being a student at AUIS. See below for a picture of him kneeling next to the Halabja cemetery memorial marker that bears his name.

Since posting the last blog, we went with a group of faculty to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, for a two day weekend trip. It takes about three hours to get to Erbil, by way of a mountainous road, one section of which has very sharp switchback curves as the road snakes up and down the side of the mountain. (Oh! for a motorcycle in moments like that.) Erbil is larger than Sulaimani, and has a larger expat community. They in turn can support Western stores and restaurants that we lack around here. Erbil also has a traditional bazaar like Suli’s, but also has a large modern mall, complete with huge grocery store – the closest thing to a Super Walmart we have seen in this part of the world. There is also a combination bakery, delicatessen, and restaurant called Bakery N’More that stocks beef salami, sliced turkey, good cheese, and other foods that we cannot get around here. We bought some food, but not too much as we cannot use a large amount in the next month.

Erbil is widely known in the region as being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It is mentioned in some of the records of ancient Mesopotamian empires. There is a large circular flat top hill that rises perhaps 300 feet from the level plain that is now the modern city of Erbil, and on top of the hill successive generations have built fortifications, called a citadel. The citadel was actually occupied until a few years ago, and now is undergoing significant renovation. See next photos of the citadel from below. If you ever come this way, you must check out the rug museum in the citadel. While there we met a group of 15 brave American women who were involved in a tour of the region. Each had had to convince husbands and/or family that travel to this part of Iraq is safe. They were loving the experience.

While in Erbil we went to the home of Rawa, one of Carl’s students from the fall term. In this home we met his lovely family: Mohammed, father, Shadia, mother, and Ramyar, Baso and Basya, brothers and sister. The latter two are delightful and energetic 13 year old twins. Mohammed has earned a Ph.D. and is the head of the physics education program at a university in Erbil, and Shadia is an elementary school teacher. They are in many ways the new face of Kurdistan: well educated and professional, but still committed to the family values of the Kurdish people. In traditional Kurdish style, we sat around a tablecloth that had been spread on the floor. The food was delicious, as usual. See photos below.

When Rawa picked us up at the hotel he was driving a late model Chrysler 300, and after being crunched up in Toyota Corollas for much of our local transportation, we were delighted to ride in an American car that felt almost limousine-like in its size and comfort. The car, it turns out, belongs to his older brother Ramyar who works for the American computer equipment maker Sysco which has an office in Erbil. That we liked it is a sign that perhaps we really should be coming home. Sorry, no pictures of the car.

We are now hunkered down for the last 5 weeks of classes, plus finals week. If all goes according to plan, we should be back in the US by the evening of June 11. This has been a long semester so it’s difficult not to wish away this last month. I’m sure we will end up doing some exciting things before we leave, we are just not sure what that is at the moment.

Thanks for reading. Sorry that we are running out of new experiences. If you are curious about an aspect of life we have not covered, feel free to write to carl.caldwell@auis.org, and we’ll see what we can do to get information.

23rd Blog

2010-04-18T14:17:00.004-04:00

April 18, 2010

Since we last wrote, we have had two very different experiences. We saw our first Iraqi sporting event when AUI-S’ women’s basketball team played a team from a school from Karbala in southern Iraq, and the second was a visit to the town of Halabja last week-end. These two experiences couldn’t have been more different.

First, let me tell you a bit about the basketball game. One of the more important facts to remember is that almost all of these girls had never held a basketball or played the game until two years ago. Another important fact to remember is the team they were playing comes from a university that trains physical education teachers. But I cannot tell this short story without reminding you that we come from Indiana, the basketball state of the US. That all being said, let me say this game was the most entertaining game we have ever watched. There were times when it appeared to be more of a comedy than a sporting event because none of the players was particularly skilled at the basics of basketball. The score at half time was 10 to 8, with the opposing team on top, and most of the points earned from the foul line. The women from the other team were extremely physical and the officials didn’t always call blatant fouls. The stands held some extremely exuberant and loud fans who provided lots of cheers. Our women persevered and won the game in the end and there was great celebration including a fan party held for the women back on our campus. But the game had great symbolic value: in a part of the world that still struggles with according women full participation in society, here were 10 women on a basketball floor, playing their hearts out in front of cheering fans, fully valued for who they are. See picture below of our team in the huddle.

Where the basketball game was just good fun, the visit to Halabja was a very sobering experience. This is the city on which Saddam’s air force dropped hundreds of poison gas bombs on March 16, 1988, killing over 5,000 people and leaving many more with life-time injuries. At the time of the gas attacks the city of Halabja was actually in the control of the Iranians (this being in the time of the eight year Iran-Iraq war), so the first persons on the scene were Iranian soldiers. The number of dead was so large that the soldiers could do no more than to put the bodies into hastily dug mass graves in the city’s cemetery. See two photos below. The first is of one of the monuments on top of a mass grave containing 1,500 bodies. The second of a series of tombstones on which are inscribed family names. The stones are in place only to memorialize the families; no one knows in which mass grave the bodies are now buried.

This gas attack has always been a tragedy to us, but it is so much more real knowing some of our students’ families actually lived through this event. Events on the ground on that fateful day were so arbitrary. In the photo below this paragraph you will see three students standing with us; all are from Halabja. The family of one of the students fled in one direction and were saved because of the wind carried the gas away from them. The family of another of the students also fled, but in the wrong direction. The wind blew the gas toward them and they died.

One more Halabja story: in the museum dedicated to the victims of the gassing of Halabja, the names of all of the victims are etched in the glass walls of the museum. One name is Zmnako, noted in the photo below with green tape around it. Zmnako was an infant at the time of the attack, and in the chaos that followed, was separated from his mother. All had thought that he had been killed and his body put into a mass grave, so his name was placed on the wall. Unbeknownst to people in Halabja, he had been rescued by people who assumed his family was dead. He was placed into the home of an Iranian Kurdish family who adopted him. He grew up there and after the death of his adoptive mother, learned something of his background in Halabja. The good end of this story: after doing some research, he discovered that his birth mother is still living and as of a few months ago he has been reunited with her. The green tape around his name says he is alive, not dead. We can only imagine the disbelief and joy of his family in Halabja on being re-united with him. He is now a student at AUI-S.

Perhaps we are reading our students incorrectly, but our sense is that where they could be so bitter, there appears to be a willingness to move on and be part of a constructive future. We can only hope that their aspirations bear fruit in the future. The privilege of knowing them has certainly enriched our lives.

As always, thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments to our AUI-S email accounts: carl.caldwell@auis.org; carolyn.caldwell@auis.org.

Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010

2010-04-04T03:53:00.005-04:00

22nd Blog.

After a fairly routine week of classes, on Friday, April 2, we joined four other faculty members in a day-trip to a mountainous area south of town called Qaradagh. Near this village, high on the side of a sheer face of rock, is an Assyrian era (7th c. BC) carving of a victorious king with hammer in hand and two vanquished foes at this feet. The climb to this area is a challenge, and in lawsuit-happy America would probably be declared off-limits for fear of someone falling and filing a liability suit. But the climb was worth it. The carving is imposing, if somewhat difficult to make out.

As interesting as the sculpture is, even more interesting is how on pleasant weekend days, Kurdish folks head to the hills with automobile trunks and truck beds full of all of the equipment necessary to fix whole meals. Wherever the land levels to a plateau, folks drive off the road, spread out blankets, and spend the day. Sometimes large groups gather, bring a small generator and sound system, and have a picnic accompanied by the dance music that everyone seems to enjoy. It was not unusual to see groups of people lined up to dance, and of course the beautiful Kurdish clothing was everywhere.

On two occasions we stopped to take in the sights, and on both occasions were asked by nearby families if we would like some tea – the very strong, heavily sweetened, variety that is popular here. On the second of these occasions we were asked to sit with an extended family, perhaps 15 people over at least three generations. Fortunately one member of the family spoke good English and so there could be some genuine conversation. It turns out that the patriarch of the family is in his late 60s, is from the nearby village, and has been involved since the late 1950s with the peshmerga – the freedom fighters who were such a thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein. The old man said two things: we thank you Americans for helping us to be free of Saddam; if you support Israel to be a state, why can’t you support a state for Kurds? Somehow we moved beyond the tension implied in the question and simply enjoyed the children. As the sole female of AUIS faculty, Carolyn was approached by the women in the group who wanted pictures taken with her. One of the grandmothers entrusted me with a 5 month old baby. See pictures below.

During the time we talked and drank tea with the family we could look down the hill to a large lake called Darbandikhan, the east side of which, we were told, is Iran. That’s how close we were to Iran.

As we made our way from Qaradagh to the lake we went past a new village that was built on top of an older village that had been gassed and destroyed by Saddam. A truly sad grave yard alongside the road contained the remains of whole families that died from the results of poison gas. Our driver indicated that 122 people in the village died. See next photo.

I (Carl) had thought that after returning to the US and getting reacquainted with our family, I might organize a tour of this area for some hardy and adventurous Americans. But I tell you that all-day travel around here continues to be a challenge. There simply are no public toilets anywhere, and restaurants as we know them are few outside of the larger towns. In spite of the lack of facilities, northern Iraq continues to be a fascinating place to live, and we continue to learn from new experiences each day.

Even as we write this blog, we have learned of the death of Robert Schleiger, one of Carolyn’s favorite uncles who lived in Loveland, CO. He battled cancer valiantly for the past year or so. Fortunately Carolyn was able to talk with him last week, before he slipped into a coma, and she could say her good-bye to him. This is the second of our beloved relatives to die this year while we are away from home. My Aunt Mary Sneed died earlier this year in Charleston, WV. Like Carolyn and her uncle, I was able to talk with her while she was still conscious, about a week before she passed away. We have had to grieve from afar.

On this Easter Sunday, we wish for all of you a meaningful day of rest and reflection on the meaning of resurrection.

2010-03-26T05:59:00.008-04:00

21st Blog

The celebration of Nawroz has come to an end, the visit with my dad, Glenn, and his wife, Berny, is complete and was very good (see above picture of them standing in front of our apartment building,) our spring vacation is almost over, and we are heading into the final stretch of classes before we come home. We have eleven more weeks and it hardly seems possible we are so close to the end of our stay here.

Dad and Berny arrived safely but two days late after much trouble along the way. Berny’s luggage was lost and never found but she was a real trooper making do with things I loaned her along with an outfit that she bought in the bazaar. She said she still had a wonderful time and they both especially enjoyed the Nawroz celebration and the trips to the bazaar. (See picture of us having tea at the bazaar)

We couldn’t have picked a better time for Dad and Berny to visit.

The weather was sunny and we were able to take them to the mountains twice. The second of the mountain trips was very special because one of our students, Zryan, joined us and was able to talk with Dad and Berny in English and answer any question they had about the culture or his personal plans when he gets out of the University. His mother had made a wonderful picnic lunch of dolma (stew of lamb and stuffed vegetables) for us. You can see it in this picture.

It was delicious and I will take the recipe back home to fix for our family. See picture of our picnic as we ate in a pull-off area along one of the mountain roads.

At the street celebration of Nawroz, Berny said she felt as if she were walking with royalty because the locals kept asking us to have their picture made with them. We can only assume it impressed them greatly that we Americans had chosen to dress in local Kurdish dress for the occasion.

The evening was cool so the large bonfires along the street were a natural gathering place for people to stop and warm the hands. See picture of my dad watching me warm my hands by the fire.

Fireworks would erupt periodically and Kurdish dancing was available all along the way. At one point, we were standing there watching the women in one circle dance and the men in another circle dance when a Kurdish man came up to me and pulled me into the men’s circle. Carl joined me and we laughed and danced along with our local friends. I love the traditional dance. It is very rhythmic and anyone can join in the circle at anytime. (Even Carl can manage the simple two-step dance.) The leader always carries a scarf or beads and spins them in the air as the participants hold hands, step in unison and lift their shoulders up and down to the music. I felt very honored that I was invited to join the men’s circle.

Tonight we celebrated the end of the spring break with a party held by some students for faculty. As you can see below, almost everyone was dressed in beautiful Kurdish party dress and there was much dancing again. Carl and I are especially grateful to Shad and Kurdistan (first picture below,) the young people who took us to the bazaar and helped us negotiate the purchase of cloth and fitting by a tailor to have our outfits made. We continue to be so grateful for all we are experiencing and learning about this wonderful culture.

20th Blog

2010-03-16T23:41:00.005-04:00

20th blog. March 17, 2010

As we posted our last blog, the citizens of Iraq were about to go to the polls in the second parliamentary election since the creation of the post-Saddam constitution. When we wrote, we did not have clue as how the polling process would take place. Would it be safe? Would it be violent?

As it turned out, the election was safe in most parts of the country. Unfortunately there were around 25 deaths in Baghdad, and while any death is one too many, the country was for the most part quiet. We understand from the press that about 65% of eligible Iraqis voted overall, and that about 75% of persons in the Kurdistan Regional Government area (where we live) voted.

On election day, we walked to a nearby hotel to pick up a guest of the university and in the process walked by a school that had been converted into a polling station. Large concrete barriers had been set up on either end of the street that passed in front of the school, so as to keep auto and truck traffic away from pedestrians walking to the school. Although there were soldiers guarding the street, they said nothing to us about passing in front of the polling station even though we clearly were not local and would not be voting.

We were amazed to see that whole families turned out, often three generations, with children in tow. Many were dressed in their finest Kurdish clothing, as if they were dressed to go to a party. One particularly touching scene was of a boy too young to vote, perhaps 12 or 13, helping an elderly relative up the steps that led to the school. The scene was one more reminder of the power of family, and of urgency that even, maybe particularly, the elder folks felt to exercise this right, given all the deprivations they have been through in their lives.

As we polled our students, they too voted in large numbers. For all but the oldest students, this was their first election. By our unscientific sampling, we would estimate that 75% of our students voted. All seemed to be proud of their deeply stained fingers, made that way by dipping a finger into stain after voting, thus discouraging people from going to a nearby place to vote a second time. I don’t know what the stain is, but even now, 9 days after the election, it is still in evidence on people’s fingers.

We do not yet know the outcome of the election, and even if we did, we suspect that it would take more than one blog message to explain the complexities of just the Kurdish part of the electoral process, much less the rest of Iraq.

We took no pictures that day, but we include below four excellent photos taken by one of the AUIS English language instructors who has a phenomenal eye for what the camera can do. (About the time I think I am getting half way decent with a camera, I see his photos and know I have a long way to go.) This young man is Chris de Bruyn, and you can see more of his work at this website:
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/brownbearphotography/. He submitted some of them to BBC news that included the photos on their website. Not a shabby place to have your photos made available, eh?

The only disconcerting part of election day occurred in the evening, after the polls closed, when groups of people anticipating victory for their candidates fired their guns into the air. I’m not talking about a casual shot or two. Rather, there was an extended period of maybe 30 minutes when we heard the frequent rat-tat-tat of machine guns and automatic rifles. The shooters were not aiming at anyone, just shooting into the air. But bullets have to return to earth and we were told that around 15 people were admitted to emergency rooms with wounds. No one, thankfully, was killed. One errant AK-47 bullet returned to the earth in the middle of the university where it passed through the sheet metal roof of one of the faculty offices. It hit the tile floor with enough force to actually break the tile and penetrate into the floor. Fortunately the school was closed, and no one was hurt. See photo below of the bullet.

As I write and post this blog message, we are awaiting the arrival of Carolyn’s father, Glenn Falls, and his wife, Berny Berquist Falls. They are supposed to arrive on the 18th and will be with us for a week. This weekend is the beginning of a major celebration in this part of the world, namely Kurdish Iraq and Turkey, and most of Iran. The holiday, called Nawroz, predates the coming of Islam to this part of the world in the 7th and 8th centuries, and probably is a tradition that came from Zoroastrianism, the predominant religion in this area before Islam. Nawroz falls on the vernal equinox signaling the beginning of spring. School is dismissed for all of next week, and we intend to use our time to show Glenn and Berny around this part of the world that we have made our home since last September. It should be great fun. In our next blog we can post some pictures of their time with us.

We thank you for reading this blog and wish all of you the very best as you too celebrate the coming of spring.

Nineteenth Blog

2010-03-06T23:25:00.004-05:00

Nineteenth Blog, March 7, 2010
In our last blog we told you about the dust storm that had blown through this area a couple of days before we wrote. We made the ill-advised statement that what we need now is a good rain storm to wash away the dirt that settled on every horizontal surface. What we had in mind was an Indiana thunderstorm that would come in, rain hard for an hour or so, and then move on. What we got, instead, was about five days of unrelenting rain, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, but always present. Sure enough, this rain washed down the dirt deposited in the storm, but it also made getting about the campus a wet mess by turning the sidewalks that link our offices and classrooms in to small lakes and the roads that lead up to our apartment complex into muddy pathways. The rain finally stopped on Thursday, March 4, and for the past two days, we have had lots of sun. As we talked with students about the weather, expressing frustration with the rain, we learned that all were grateful for the rain as it fills the reservoirs that provide water to this region in the hot and mostly rainless summer months.

The temperatures are warming, and when the warm temperatures are combined with the moisture the net effect is green. We see the hillsides that were golden brown when we arrived in September are beginning to turn green. Today as we walked the two miles to the bazaar, we observed some flowering trees beginning to form buds. We even saw a person in the bazaar who was selling daffodils. So spring is on its way. We’ll tell you more as we know more.

Based on observing CNN and BBC television, it would appear that few Western media have carried stories about the upcoming parliamentary election in Iraq. This election will take place later today, Sunday, March 7. Given our plans for posting this blog, we will not know outcomes by the time of the posting but we want to give you some impressions.

Unlike the campaigning process in the US, in which campaigns seem to go on forever, the campaign process in Iraq is short and tightly managed. No one was allowed to campaign openly until about three weeks ago, at which time this place burst forth in a kind of avid grass-roots campaigning process that we never see in the U.S. Various political parties put up flags across roadways and on buildings, people plastered campaign posters on their cars and trucks, and groups of supporters of one party or another conducted traffic-slowing parades on the main roads. Drivers of cars honked their horns in a short-long-short-short-long cadence of horn blasts pattern hour after hour. People sat on hoods of cars, or hung out of car windows waving flags. Children and adults alike rode standing upright in the backs of pickup trucks, waving flags and shouting. The climax of the campaign came late Friday evening when there were massive parades, including lighted floats, and fireworks displays. After Friday’s climax, the campaigning ended as suddenly as it began. On Saturday, the day before the election, they declared a moratorium on campaigning, so aside from the ubiquitous flags and posters stuck on every vertical surface and hung on ropes across all major streets, it was all very quiet. Shortly the polls will open and the voting will take place.

Regardless of the party one wants to see win in this area, the campaign process says a great deal about how the folks of this region have taken to the electoral process. A few of the more cynical of our students say that elections do no good, i.e., they keep returning the same politicians to power, but most disagree. But anyone who has lived through this campaign season can only conclude that there is a great deal of grassroots involvement in who wins and who loses. Their exuberance is a joy to behold, and a kind of living proof that in an important way people enjoy the most elemental aspect of democracy: having a say in who will lead. This is, after all, only the second parliamentary election since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and there continue to be many difficult issues to sort out both nationally and regionally. But our experience here and what we learn from the several reports from other parts of the country suggest that Iraqis have rejected various outside influences in charting the course for their own future, and they very much want an Iraqi solution to Iraqi problems. With you, we look forward to reading the outcome of the elections in a few days.

We have placed below several photos of the election campaign activity, and apologize that we may not have photos of every political party in the race. The photos we took were the result not of design, but of the vagaries of when we happened to be out, and whether we had the camera at a given moment. We intend no favoritism in the selection of photos.

We continue to be healthy and to be able to get around town safely – except for dodging the occasional car or bus driver who appears to be playing the game of “let’s see how close we can get to the pedestrian without actually hitting him.” We will begin the fourth week of the spring term this week and are a little over three months from the end of our time here. We thank you for your continuing reading of our blog.

2010-02-23T11:56:00.002-05:00

18th Blog, February 23, 2010

This past week was a week of celebrations. I turned 67 years old and Carl and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. Neither of us can believe we have been together so long, but we both agree that we really made a good choice and love our life together.

But the real story this week is for the past 24 hours, we have been experiencing a dust storm, our first since arriving in Iraq. As Carl and I came out of the faculty meeting yesterday at 4:30, the air was yellow—a little bit like what the weather looks like in Indiana when a tornado is blowing in. By the time we walked from the Administration Bldg. to the area where we pick up our nightly ride, my eyes were killing me with dirt caught under my contacts. We realized that at some point in the afternoon it actually rained blobs of mud. When we got to the car taking us home, we could see a massive collection of dirt on its surface and the driver had to turn on the washer fluid and wipers before he could see out the front window to drive us to our apartment. I have placed two pictures here to compare our view from our apartment on a nice crisp winter day vs. yesterday afternoon when we arrived home. You may not be able to see this, but the view is the very same soccer field and mountains.

We chose to stay in last night to avoid breathing any more dirt than necessary but awoke this morning to the same condition. (It will take a major rain to wash the skies clear again.) As we arrived at the University, I noticed many students and staff wearing masks and those of us who had not done this were practically breathing and swallowing dirt. Even indoors, one cannot really avoid breathing the stuff because it filters through the cracks around the windows and doors. Everything in our offices and our apartment is covered with a layer of fine dirt and will require a major cleaning when this condition clears. It really is dreadful!

I have included a few pictures of items to show how the dirt has collected on what are hopefully recognizable surfaces. Any place you see yellow indicates a collection of dirt rather than indicating the actual color of the item: white/gray sidewalk by buildings, blue trash container, black automobile.

When something strange, like this, happens we ask about it: how often does this occur. Some have said that this happens a lot in the spring and it is dirt/fine sand blowing up from southern Iraq; others have indicated that this rarely happens. Take your pick. Should it happen often, we can imagine that eventually the measurement of feet above sea level will actually increase in Kurdistan while the measurement of feet above sea level in Baghdad will decrease.

Do not worry. We are fine. This, too, will pass.

17th blog

2010-02-10T09:33:00.003-05:00

[Carolyn writing] As some of you may know, I was hired to teach accounting 2/3 time and work on special projects for the Finance Department 1/3 time. The second assignment was not specific until I arrived in Sulaimani, but after arriving, it became clear what they needed from me was two things: some basic accounting training sessions for the finance staff, and the selection and set-up of an electronic accounting system. See picture of Director of Finance Carey and me discussing the plan.

The ingenuity of the AUI-S Finance Department staff is so impressive. Without any real experience with double-entry accounting and no electronic program made available to him, Pasha, the second employee of the University, set up a system on Excel spreadsheets that has worked extremely well. The only real deficiency was there was no easy way to gather data to prepare financial statements. As those of you readers who understand business know, the value of financial statements is essential and critical to budgeting—one of the key aspects of running any productive business. Although AUI-S is not a business run to make a profit, it still needs to be able to plan fiscally for the future. See picture of Pasha, Nigar, and Zinya working together.

The plan was that I would work as a trainer of accounting principles for four weeks in November/December. Then upon our return from winter break, we would begin in earnest putting a program called QuickBooks Enterprise into place. There are six members of the Finance Department staff and all six appeared to enjoy the training. I had a great time because it is always fun to work with people who can immediately see how they can apply their knowledge. I won’t bore you with my lesson plans, but I did start out explaining the accounting equation and tried to avoid too much emphasis on debits/credits. What I quickly learned was that all six staff members had more experience with similar concepts and were very bright students. They would bring daily financial happenings to the training session and we would talk about how these events would be booked in an accrual based system. One very important note here—most of Kurdish business events are cash basis and the concept of buy now-pay later (accrual) is foreign to them.

When we returned to work from winter break, all the staff members kept saying, “When are we going to have more training?” They were so anxious to get started. But our next problem was that it is often difficult to get products shipped to Iraq. Intuit who makes QuickBooks does not deal with Iraq so we had to work with them to get special arrangements made for our purchase.

With the assistance of a very knowledgeable IT department, we were able to install QuickBooks the last week of January, Then Carey, Pasha and Nigar sat with me last week to set-up the books for AUI-S. This week, the whole staff has been entering in historical data, and we were able to create our very first set of financial statements for the fiscal year of 2006, the year AUI-S was established. What joy!!! Nigar is very creative and has volunteered to create AUI-S specific forms such as bills to be sent to students for tuition, donor receipts, and other necessary forms. We are in the process of training each staff member, one-on-one, to use QuickBooks, and it really is exciting to see these good people take to this new opportunity.
See pictures: Wrya with Carey, Nigar and Shno, me working with Zinya.

In every good educational experience, learning goes both ways. In working with this very competent staff, I have learned so much about the Kurdish way of business. I will walk away from the assignment at AUI-S feeling not only good about what I was able to share with the students, but also what I was able to do to help the administration of the university.

16th Blog, January 30, 2010

2010-01-30T02:56:00.005-05:00

For the past three Thursdays in a row (January 14, 21, 28)we invited students from our classes to our apartment for dinner and conversation. We served Sloppy Joe sandwiches (aka, a Spanish hamburger recipe that came from my family), salad, chips, and homemade brownies. My mother (Ruth Falls) would be so pleased to know that the very recipe she used to prepare food for Anderson College students was used here and that some of the students asked for her recipe. The students seemed genuinely to enjoy being in our home, something that just does not happen for Iraqi university faculty and students.

When given the opportunity to watch a movie together or sit in conversation, all three groups preferred conversation. That is not to say young Iraqi people don’t like American movies. They love them!!! They simply enjoy visiting with us as we share about ourselves and learn more about them. It truly is an evening of learning for all of us. We are reminded by them that although there is so much room for improvement and growth here, the changes which have occurred in the past ten years are enormous and life is so much better here today than it was when they were in elementary school. There really has been massive change in a very short time.

For instance, most of them remember a time when most families did not have a car and now almost all families have at least one car if not more. They remember a time when there were no banks and now there are choices of banks. The students admittedly agreed with us that the banks are not particularly efficient, but they see improvement almost daily. Young people remember the day when everything was made in another country and imported here—now Coke and Pepsi are manufactured in the capital of Kurdistan, Erbil. Although the internet is very frustrating at times because of poor band width, fiber optics is just months away. Where we get frustrated with short power outages (the power went down momentarily five or six times last evening when they were here), they can remember when there was no power for hours every day.

And yet with the all the rapid change, tradition still plays a very large part in most social customs. It is good fun to talk with the students about dating and marriage. For them, parents continue to play a significant role in the choice of spouse, and open dating prior to engagement and marriage is rare. One group wanted Carl and me to tell them about how we met, dated and married. They said they thought we were an exemplary couple and admired our commitment to each other. That was rewarding to hear from them.

As we have mentioned, one of our most favorite experiences here is getting into some of our students’ homes and meeting their families. We have more of those events planned in the next few weeks. All of this being said, these young people will forever be in our hearts and we have hopes of some of them visiting us someday in the States.

We close this blog with a few pictures of our student suppers, including one when Dr. John Agresto, the Provost of AUIS, was able to join us.

The next four photos are of Carl's classes.

The next four photos are of Carolyn's classes.

2010-01-26T13:58:00.005-05:00

15th blog. January 25, 2010

In the two weeks that have passed since our last report to you, we have had no dramatic events or new out-of-town experiences. Rather, we have been at work on materials for concluding the fall term and for beginning the spring term on February 14.

With the assistance of two of our students we have gone to fabric shops in the bazaar to purchase cloth and had it tailored into proper Kurdish outfits of the type we have shown in earlier blog messages. We will include no pictures the outfits at this time, but will as such a time as we are both fully dressed in our outfits and ready to go to an event where this garb is appropriate. We are including immediately below two photos of the shop where Carolyn bought her fabric. It is a feast for the eyes, rich in virtually every hue of bright color. In the second of the two photos you can see Carolyn and a student named Kurdistan who helped her by translating.

[Carl writing] To get my outfit made, I had the help of a student named Shad who took me to a cloth shop with, no surprise, much duller colors of dark blue and gray. After I bought cloth for my suit, the shop owner took me to a tailor who measured me. A week later, I went back to pick up the outfit. Total cost: about $75.00 for an outfit made just for me.

Shad invited to join us one of his friends named Shwan, an AUIS student who is also from the area and who knows the bazaar very well. Over the two Saturday mornings, Shwan got us into parts of the bazaar that I did not know existed. For example, there is a metal working section in which groups of men hammer axes and hoes out of red hot iron, while nearby other men are fabricating metal gates. As you might guess, it’s hot, dirty, and noisy work, and once again I came away with confirmation of my conclusion that people work hard around here. To make an axe head, one man used tongs to hold the red hot iron on an anvil while two others struck it in a rhythmic pattern, hammering a block of iron into a recognizable tool shape. No one spoke as they worked; they all knew what had to be done. This is the kind of work that is demonstrated in living exhibitions in restored 19th c. museum villages in the U.S. Here, it is real. No costumes. No interpreters. Just hard work.

Near the iron working area, Shwan took us to a small kebab grill stand. Most kebab shops cook either chicken or lamb. This one specializes in sheep liver and testicles. He insisted that this is something I should not pass up, so I accepted his offer. Both meats were good, but I preferred the liver. Later in the week, one of the university drivers named Diary (pronounced Dee-are-ee) invited me to join him at a restaurant that specializes in another delicacy, serupay and geepa. The first word means “head and feet,” and true to its name is made from boiling sheep heads and feet in a large metal pot. As the meat is cooked, the water becomes a rich broth. After the heads are cooked, they are broken open and the brains are put back into the pot along with the tongues. Boiled in the same pot are the geepa, balls about 3 inches in diameter made from intestines that are literally sewn up with thread to make a container into which is placed a mixture of rice, raisons and spices. These balls are boiled until the rice is soft, and are served in a bowl along with a bowl of the meat, tongue, and brains, and a third bowl of the broth. Of course the ubiquitous flat bread called naan is also served. It all sounds fairly exotic, but I can attest that the soup and rice are quite good. The boney parts are, well, boney. Not a lot of meat there, but what’s there is good. The brain would fall into the category of an acquired taste.

As I have described my experience to others on campus, I have been told that even though among Kurds there are some who choose not eat all of these meats, they are considered a delicacy, and they are appreciated as part of culture.

One more experience in the bazaar. Shwan took us to a shop in which the walls are lined with bootleg copies of movies and Play Station/X-Box games. Most of the movies were made in the U.S., and the cost for the DVDs is around $1.75. While some movies are old, others are very current with what is showing in theaters in the U.S. Example: the movie “2012” about the coming of the end of the world, and the recent movie about Michael Jackson’s efforts to prepare for concerts in London in the summer of 2009. As far as I know, these are still showing in cinemas and have not been released for sale as DVDs, and yet they are available here. Some of the jacket covers appear to be copies of copies of copies, etc. and are hard to read, but the movies work. Where and how they come up with these movies is a mystery to me. When I ask, no one seems to know. When I challenge my students about the fact that when they purchase these disks they are robbing actors, directors, distributors, etc., of their just rewards for their creativity and hard work, their response is that it is impossible to get movies by legitimate channels and there are no credit cards, thus it is O.K. to buy bootleg. I can hardly chide them as we have purchased a number of movies for weekend viewing, and, quite literally, there is no place to buy legitimate disks, Netflicks doesn’t serve Iraq, and there is no friendly Blockbuster DVD rental store.

Concluding words regarding weather. After a warm and sunny weekend, a cold and rainy front moved in over the past 24 hours. Yesterday we had heavy rains and some lightening, and we awoke this morning to see a light dusting of snow on cars in the parking lot of Pak City. As we looked further out we could see that the mountains that encircle Suli were covered in snow. By mid-morning, a fairly heavy wet snow was falling on the city, but by mid-afternoon the clouds had cleared, the sun came out, and the small amount of slush had melted. The photos below give you some idea of what it looked like from our balcony by late afternoon.

Last photo is of the eastern skyline just before sunrise. The colors were so very rich.

We wish all of you the best. Go Colts. Beat New Orleans.

2010-01-12T13:48:00.007-05:00

Fourteenth blog, January 12, 2010

After a three week break, we are now back at work. The remainder of the fall term began on Sunday, January 10, 2010. The fall term ends in early February following which is a one week break. Then, the spring term begins on February 14th and during the spring term there is only one break, the Kurdish New Year a one week break toward the end of March. Otherwise we will be at the business of teaching for 16 weeks. It is hard to believe that by the time the term ends we will have passed the spring equinox and be near to longest day of the year on June 21. It’s when we reckon these kinds of dates that we understand what it means to leave home for the better part of year.

In the time period between when we came back to Sulaimani on January 1 and when classes began on January 10, we had some relaxing days here at the apartment, and were able to get some work done for the beginning of the remainder of the term. Carolyn went in to the university to continue her work of helping the business office set up its accounting system. I spent a number of hours going through some new history DVDs that I will be using in January and in the spring term. On two of the days we traveled from Sulaimani to visit in the homes of the families of two of my students.

On the first of these occasions we traveled north of Suli to a small village of 200 people called Zalan. It lies near to the Iraqi border with Iran, and it is clearly in a more mountainous area than Suli. See the photo below to get a sense of the terrain in the area of the village. [If double click on the photo, it will be enlarged, so you can see more detail.]

As we approached the village, my student, Zryan, pointed out some roped off areas along the road where they were excavating the earth with shovels. He indicated that after the fall of Saddam, local people discovered shallow graves where Saddam’s forces had dumped bodies of some of his victims in this remote area. Further on, we came upon a shepherd taking care of his flock of cows and sheep, and we stopped to take pictures. Because my student was able to translate, I was able to talk with the shepherd, a most pleasant older gentleman who brought his herd to the field from a local village. In the course of the conversation, he showed me that in place of his right leg he has a prosthetic leg. He indicated that his leg was blown off by a land mine planted by Saddam’s forces, and that the clearing of mines continues. It is in conversations like the one with him that we come to understand that virtually all Kurds over the age of 15 have a story to tell about pain and dislocation that occurred in their recent past. See photos below of the locale of the grazing herd, and of the shepherd. I wish I could give you his name but I failed to get it. This humble fellow received me very warmly and seemed genuinely honored that someone would inquire about his life.

At the village of Zalan, my student parked his car at the edge of the village and indicated that we would have to walk the rest of the way. The village is built into the side of a hillside that slopes to a fast moving mountain stream, the water of which will ultimately go to the Tigris River. Near the stream is a fresh water spring that runs year round. We pushed through a rustic gate to come upon a house built of stone and mud bricks. There were three rooms: a kitchen, a combination living room/dining room/bedroom, and a somewhat more formal sitting room lined with carpets with images of the Islamic holy site called the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The roof of the house is made as follows: a log base that is intermixed with sticks and twigs, on top of which is placed about 10 inches of dirt, on top of which is placed either corrugated metal roofing or plastic sheets, on top of which is placed stones or old tires to hold down the roofing material. The interior walls have been plastered and whitewashed. Between the thick walls and thick roof, the small house remains cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

My student’s aunt, named Rihhana, working with the wife of one of Zryan’s cousins got to work and prepared a wonderful meal, a picture of which is below. The custom is to spread all of the food on a cloth placed on the floor, and for all to sit cross-legged at the edge of the cloth. They clearly were more comfortable with this seating arrangement than Carolyn and me with our stiff and unbending joints, but the deliciousness of the food and the warmth with which we were received, more than made up for any discomfort.

Three days later, at the invitation of another student, Sarhad, we went to the town of Chwarqurna, further north of Suli. His father and mother, named Ahmed and Malea, received us, and several of his brothers, sisters, and brothers-in-law joined us at some point during the day. Again, the cloth on the floor was spread with an amazing array of food. We felt almost guilty that we could not eat more, but were assured that they, like us, keep leftovers for later meals.

We enjoyed conversation with several members of the family, one of whom is an English teacher at a local high school. His English was quite good, and he expressed to us his frustration with trying to teach English to five large classes every day. One of his classes has 56 students in it, the other classes have more than 40 each. He has none of technologies that we now take for granted in a class: internet, computers, data projectors, etc. We admire what he is attempting to do. We also enjoyed talking with Sarhad’s father about his family and about politics and history, but especially we enjoyed watching the joy on his face when his five month old grandson was brought into the room. See four pictures below:

These two experiences in the homes of our students’ families demonstrated just how important family relationships are in this part of the world. They also say something about how delicious local cuisine is – too bad we cannot find this in a local restaurant. And, they confirm the beauty of the area. There is something about the mountains that is part of Kurdish identity, and being in the mountains helps us understand why. They pull you in and make it difficult to return to the city.

We now settle back to our own cooking, in our own [temporary] apartment, in Sulaimani, but the memories of these experiences will be with us for a long time.

2010-01-02T13:08:00.005-05:00

Thirteenth Blog, January 2, 2010!!!

We are home from the United Arab Emirates and Oman, and although we had a wonderful, warm, sunny trip, it is always good to come home even if it is a temporary home. There is something about being able to get our clothes out of a drawer instead of a suitcase.

As we mentioned previously, the opulence in the Emirates is truly amazing. We have never seen so many expensive cars in one block in all our lives. Carl tried not to salivate. There’s not a lot more to say on this matter than we wrote in the last blog.

Oman is less affluent than the Emirates, but still has considerable money coming from the sale of oil. It has a much older known history than the recorded history of the Emirates. Being positioned on the Gulf of Oman, and thus on the trade routes between Africa and India, it found itself being fought over by European powers as they extended their hegemony into this part of the world in the 16th, 17th,and 18th centuries. Parts of Oman were controlled by the Portuguese in the 16th century, 50 years before the English decided to put down roots in North America, so it was known about and discussed in European histories of this region long before the Gulf Arabs came into the consciousness of Europeans. Within the old town of Muscat, there’s a lovely museum dedicated to Omani-French relations since the late 1600s. Going through this museum, it’s fascinating to see how the European powers vied with each other for favorable consideration to the Omanis who have been largely self-governing.

Oman, more than the Emirates, is a country characterized by its mountains, which are obvious upon entering the country. There is a coastal plain, sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, but the dominating geographical feature of the northern part of the country is mountains.

In the area of Muscat, the mountains have had to be blasted through many times to make way for a modern highway system for a growing city. See the next couple of slides, shot from our hotel in Muscat to see the proximity of city – with its lovely white houses – and mountain.

With mountains, come valleys that lead out to the sea. These valleys, dry except in rare times of heavy rainfall, are called wadis. Traveling up the wadis into the mountains is now a big business for local tour operators in the Muscat area. The river beds are rough and rocky, and thus demand a four wheel drive vehicle with high ground clearance. We tried getting into one wadi with our little Nissan Sunny and gave up a couple of kilometers into the wadi, fearful of puncturing a tire on the jagged rocks, or worse, damaging the undercarriage of the car. I [Carl] was trying to figure out how I would explain to the folks at Budget car rental in Dubai how I had managed to put a hole in the oil pan of the engine, and no plausible explanations came to mind. Thus, we chose the course of caution and drove out of the wadi while tires and oil pan were still intact.

Because of long term instability prior to the modern period, virtually every town of any size has a fort to which townspeople went when there was threat of attack. We have included below this paragraph pictures of a couple of forts that dominate the towns of which they are a part. The first two are major forts guarding the harbor in Muscat, the others are in the towns of Rustaq and Nakhal.

In this part of the world, whether in northern Iraq or in Oman, with poverty comes poor public toilet facilities. Thus traveling beyond the convenience of hotels in large cities was a challenge. While the Omanis have tried to establish modern gasoline refill/rest stop facilities, there were places where day-long travel was difficult because facilities, especially for women, were either non-existent or the worst you can possibly imagine. But the old forts and city walls we walked were well worth the inconveniences. For the American tourist jaded with being in a crowd of tourists being herded through the Tower of London, Oman is worth serious consideration because it is still in the process of being discovered. It’s really quite lovely, English is widely spoken, and coming into the country with a US passport is quite easy. The shops are full of colorful, locally made objects, as well as carpets from Iran, Pakistan and Kashmir, and scarves from India. The gold souk is, well, a gold souk: lots of 22k, ornate gold. The people are warm and friendly. Just witness this group of school boys on their way home from school and willing to pose for a picture.

We did manage to spend one day on the beach of the Gulf of Oman so got just a little color in our skin even with the winter sun low in the sky. We were glad to be here in December, with temperatures in the mid- to upper-seventies, and not August when the temperatures regularly reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Returning to Sulaimani was quite an experience. After the opulence of the Emirates and Oman, we had to re-acquaint ourselves with all of the problems of a rebuilding city: trash in the streets and in empty lots, diesel powered electricity generators pumping exhaust fumes into the air 24 hours per day, brief power outages, tap water that we need to boil before we drink, a sewage system that cannot accommodate toilet paper, etc. And yet, with all these problems, Sulaimani feels more genuine – more truly itself, with all its warts -- than where we had been.

Now that we are back at our apartment, Carl has returned to grading exams which he left when we went on vacation. I, on the other hand, can’t bear to leave that kind of thing behind so, because all of mine are graded, I am taking this week to catch up on correspondence, laundry, etc.

As some of you know, we accepted a one year contract here with the understanding the university would like for us to consider a second year. After much soul searching on Carl’s part we have finally decided to make this experience only a one academic year assignment. Carl really struggled because he feels like he is having some impact on the students at AUIS but I was greatly relieved because I had already decided this was only a one year commitment for me. We told the Provost and he said he was not surprised at our news. He did tell Carl that I would be the harder one to replace! So we are now counting—five and one-half months to the end of our time here.

I have managed to make about four baby sweaters, a couple of scarves, one ladies’ hat and about four hats/mitten sets for children at the local refugee camp and orphanage. That makes the evenings go faster and I feel like I am helping those that need the help so badly. We have never visited the camp, but we have been told it is a crowded field of knee-deep mud and tents.

As we approach this new year of 2010, we do pray for peace. What we have seen here in this part of the world only points us more strongly toward the need for that end.

Twelfth Blog, December 24, 2009

2009-12-24T12:57:00.018-05:00

Twelfth Blog, December 24, 2009, Chrismas Eve

[This blog, more than the others, has the thoughts and words of both Carl and Carolyn. It would be hard to separate.]

Opulence!!! That word describes what we see as we experience the United Arab Emirates. We have stayed in two of the Emirates, Dubai and Abu Dhabi now, and we have driven through four more of them. When we finish this vacation, we will have visited all seven of the Emirates as well as the country of Oman. Sheik Zayed al-Nahyan, who first suggested the unification of the emirates in the late 1960s when the British were about to withdraw from their involvement in the Persian Gulf, is highly revered. Having just celebrated, on December 2, the 38th anniversary of the founding of the UAE in 1971, the Emiratis have placed large pictures of him in many prominent places, and they offer almost-sacred poems extolling his work. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are both very luxurious and it feels particularly that way after having spent the last almost four months in Iraq where the infrastructure is still being built. There are no electric blackouts here, water can be drunk without fear of illness, and the bandwidth for the internet is as fast as it is as home.

Dubai, more than the other seven emirates, has put huge amounts of money into high rise office and hotel towers. One of the buildings, a picture of which was taken from the beach in Dubai, is proudly proclaimed as the tallest building in the world. The next photo is of a luxury hotel built in the shape of a sail. The malls are true temples to consumerism. The last two photos in this section are of two malls, one an interior shot of the Ibn Battuta Mall and the other is an exterior shot of Wafi Mall.

Although this is a Muslim area, they acknowledge Christmas as you can see by our Christmas picture, taken in front of the tree in the Abu Dhabi hotel lobby.
When we were in Dubai, the malls were all very heavily decorated for Christmas even though they will not close for the day as a mall in the US would do. Our hotel in Dubai was inhabited by Spanish and Argentinean soccer fans who were there for one of the world cup competition games that was being played in Abu Dhabi. It was fun to watch them as they competed. I think the Spanish won.

On the 23rd, we left Dubai for Abu Dhabi on a 8 lane highway. Our little Nissan Sunny (like a Sentra) was regularly passed by fast SUVs and luxury sedans far exceeding the 120 kph speed limit. At $2.00 per gallon, the price of gasoline does not encourage fuel economy. Our hotel in Abu Dhabi is one of the newest and nicest places we have ever stayed in. It is quite contemporary and sits on an island called Yas Island, which is served by a nearly deserted 10 lane highway out of Abu Dhabi. Adjacent to the hotel is a new golf course right on an inlet of the Gulf, and the new Yas Island Marina road racing circuit used by the F1 race series. We probably will spend Christmas Day on the side of the swimming pool you see in the picture below our room. We have had some nice lunches on the balcony of our place, because, as you can imagine, we have avoided the fairly expensive hotel food and rather have bought our own food at area grocery stores.

Today, we met with Dr. Jasim Jizrees, Library Manager for the National Center for Documentation and Research for the UAE. Having done some work at the Center in 1989, Carl wanted to come back to see it in its new, large and beautiful building. It turns out that Dr. Jizrees is an Iraqi ex-pat, so we spent as much time talking about Iraqi politics as we did about the Center. He was so kind as to show us around the place. See picture below of Carl and Dr. Jizrees, and of the Center.

Then we went over to the Heritage Center on the coast where we saw examples of how Emiratis lived in primitive tents as recently as 40 years ago. We learned, for example, that in the mid-1960s, there was not a single mile of paved road in the whole country. Pictures are below. Then notice the pictures of the huge sky scrapers and elegant mosques to see how much life has changed for the local Emirati. This is a place of luxurious cars such as Rolls Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, and Mercedes, and every elegant Swiss watch brand known to mankind. They truly have seen a total change in their lives thanks to oil and unity.

The last moment of observing extravagance for this day was to visit the Emirates Palace Hotel. Situated on a promontory within sight of the primitive tents of the Heritage Village, its difference from the village and its lavishness are difficult to put into words or capture in pictures. You need not worry that we will be moving there tomorrow. For people who are satisfied with Motel 6 in the US, it would be difficult for us to agree to pay the over-$2,000 cost for one room per night. It was fun to look around, and the staff were as kind to us, who were obviously looking around with no intent to stay, as they were with the real customers.

As far as shopping goes, we have also managed to acquire many of the food products that we cannot get in Sulaimani. We have cleaned out two Starbuck stores of Sumatra coffee by purchasing 18 pounds of coffee for the coming six months we spend there. We also found my Tylenol as well as brown sugar, vanilla (so I can make homemade brownies for our suppers for our students), and chili sauce so I can make sloppy joes (my mother’s recipe.) Our shopping experience yesterday at a store called Spinneys was interesting in how they market pork products. Out of sensitivity to Muslim prohibitions about eating pork, all pork products are kept in a part of the store separated from the rest of the store. Above the door leading to this part of the store is a sign, “Pork Products for Non-Muslims.” We were hoping for canned bacon but had to settle for some German knockwurst to make bean soup. We now have filled an entire carry-on bag with food that we will be taking “home” with us.

The holiday experience here doesn’t feel the same as we aren’t making plans to be with our children and grandchildren, we aren’t buried in snow, and I am not preparing any more complicated food than a cheese and cucumber sandwich. We attended an Anglican church service in Dubai last Sunday evening, and tonight attended the Christmas eve service at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church here in Abu Dhabi. The Anglican church is located in the same block as Muslim mosque, and a Roman Catholic church. As we walked to the Anglican church, others were going to their houses of worship, peacefully and respectfully. We participated in communion and sang Christmas carols. As we observed the many hues of skin color of people united in observance of the the birth of Jesus, in a context of proximity to worshipers of other traditions all of whom have been at war with one another over faith issues, we had a sense of what God would have of us on this earth.

Wishing for all of you, our faithful readers, a most joyous and meaningful Christmas, we close this message with the words of Christina Rossetti that we sang this evening:
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine.
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and angel gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love divine;
Worship we our Jesus;
but wherewith for a sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love be yours and love be mine.
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

Eleventh Blog, December 12, 2009

2009-12-12T13:00:00.005-05:00

Eleventh Blog, December 12, 2009

[Carolyn writing] Today is three days after my father’s 88th birthday! And we will stay up till 12:30 am tonight to Skype our whole family who is getting together to celebrate my dad. It is hard to believe we have been here almost thirteen weeks. Carl has done such a good job of writing about things we have seen and experienced and stories about the people. I want to write today a little more about our daily lives and how we have come to survive here.

A week ago yesterday, we moved to an apartment in an apartment complex called Pak City where the university has leased a number of apartments for its faculty and staff. As you can see from the Google Earth photo, we have moved much closer in to the city. By the way, we took our daily walk today from the apartment to the bazaar which you can see (about two and a half miles away.)

Although there were problems to fix here as there is everywhere such as leaking showers, we have found the convenience of location to be a huge plus to our daily lives. There are four small markets within two blocks of our place where we can buy the daily essentials. The smell of diesel fuel is ever present and we have been told we smell it because the management pours it into the drains to keep the sewer gas smells under control. Whatever the reason, it is bad enough to cause headaches sometimes. And although the apartment is spacious as you can see by the pictures (see below), the finish work is still rough and the decorations are a little garish. Cleaning the place is a challenge because we can never tell whether the spot on the floor or wall is our dirt, or construction debris from 3 years ago that was never cleaned up.

Our apartment has a nice size entry way, study, living room, and kitchen; two full western baths and one eastern-style toilet room; in one of the bathrooms, a washing machine that works quite well; three bedrooms, one for sleeping, one for drying cloths, and one we use for storage. But the best of this place are the balconies. The views of the city and the mountains are spectacular and we are high enough up, seventh floor, that we almost forget about all the trash one sees everywhere. The mountains, we are told, will be covered in green and colorful flowers in the spring. This morning brought a beautiful sunrise over the mountains to the south-east of the city. We have attached below a few pictures.

More on our Picasa website: http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#

Yesterday, we entertained some of the faculty in celebration of the coming Christmas season. Carl and I were able to walk to Kurdistan 2, a local supermarket, about fifteen minutes walk and make enough purchases for me to actually bake some brownies from scratch. Carl walked about ten minutes away to a local restaurant and purchased wonderful grilled chickens for our dinner. I found just a few Christmas decorations to make the place slightly festive and we even sang a couple of Christmas carols. The Chancellor (president) of the University joined us and we had a wonderful evening together sharing our stories with each other. We are making some good friends!

Until we got our wireless internet, some very kind Kurdish neighbors offered us the use of theirs. The locals all are so friendly and helpful, but service providers work on their own time schedules. I went to get a haircut the other day and the hairdresser wasn’t even there for the appointment. Someone called her after I arrived and she came in about forty minutes later. The haircut isn’t bad but she surely is no Gloria.

Last week, the day after we moved, the University had a tree planting day at the new campus. Our Chancellor, pictured in the below cited web address with Carl and me as we planted a tree, is a real nature man and wants the campus to be a park. So some faculty, students, local gardeners and important political people joined together to plant 500 small pines on hillsides of the new 450 acre campus. I highly recommend you take a look at the pictures provided by one of the teachers in the English as a second language program. He is a gifted photographer. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/brownbearphotography/sets/72157622729347439/
And you can see for yourself, the locals worked side-by-side with us to make this new campus for their people. It was one of the best days we have had here even though it was rather cold and rainy that day.

Speaking of weather, yesterday and today it has been bright sunshine and in the low 50s. Great for walks, especially as we hear about the cold, windy, snow our home is experiencing back in the states. So although there are many disadvantages to being away from home, we do on occasion have some plusses to this experience.

As many of you are aware, I love handwork and I have managed to find some yarn here. I have made three sweaters which I have given to some of our drivers who have recently become fathers, and now I am making hats and mitten sets to give the children in the local refugee camp. We have not seen this place but have been told it is a very muddy field filled with tents housing the poor displaced Arabs from Baghdad. It is a small act but knitting fills my long evenings and helps a little bit.

On Friday, December 18 we leave for the United Arab Emirates and Oman for two weeks. We will be in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Oman. We have planned the trip around being in Abu Dhabi on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Carl was in Abu Dhabi in the spring of 1989, and went to an Easter Sunday service at the Anglican church that we will be going to. We will return to Suli on January 1, 2010. The hotels we are staying in all have internet access, so we will attempt to keep up communication along the way.

We trust you are experiencing a most blessed season filled with love and family.

Tenth Blog, December 3, 2009

2009-12-03T13:45:00.010-05:00

10th blog, trip to Dohuk over Thanksgiving weekend. Posted December 3, 2009

We had a wonder-filled trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, so this will be a longer blog than others. First a few words about why we had a long weekend, then some information about the trip.

On Thanksgiving Thursday, we joined with 35 other American ex-pats for a Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkeys. There was lots of food and good company, but no cranberries, sweet potatoes or pumpkin pie. It was a truly festive dinner but could not take the place of dinner with family.

On Friday after Thanksgiving, this part of the world began a 4 day holiday called Eid al-Adha, or Festival of the Sacrifice. The sacrifice commemorated is that by Abraham after he was told to sacrifice his first-born. In the Islamic world, the son that was taken to be sacrificed by his father was Ismail, not Isaac, because, they say, Ismail was Abraham’s first born. Like Jews and Christians, they proof-text this to scripture; in their case, the Quran. It is an important holiday for Muslims, at least as important as Christmas for Christians. There is frenetic purchasing of food before the holiday, and then on the holiday itself, things shut down. One of the traditions is the slaughtering of a live goat on the first day of the holiday. More on this in a few paragraphs. Even on Monday, November 30, the fourth day of the holiday, many stores were closed and construction work on the apartment block near our home was limited.

Because of Eid al-Adha, the university was closed for four days, Friday through Monday, so we used the first three days of the holiday period to go on a road trip to Dohuk, a city that is about a 5 hour drive to the north west of Sulaimani. I cannot tell you the number of miles or kilometers because the normal means of calculating this, either by map or by average miles per hour don’t work here. At times the driver of the huge Ford Expedition in which we were riding was driving at 85 to 90 miles per hour, at times he was going 30 to 40 miles per hour on mountainous curves. For the first fifty or so miles we were on a smooth four lane highway; the rest of the trip was on two lane roads that though paved were very rough. For once I appreciated the beast of a vehicle that was carrying us as its suspension and tires soaked up some of the bumps. It was still very rough. Three other persons were part of the group: Jonathan and Carol, a married couple, and Randall, also married but here in Iraq on his own while his wife is remaining behind in Georgia. Jonathan made arrangements for our hotel in Dohuk, and for our itinerary; I made transportation arrangements. Jonathan is my office partner and is a remarkable scholar of ancient Christianity in the Middle East and can read Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic. It was his knowledge of the area that led him to want to make this trip to places we did not know existed. We are in his debt for his knowledge and for allowing us to be part of this experience, something we would never have known to want to do were it not for our being here.

On the trip north, we saw so many sites that destroy any preconceptions of Iraq as a flat, sandy, dry and arid place. As you can see from the first photos included with this blog, the lands between the road and the mountains are flat, and the soil rich. On this trip we literally drove along hundreds of miles with rich farm land of this type, that does not require any irrigation. We now understand why the Kurdish area is considered the bread basket of Iraq and of this region. The season for growing grain crops is winter, and in fact we saw several farmers planting winter grain crops that will ripen by early June. Our travel partner, Jon, reminded us that this part of the Middle East was where historians speculate that the first ever human effort at farming -- that is deliberately planting seeds and harvesting the product of this work -- took place, thus revolutionizing human existence from hunting and gathering to settled agricultural villages. See next two photos for representative scenes that were part of this trip.

The weather was delightful as we made our way north through numerous villages. In several, we observed groups of men and boys in the process of slaughtering and cutting up goats for the Eid holiday. I would like to have stopped to take pictures, but felt that doing so would be intrusive, thus no pictures.

Dohuk city feels as big as Sulaimani, and also less torn up by the construction of roads and infrastructure. Like Suli, Dohuk is built at the base of a mountain range. See photo below, which also shows evidence of intense Kurdish nationalism with the flag painted onto the hillside above the city. We had a very good hotel that cost $50 per night and included a wonderful breakfast buffet.

After a short rest in the hotel, we set out for the village of Lalish that lies about 30 miles south of Dohuk. This village is the global center for a religious group called Yezidis. The Yezidi religion is a blend of pre-Christian, Christian, and Islamic elements that would take too long to explain. (Do an internet search and you will find several references.) We were treated very warmly and were welcomed to tour the sacred temple where our guide was a young local man who had good English skills.

Trying to describe this event is one of those occasions when words and photos simply fail to communicate the sense of awe we felt as we removed our shoes and entered their sacred space, and were led back in history. Parts of the building date to the 12th century C.E. and commemorate an important leader, Sheikh Adi, who is sacred to their history. As important as looking at the structure was seeing Yezidi men walk (barefoot) about kissing objects like trees and walls as all of this temple is sacred to them. In one of our pictures you will find a black snake as bas-relief on the wall next to the door. In their history, a black snake chased away Kurds who were trying to convert them to Islam, thus the snake is sacred.

In the Yezidi faith, light is important. Hence the conically shaped stone tomb coverings represent the sun at the top, with each of the twelve ribs representing both rays of light and the months of the year. Within the temple compound were a number of olive oil lamps that appear to be kept burning 24 hours per day.

We were treated warmly and after a tour of the temple were invited to share tea with a number of the men. One of the men brought his son, and allowed a photo of the two of them. What a beautiful child.

We returned to Dohuk in the dark on a rough and curvy mountain road, glad to return safely to our hotel. The next day, Saturday, we went to the town of Al Qosh, a Christian village. The town sits at the foot a mountain into which a group of extraordinarily ascetic monks under the leadership of Saint Hormuzd built a monastery in the 6th century. The road to the monastery goes up the side of the mountain in a series of switchback curves, but goes only so far, and from that point on we had to walk. To the left and right of the monastery are a series of natural caves in the hillside. Paths were built to the caves where monks would live for weeks at a time. Even today, you can see where they carved niches back into the rock walls of the caves. My friend and colleague Jonathan says that at its height, several thousand monks lived here. By the mid-19th century that number had dwindled to less than 100. See 3 pictures below, more on the picasa website.

At the base of the mountain is a more contemporary monastery founded in the mid-19th century where today a group of monks cares for boys in an orphanage attached to the monastery.

We met several of the monks, who happen to have good English skills, and also some of the boys who were very dear in their affection for us. All of them seem to have mastered the phrase “Hello Meester,” but like us and our use of Kurdish, they cannot go a lot further in conversation. All of the boys come from Christian families of northern Iraq and are there either because parents are dead or cannot afford to support them. As you might recall from reading the news, one of the communities that has most suffered in Iraq are the Christian communities because they do not fit neatly into either the Arabic or Kurdish communities, and they have been hurt by the sectarianization of formerly mixed towns and neighborhoods. Many Christians have simply fled Iraq. These boys represent the human side of these conflicts.

The village of Al Qosh is important for one other religious reason: it has for a long time been considered the home of the Old Testament prophet Nahum, who in chapter one, verse one of the book that carries his name says: “An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh.” Never mind that the editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible suggest that no one knows for sure where the Biblical Elkosh is located. In these parts, it’s right here and has been here for centuries.

His tomb is contained in a Jewish synagogue that has fallen on hard times. 19th century European travelers suggest that by their time, no Jews lived in Al Qosh, but traveled there once a year from Mosul to commemorate Nahum. Since the founding of Israel in 1948 there are few Jews in Iraq, and parts of the building are in ruins. The tomb is tended by a local Christian family who allowed us in to see it, and who asked us to sign a guest book. See two photos below; more in picasa.

Our last venture of the holiday came on Sunday morning when we went to a Zoroastrian cave, called Chwarstoon Cave, situated in a mountain to the east of Dohuk, near a large dam of the same name. The Zoroastrian religion was founded in the 6th century BCE, and was popular in this area. Today, the cave has carvings into its wall that are thought to be associated with Zoroastrianism. The sides and roof of the cave are still coated with hardened soot that was the after-effect of the fires that were burned in the caves over many years. See next photo.

On Sunday afternoon, we returned to Suli by the same bumpy route. Along the way we re-crossed the Greater Zab river, where we had tea with some local folks and watched young boys bring in their catch of fish which they were offering for sale. If I liked carp, I might have bought one. The water of the Zab River flows west and south from this point and eventually joins with the Tigris River. Photo below.

All along this three day outing, we felt that we were somehow becoming a part of the history of this part of Iraq. It was around here that agriculture began, near here that the great Assyrian city of Nineveh was built, and through here that Alexander the Great marched his army and defeated the Persians at Gaugamela. It was an awesome experience.

This coming weekend we will be moving to an apartment complex much nearer the university than our villa. We are looking forward to the move as it will allow us much greater flexibility in our ability to walk about and be a part of the city. We can even walk to a Chinese Restaurant that has pretty good food. There may be a delay in our getting access to the internet from our home, so bear with us if we do not respond quickly.

We wish all of you, our faithful readers, a meaningful beginning to the season of Advent.

Ninth blog. November 23,2009

2009-11-22T23:12:00.006-05:00

Ninth Blog. Saturday/Sunday, November 21/22, 2009. Sent on November 23.

For those who are keeping track of these things, you know that it’s been two weeks since we last posted a blog. We just did not have enough news last week to justify taking the time to write, or to presume on your time to read. You may assume that what were adventures in previous weeks, like finding our way back to the same shop in the bazaar to purchase meats, have now become ordinary, and thus not worth writing about. We have tried to speak positively about our environment because it hardly seems fair for a couple of folks from Indiana to knowingly come to and complain about a part of the world that has known more difficulty than the US has ever experienced. This does not mean that we don’t have frustrations. It just means that to this time we have chosen not to dwell on them. But in this blog, we let out of few of our frustrations, so you can know that we are human. Here goes:

1. Power outages. We see long distance electrical lines but have no idea where they come from or go to. I just know that something about the power grid is irregular enough that there are large, portable power generators everywhere. At the university there are 3 of these mammoth generators in back of the building, at least one of which is running all the time, and even with these, there are interruptions . Most of the time these are short –five to ten seconds – sometimes longer. They rarely last long enough that we have time to get a match and light a candle, but once the power goes down, everything has to re-set: the satellite TV signal receiver, the heat pumps, the wireless internet device. (I know. I can just hear someone in much more primitive surroundings say something to the effect, “I would love to trade my 4 hours of daily electricity with their momentary outages.” So please know that I understand that all inconvenience is relative.) Today, Saturday, November 20, the power has shut down 5 or 6 times in the afternoon and evening. Really irritating. People around here are used to it and just keep on going when the power shuts down. But there’s nothing more aggravating than to be in the middle of a lengthy internet related activity, like uploading this blog and its pictures, and have to start over again.

2. A related frustration: lack of band width. Like all internet providers, one of the great problems for the university is keeping up with demand for bandwidth. Give people more and they just use more. For us, bandwidth problems cause us to avoid anything like Facebook. It just takes forever. And the university has blocked the use of YouTube. It would be great to have things download and upload quickly. At home we listened to SomaFM, an internet music source, but here it keeps shutting down as it rebuffers, whatever that is. This feels more like dial up than broadband. (November 25, 2009: Since writing this, we have learned that the amount of bandwidth for the whole university is less than a household in the U.S. would would have available to them. Even with Facebook lite that one person told us about, you can see why responding to Facebook is difficult. Email works well. Write to us at our Anderson University email accounts and we will respond, asking you to shift to our AUIS accounts.)

3. The presence of cheap Chinese goods. If you think Walmart is bad, come here. The stuff that is imported here doesn’t even pretend to obscure where it comes from, and it is so shoddily made. Whether dealing with something as cheap as a potato peeler or expensive as a microwave oven, we have gotten our share of faulty goods. The first microwave oven lasted one month and failed. Of course the store would not take it back. (A strong sense of serving the customer is not uniform. Some places act like they are doing you a favor to be there; other merchants are very generous.) The second one lasted one evening before it shut down, and fortunately the owner of the store made good on it, but for our third microwave oven, we paid a premium price to get a Sanyo from Japan. It continues to work – knock on wood. The students I have talked to about this acknowledge, almost fatalistically, that a lot of the goods available to them are poorly made, whether from China or Iran.

4. Lack of mobility. They have actively discouraged us from buying cars and have provided a fleet of cars and vans and drivers to carry ex-pat faculty and staff to the university and to markets. They have even said that the drivers are on the job until 9:00 p.m., and we should avail ourselves of them in the evening. But the simple fact is that there’s nothing quite like being able to walk from house to garage and take ourselves wherever we want, whenever we want. Some of the drivers have quite good English and we can explain some subtlety, like “can you run by Kurdistan market, then to the bread store and then home.” But for others, it’s got to be simple: “go to villa.” It’s best to leave out articles, and sometimes even verbs so as not to confuse. Even with those whose English is good, we have a sense that when we ask them to take us somewhere in the evening, our request is an inconvenience. Above all, we want mobility in the evening and weekends, because being in the villas is really isolating. There’s no place around here to walk to. (See photo Suli area, snipped from Google Earth, so as to get a sense of the lay of the land. It is about 10 miles from to villas to the university. ) If you double click on the photo, you can get more detail.

5. Food. We are not starving. Far from it. But there are some foods that we just cannot find around here. Oatmeal for example. Brownie mixes. Parmesan cheese. Certain spices like oregano. And even when we find something that is a bit unusual in a store on one shopping expedition, we cannot be sure it will be there next time. The supply lines from Turkey, Iran, Syria or wherever they come from apparently are not consistent.

6. Lack of Starbucks coffee (or any other good coffee like Seattle’s Best.) (You’ll notice that I have put coffee into its own food group.) The local coffee all has cardamom added to it, thus making it undrinkable from my (Carl’s) point of view. I have tried three different brands and have either given them away or thrown them away. To make sure that the supply of coffee that we brought will last us till the end of December when we will be going to Dubai for Christmas break, we limit ourselves to 5 cups a day in our little coffee maker. When that’s gone by 9:30 a.m., I shift to Nescafe instant coffee which is offered free to faculty and staff at the university. This beats drinking plain old hot water, but not by much.

7. Lack of church. There is a Chaldean Christian church in Suli that has its service on Sunday evening, but the service is all in Arabic, so we have not gone. There is also a non-denominational international church that meets in a hotel. We attended once, but will likely not go back. They were genuine in their friendship in greeting us – there are not that many ex-pat Americans around here – but we find it difficult to worship in a context where all of the music is contemporary praise chorus type of music. I know this gripe sounds narrow and uncharitable and I don’t offer it with any pride, but the reality is that we miss Pastor Markle and the organ, choir, and hymns of Park Place Church of God, and the Sunday evening music brought to the church by the AU department of music.

8. The cold and rainy weather. When the weather is nice around here it is really nice. But when it turns foul, it turns really foul: long days of continuous drizzle punctuated occasionally by a thunder storm. I have for years taught in Middle East history courses about how the water of the region tends to fall in the mountains and flow out to the desert plains. When I gave that lecture I would wave generally to that part of the map where the Zagros mountains are located. Now we are living in the very mountains I have been talking about, and it isn’t much fun to get around in the rain. To make matters worse, the concrete sidewalk work around where our offices and classrooms are located was poured in haste, without proper drainage, so the water collects in one and two inch deep ponds that are virtually impossible to avoid as we go from office to classroom.

9. This last item is not a gripe, but rather an observation on differences in taste. We have noticed in furniture stores that the taste around here runs toward, shall we say, the heavily decorated. Imagine over-done French provincial with added decorations. You can imagine, then, our reaction when we went to a trade show and came upon a couple of chairs that simply exceeded anything we have seen to date in terms of stylistic flourish. They were just over the top. I'd love to see the home in which these chairs end up. See below.

Enough griping. One positive note: at the same trade show, we found an Iranian rug merchant who had come to the show from Tehran, Iran, to ply his wares. We bought a lovely wool rug that’s about 8 feet by 5 feet. See next two pictures, one of which is a close up. Now we can stop coveting the rugs in the museum.

Please do not be concerned as you read our complaints. We really are just fine. There are lots of good things going on for us and our students, and that’s what matters. But know that we continue to be as human as ever and we appreciate your following our story.

8th Blog, November 9, 2009

2009-11-09T13:16:00.013-05:00

[Carl writing.] This past weekend was rich in cultural experiences. On Friday evening we attended the fall semester student dance. It was held in a large circular banquet hall, and was one of the most heavily guarded events we have been to. Three guards at the outside gate were checking IDs of everyone who entered. Then, as we entered the venue, three more guards. The amount of firepower they were carrying would deter all but the most determined terrorist. One of the guards greeted me especially warmly and posed for a picture (see Picasa web site: http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq# )

Regarding the dance, we had heard that men and women students were reluctant to mix at events like this, but what we witnessed on Friday suggested that this is not true. They seemed to thoroughly enjoy each other’s company, and from the first opportunity that the music started, began dancing a traditional Kurdish dance, that involved long lines of dancers in a simple two-step as they move in a counterclockwise motion around a large dancing floor. One of my students insisted that I get into dance in spite of my protestations that I am rhythmically challenged. I dragged Carolyn in with me, and she helped me with the left-step, right-right cadence, so I did not embarrass myself too much. See first photo above for a sense of what we looked like. The students seemed to appreciate our efforts even if the outcome would not win a place in a Kurdish version of Dancing with the Stars. Photos 2 and 3 above are of us with those students who are in our classes, and who were available at the dance at the time of the photo. As is always the case, it seems, these still photos of the dance do such a terrible job of representing the sounds and feel of the banquet hall as lines of persons did the traditional Kurdish dance with such syncronicity, one would think that there must be a choreographer directing them . The dance was great fun.

Several of the students and staff, both men and women, dressed in traditional Kurdish dress for the dance. We have included one photo above as an example of the traditional dress of women. The rule seems to be that the more decorated – shiney, glittery, bejeweled – the cloth, the better. See the Picasa web site for some additional photos. Carolyn and I have decided after this experience to go to the bazaar with Kurdistan, one of Carolyn’s delightful students, who knows tailors and cloth shops well and who can help us get outfits made. We have been told there will be some other opportunities to wear them later in the year.

On Saturday morning we returned to the Red Museum for the opening of an art show that was supported by a major arts organization from England as well as by the U.S. and the British Governments. (See http://www.artrole.org/) One of my students joined Carolyn and me for the morning. The event was attended by representatives from the US consul’s office from Irbil, Dr. Salih, and by Lady Hero the wife of Jalil Talabani, the President of Iraq. It seemed there were as many body guards and photographers from the mass media as there were observers of the show. (One of our students informed me that Carolyn and I made the Saturday night local TV news.) There were exhibits of original Iraqi art as well as photos of Kurdistan taken by Susan Meiselas who collected a number of photos in a book called Kurdistan in the Shadow of History.

As impressive as it was to see the photo and art exhibits, the rooms that most captivated us contained several dozen traditional Kurdish and Persian rugs. See above and several more on the Picasa website. The rugs are absolutely captivating in their design, complexity, and color. If ever I wanted to quietly steal something from a museum, this was the moment. I resisted the temptation, as stealing is discouraged in the Bible(one of the big 10, as I remember), and I do not wish to experience from the inside what an Iraqi jail is like. I leave to you to decide which was the greater deterrent.

Classes continue apace. We are approaching the time to submit mid-term grades, and it’s hard to believe that almost 1/4th of the year has passed. We thank you for your continuing interest in our story.

Seventh blog, November 2, 2009

2009-11-02T12:22:00.007-05:00

Please allow us to relate four events that occurred in the last week. Each in some way says something about the area and its people.

First, in my World/Western Civilization course, I decided to bring an enrichment moment playing from my iPod a piece of music by Thomas Tallis. An English church composer, Tallis died in 1585, and lived through the religious upheavals of the 16th c. I happen to have a rendition of his song “If ye love me,” the beginning words of the passage where John suggests that Jesus says: “If ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another comforter, that he may abide with you forever, e'en the spirit of truth.” (John 14: 15-17) It is really a lovely piece of music that would sound particularly good in a large cathedral where the harmonies can linger and mingle as they bounce around inside the space. I tried to explain the context in which the music would be performed. The students responded very favorably – said they really enjoyed it. And the supreme complement: two students have asked if I would give them the music file. Normally I am reluctant to support the widespread copying of music and films that goes on around here, but in this case, I made an exception since it would be so very difficult to get this music in this region. This situation allows me to say that in my bringing the Bible into my class discussions, as we have talked about the late 15th century church and the Protestant reformation in the next century, I have been struck by the extent to which students seem to have a great respect for sacred text as a source of guidance for living. I have said explicitly to them that my bringing this to class is not for the purpose of changing their beliefs, but rather to help them understand how the West evolved in ways that impacted the whole world. They seem far less concerned about this than I am.

Second event: this morning, as I was waiting in a student lounge for any of my students to drop by for voluntary conversations on issues of their choosing, a student in the pre-college writing program saw me sitting with no students around (none came this morning) and asked me to critique a paper he had written. So I spent the better part of an hour going over his paper, making suggestions for better word choice and sentence structure. The paper was a first-hand account of his growing up in a town north of Sulaimani, where in the early 1990s his family was caught up in a civil war between two feuding Kurdish parties. To escape the fighting, his family fled to a refugee camp in Iran. He describes how, as his family lived in a tent city for two years, he had to sell cakes in order to help his family survive. In the essay he wrote about how the birds spoke to him and told him that it was important that he not give up hope, and that he climb the mountain of knowledge, no matter how difficult. He wrote of how glad he was to be able to return to his home town and to begin the schooling that had been denied him as a refugee. He is so happy to be at AUIS, and sees the program as the fulfillment of his long dream to climb the mountain of knowledge (his metaphor). I could hardly speak at moments as I read and understood the utter horrors he experienced as a child (he decribes crying from being cold and knowing there was no place to turn, no more coats and no more blankets), and yet I saw in him such hope for the future. Some of the students can be maddening in the literalness with which they approach reading and assignments (“now tell exactly what I have to know to get an A on this essay”), but a moment like this one gives life to the day, and a renewed sense that though things are not perfect around here, we can make a difference.

Third event: The voice has changed and Carolyn is writing now. Last week-end, Carl and I went to the bazaar to purchase some fresh vegetables and fresh ground meat. The prices are so much better than the Suli supermarket, and the freshness is also much better, just as it is at home when you are able to buy directly from the orchard as opposed to the chain food store. As we walked along the crowded street, Carl spotted a very young boy, maybe 14 years old or so and weighing at most 100 pounds, pushing a very heavy three wheel cart uphill loaded with boxes of paper. He was barely moving and the cart frequently lodged itself in holes in the pavement. Carl decided to offer to help the boy push and they began moving the cart at a rather good rate of speed up the street. You can only imagine the looks these two received as the locals watched this white-haired American help this young Iraqi boy perform his task. The young boy knew a little English and was able to ask Carl “American?” “I learn English in school. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” After about two blocks, a very winded Carl and this young boy reached the top of the hill, and Carl felt he could step back and let the lad take over the control of the cart. I had followed along the entire time walking on the sidewalk, snapping pictures, and watching the reactions. (See first picture above.)

Fourth event: Two young girls in the English Writing Pre-university program contacted me to ask if I would agree to an interview about my work as an accounting professor. I agreed and they came to my office with good questions prepared. Their English was somewhat broken as they are in the second of four levels of English training. But we managed a good conversation and they thanked me profusely. Their teacher told me he was very impressed with their report and suggested I asked to see it. I asked them to stop by my office with their report and they proudly arrived with a report which had earned them 100%. It was amazing how much they understood including my discussion with them about how I had experienced the glass ceiling as a young professional. I wasn’t sure they could understand that concept but they really got it. When I finished looking over the report, one of the girls handed me a necklace made of gold beads and cloves. (See second picture above.) She explained that this was hand-made and represented an Iraqi custom given to someone for whom you have great love.

Each day here is filled with these wonderful one-one-one encounters with the local youth that make up for some of the inconveniences of daily life. People are the reason we came to this place and we have not been disappointed.

Carl here to close: normally by late October I would have helped my granddaughters carve pumpkins. The third picture is of a pumpkin I carved for a Halloween party we went to last Friday evening for the ex-patriot community. The picture is dedicated to Maya, Talia, and Elena, whose help I needed to pull the “guts” from the pumpkin.

See additional pictures at our Picasa photo web album:
http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#

Postscript written by Carl on November 3, 2009: At the risk of over-emphasizing the dark parts of the Kurdish past, I am offering a URL for a website that contains first person accounts of what happened to them in the Red Prison that we wrote about last week. It is disturbing reading, but says so much about what is important in the collective memory of Kurds. The site:
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2008/1/judgement405.htm

Sixth Blog, October 26, 2009

2009-10-26T13:38:00.003-04:00

Sixth Blog – Monday, October 26, 2009.

Carl writing:
I’m not sure how much longer we can keep up with a weekly blog and still find things that might be of general interest, but at least for this blog, hopefully there will be something of interest to most, even if the topic is less than cheery and light.

This week we went to a Saddam Hussein-era complex of buildings in the center of Suli. They are the only buildings we have seen that bear any marks of war. Now called the Red Museum, when it was first built 30 years ago, the German company who built it was told that it was to be a prison. In fact, Saddam had other intentions. He was frustrated with the emergence of new Kurdish nationalist movements and determined to root them out. So over the period from 1979 to January 1991 this complex became a feared place to which many persons suspected of involvement in Kurdish nationalism were sent, but from which few ever came home. Within the complex are two sets of buildings: a large, multi-story administrative center, and off to the north of it, a fairly common, rather prosaic low concrete building with few windows. It was in through cells and rooms of the latter building that we were taken. It was pointed out that some cells were for groups; others were intended as solitary confinement places for persons who were reluctant to answer questions. All were grim, to say the least. A simple blanket on the floor; a single window about 6” by 6” high on the wall; two plastic pans, one for food, the other for human waste. Intermixed were torture rooms in which prisoners were treated to tortures as old as the type used in the late middle ages in Europe to extract confessions from persons who were accused of witchcraft. This torture was called, in Europe, strappado, in which the victim has his hands tied behind his back, and then is hung by his hands from a hook, so all the weight of the body is carried by the hands and shoulders with hands over the back of the head. Add to this the modern torture of electric shock to the ear lobes even as the person is hanging from a hook. In other situations, Baathists – Saddam’s henchmen – would bring to the prison female relatives of suspects and tell the prisoner that unless they confessed, the women would be raped in their presence, a particularly heinous retribution in a society that so values sexual modesty. Other forms of torture involved striking the soles of suspects’ feet with a rod. Persons found guilty were shipped off to Abu Graib prison in Baghdad for execution. (In several key rooms, they have created sculptures to illustrate what happened.) All of this was explained to us by a guide, with translation being provided by one of the AUIS students. It was a grim hour to be led from one room to another, all meticulously kept in the same condition they were in at the time of the liberation of the prison in January 1991. As you might guess, the Kurds who stood up to Saddam’s abuse even to the point of death are now considered martyrs to the cause of Kurdish nationalism and are revered as heroes. One of the parties he targeted, the Progressive Union of Kurdistan (PUK), is now a respected party in this region.

Saddam’s efforts against the Kurds became even more widespread in the 1980s, when he accused them of helping the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war. He began the Anfal campaign, to cleanse the area of Kurds. 5,000 villages were razed, families were torn apart, and over 180,000 Kurds lost their lives. (If you want to get sense of the period, rent and watch the movie called “Turtles Can Fly” that is built around the lives of children in a refugee camp.) One of the most tragic of situations occurred only 50 miles from here when Saddam ordered the use of nerve gas and mustard gas against the village of Halabja. Over 5,000 people lost their lives in Halabja. To memorialize the loss of lives in the Anfal campaign, the designers of the museum created a long and winding room that is lined with pieces of jagged pieces of mirror, one to stand for each of the 180,000 deaths, and on the ceiling are placed 5,000 white lights to represent the destroyed villages. One has the sense in this museum that it is, like Yad Vashem in Israel, an effort to say, “never again.”

But the Red Museum also has space dedicated to peace: a room full of dove houses – a place where doves, as symbols of peace and reconciliation, can come and go freely. It also has lovely gardens with fountains and rose gardens that stand in stark contrast to the horror of what happened here just a few years ago. What the museum seems to say is that Kurds want to remember, but they want to move on and live peacefully in Iraq. What we realize in talking with our students is that virtually all of their lives were impacted by the struggles of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, including a bloody civil war that took place between two Kurdish factions in the ‘90s, after the effective defeat of Saddam in this area.

The trip to the Red Museum could hardly be called joyful. But it served as a sober reminder of the struggles through which the people of this region have gone, and of the optimism that is the predominating trait of our students. They seem eager to put behind them the animosities of the past and to live as Kurds and Arabs in peace.

I have placed at the top of this blog three photos of the Red Museum: the first is of one of the group cells, the second is of a statue of a prisoner being hung from a hook, the third is of the hall of mirrors. Several more are at the Picasa web site: http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#

If as you read this and previous posts you have questions that you would like for us to answer in future posts, feel free to write them as comments, or to write to our email addresses. While we can hardly claim to be experts, we will try to address questions on life here.

Fifth Blog, October 18, 2009

2009-10-18T15:46:00.006-04:00

Carl writing. Having spent a lot time in previous blogs talking about navigating the process of shopping, food acquisition and preparation, and daily living, I’d like to devote a few lines in this fifth blog to people, and then offer a few other comments about life here. We will continue to do this in the future and introduce you to some of the folks with whom we interact on a regular basis.

I want to tell you about Mr. Osman Hassan. His picture is the first of those posted with this blog. We are told that one year ago, when AUIS was only in its first months of operation, the grounds around the administration building were an unkempt mess. Across from the building, is a small, attractive park, in which Mr. Hassan was the gardener. The university asked him to come help them out, and he became a full-time employee who has, by virtue of hard work, changed the grounds into a very attractive part of the life of the campus. He is on the grounds from early morning to late afternoon, watering grass and flowers, pulling weeds, and extending flower beds into new areas. He is very proud of what he does, and deservedly so. It is a pleasure to walk by him and share a smile with him each morning.

I also want to tell you about one of my students who for this purposes of this website, I will call Muhammad. He grew up in Baghdad where he went to an English language high school, and when the Coalition forces invaded in 2003, he was recruited to be a translator for U.S. forces. He did this for several years, until the U.S. forces were pulled back from active engagement in cities, and at that time made the decision to attend AUIS. When we were talking on the first day of class, and I told the class that I was from Indiana, he told me that his sister was attending a college in Indiana. On further inquiry, I learned that she is attending Manchester College, the very school where I taught for 18 years. Since then, I have learned from good friends, David and Becky Waas, that they are part of a group of senior citizens in North Manchester who have chosen to provide scholarship support for her. Talk about a small world.

I realize that it is easy to idealize a world that I don’t know well, but I want to mention an aspect of life in Sulaimani that I really appreciate. That is, the basic honesty that pervades business interactions. We have mentioned before that this is a cash only economy. No credit cards. No checks. The end result is that people have to carry around large amounts of cash just to go about their daily lives. Businesses, likewise, keep large amounts of cash as they make transactions through the day. In the bazaar, there are people changing money on the street who carry stacks of cash as they stand along the street seeking business. As much as I have tried to learn Kurdish numbers, so I can know how much to pay when I say “Bah chana?” (how much?), I struggle to understand any numbers other than simple numbers like “penj hezar” (five thousand), an amount that is slightly less than $5.00. A number like 750 or 1,250 is still difficult to hear and understand because there are too many numbers coming at me too quickly. But I have learned that all I have to do is open my billfold to them and allow them to take money out, and it all works. I have a general sense of what things ought to cost, and would know if a person were about to rip me off by taking ID 25,000 when the bill is only ID5,000, but after numerous transactions, I can say that this simply doesn’t happen. They are careful to take only the cost of the item being purchased. Another example: in one of our early trips to Zara Market, mentioned earlier in this blog, I left the cash register and the store before receiving change from a transaction in which I had used US dollars, because I wasn’t sure that I had any change coming to me. As we were getting into the university van to come back to our villa, someone came running from the store with my change in hand – not very much, less than $5.00 – but change nevertheless. I am impressed with this sense of honesty, and wonder how it gets taught so broadly in a culture. I am not so naïve as to believe that there are no problems with theft, but the prevailing attitude about the handling of money is refreshing.

One more story: my students have told me that fresh meat in the bazaar markets is fresher and less expensive than what is sold in large grocery stores. So yesterday, I got brave and decided to purchase ground beef from one of the meat merchants in the bazaar. I walked up to the butcher and asked for one kilo of ground beef [yuk (one) kilo, ghosht (meat), gueraca (cow), qima (ground)] . He actually understood me (!), picked up a knife and carved a chunk of meat from a side of beef hanging in the front of the store, then handed the meat to an assistant who ran it through a grinder. Within minutes, I had my 2.2 pounds of ground beef that really was more like ground round steak, with virtually no fat. Carolyn and I made patties from this meat last evening and had some very good fried hamburgers that were so lean, we had to add olive oil to the fry pan to keep the meat from sticking. The students were right. See the second of the pictures posted above for an image of this very proud butcher in his shop.

Must close this message and get ready for classes. More photos of this area and of the bazaar are posted in the Picasa picture website: http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#

Hope you enjoy.

Fourth Blog Message

2009-10-11T14:02:00.007-04:00

Fourth Blog. Carolyn writing, {Carl in brackets} October 11, 2009

We’ve been here almost a month, and we are beginning to feel as if we have the managed to master the daily activities of shopping, food preparation, travel back and forth from our villa to the university or town with a reasonable sense of normalcy. I did miss my ride one morning last week because my key would not unlock the front door so I was locked into the villa. After much jiggling, I managed to break the lock loose and picked up the next van one half hour later. It is a good thing I always plan to leave some extra time so I still managed to get to class on time. It still isn’t the easiest to accept that one cannot travel about without making sure you are meeting a transportation schedule rather than running to the garage and firing up the auto!

My good friends at the Falls School of Business will love this story. Last week, I was explaining to the students why we needed to set up a petty cash account for Anderson ATV, Inc., the business simulation I wrote for my classes at AU. They asked me why that was necessary when every company in Iraq keeps huge sums of cash in the company safe. I tried to explain to them that the United States companies do not consider that a secure way of handling their cash so they keep most of their money in the bank. Therefore, keeping a small amount of petty cash for incidentals is necessary. One very bright young man sat there for a moment and finally said, “Is that the reason why, in American movies, the robbers always rob banks instead of companies?” After I recovered from the humor of it all, I answered in the affirmative and then told the class I had learned something today as well as they had. Teaching in another culture helps you be more aware of the reasons for why we do things the way we do them.

Carl and I finally feel as if we have managed to negotiate the bazaar (multiple blocks of streets and alleyways, labyrinth-like, full of shops that are 6x8 feet in size). We actually went twice this week—the first time with persons who are familiar with this place, the second time on our own. And we were able to find places we had visited the previous time. It felt very good to know that we were able to return someplace a second time without assistance. {In spite of our intention not to do so, we still ended going through the section of the bazaar where they trade in live chickens, ducks, and turkeys ready for slaughter. See comments below, and photo on other website.} We purchased one beautiful silk rug that we intend to use here to keep our tile floors warm; we will give it to our son and daughter-in-law when we return in appreciation for all they are doing to keep our finances straight back home. I even managed to communicate with one shop keeper that I wanted to purchase some curry. The spices are very rich but it is hard to know what you are buying when they are all sitting out together and the smells blend together in this rich aroma. We will include on the other website some pictures we took at the bazaar.

{See some new photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#.

Note name change in URL to Living in Iraq. It hardly feels like Adventure is the right term. Let's try Living. I struggle over what pictures to post, or what to say about them. We do not want to say anything or post any pictures that seem to make the people of this community appear to be odd or weird or insensitive. They are extraordinarily hard-working folks who have in the past 25 years lived through an effort on the part of Saddam Hussein to destroy them and their culture, through a civil war, and who live in a labor intensive economy that has not, like ours, totally separated the messy side of slaughtering meats from the purchasing of nice, neat sanitized packages. I just wish it were possible to get motion pictures of some of the laborers hard at work carrying huge boxes, pushing over-loaded carts up hilly streets, repairing shoes at curbside, selling phone cards, or artfully arranging a variety of olives in such a way as to attract customers into a shop. I’m no economist, but I suspect that if we were to try to import the big-box economy U.S. into this setting, the social and economic repercussions would be devastating.}

We probably are socializing more than we do at home because we feel the need of community. We went out to dinner one night with the EWPLI staff – that is the English Writing Program staff who are teaching basic English writing skills and who tend to be on the younger side, in their 20s and 30s -- and another evening with a couple of the degree faculty – that is people more our age who are teaching regular university classes. Both groups were very enjoyable and the dinners out make it nice for us since we don’t {Carolyn doesn’t} have to figure out what we are {she is} going to cook that night. One thing I have discovered here is dessert yoghurt which is amazing. It is much higher in fat content than I normally use, 8 to 10%, but with a little cherry or apricot preserves added, it is a special treat. One finds very little low-fat {or decaffeinated} anything!!!

The weather is still very comfortable. We are having days in the 80s and nights in the 60s. The biggest problem is the blowing dust which makes contact wearing and breathing less than comfortable at times. It also makes picture-taking of the mountains around us difficult. We hope to get some good pictures of the mountains soon. {We are missing the colors of fall here. There are no broad leaf trees like sugar maples and oaks that produce the colors in Indiana. The trees around here are more like olive trees: they are bush-like and have small, gray-green leaves that will likely just turn a bit more gray and drop off as we move to winter. We have been told that the really pretty season around here is in March, April, and May when the air is clear and the hills turn green from the winter rains.}

{Sorry, I have to leave this blog writing to go rescue Carolyn. She is sitting in pitch darkness because the engineers who control electricity for our housing complex took us off of one generator and put us on another. When they do this the power goes down. The power never stays off for long periods of time, like 10 to 15 minutes, but even a minute or two when it is dark is disconcerting. In addition, we lose all internet connectivity when the power is down. The power is back up. We can see. Light is good.}

An experience such as this is great, but we continue to cherish your love and support.

2009-10-04T12:18:00.006-04:00

Carolyn writing; Carl in brackets:
We have just had our first week with the students and what a delight they are. The students I have in accounting have now been here at the university for English language training and are now completing their sophomore year of academic education. They appear to be well trained in English at least in speaking and listening skills. I haven’t had much chance to measure their reading and comprehension skills yet but I suspect they are weaker in that area. Teaching accounting to students who have grown up in a cash basis only society presents its problems but I just have to remember checks and credit cards as well as buying on account don’t exist here. The students seem fascinated with that idea and are anxious to learn though. Our classes are quite small, about 8-12 per class, so it is easy for us to give individualized attention when needed. The students are very friendly; I had lunch with four of my students Thursday and they were very willing to answer any question I had. They are also very curious about the United States and are very proud that they are getting an American education. That is something to be prized here. It is clear that although many of these students are local Kurds, they have at some point in their lives, lived in other countries during the Saddam era when so much damage was done to this city and other areas where there were large concentrations of Kurds.

{Carl writing: I am finding more diversity among my students than Carolyn has experienced in terms of ability to grasp the material I am dealing with. Some are able to handle 10 pages of text, others struggle to get through two or three pages. I am also dealing with a group of students who are very nervous about how they are going to be graded and seem more interested in what’s going to be on the test – a typical response in a general education course not in most students' majors. In short, they’re much like US students in this regard. But they seem anxious to learn.}

One of the best people-watching experiences came when we had to go to immigration to get registered to be in Kurdistan. There is such a mixture of people coming here from other parts of the Middle East as well as the US, Europe, and the Far East. We met some men who had just arrived to drill some oil wells just south of Sulaimani on the way to Baghdad. When we finished the immigration process, we were to set up our bank accounts but the bank is very busy recovering from the time off for the holiday Eid. So our bank accounts have not been completed and the University paid us our first month’s salary in cash. Being American, we were rather concerned about the safety of this process, but that is the norm here and they think nothing of carrying around large sums of cash. We have been told that the walls of the bank are lined with the cash right out in plain sight; it’s safer there in the presence of armed guards than in a secluded safe where someone might take it.

Some of you have asked about food purchasing and preparation. One can find some things readily so we can prepare a tradition meal such as chicken, potatoes, green beans. Cucumbers and watermelon are as good as I have ever tasted anywhere. But pork is not available so the green beans are prepared without the seasoning of ham or bacon. We did find some ground beef the other day and made spaghetti and meat sauce. It tasted pretty good but we can’t find Parmesan cheese! Garlic bread can be made if you are willing to use the flat bread they call “naan” and spread the garlic butter on the top. Butter tastes more like lard so we add a little salt to make it more palatable. Chicken, lamb and rice are mainstays. I am not crazy about lamb so I haven’t bought any yet. We have a propane gas stove and oven so cooking is very similar. Just remember to wash every vegetable and fruit with soap and boiled water before eating.

We had a wonderful experience Thursday night {the equivalent of going out on Friday night in the States at the end of the work week} when we went to a local restaurant with another couple from the faculty. It was an outdoor restaurant and they seated us right next to the fish tank. The tank contained several very large carp and when someone would order fish, the waiter came to the tank, fished one out with a net, laid it on the ground right next to our table and proceeded to beat it over the head until it quit flopping. Then, they cut the head off and placed the fish over the open fire pit to grill it. There were also live chickens roaming around our table although we did not see them killing those. The meal consisted of about eight or ten dishes and cost us 9,000 dinars, approximately $8.50 for the four of us. That’s right, slightly over $2 per person. The cost of things is difficult to define because another friend from the faculty went out for steak and potato with a glass of wine and paid $35 for his dinner. We suspect if you are willing to eat local fare, you get by much cheaper than eating Western. Our meal was very filling and quite an experience too. We will try to include pictures of that.

Probably the highlight of the week was what happened at a BBQ the university had for all its expatriate employees on Friday evening. The man who is head of security at AUIS, Dr. Aso (veterinarian) and his wife were with us for the evening. She had given us a Kurdish lesson that morning so we were visiting with her when someone announced that Dr. Barham Salih, Prime Minister of Kurdistan, was on his way to visit with us. He has been instrumental in seeing that AUIS becomes a viable American University and we have seen him on campus at least twice this week. He was very gracious in allowing us to have our picture taken with him as you can see in the photo posted at the top of this blog. Other photos of the past week are at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/AdventuresInIraq#

Second Blog posting from Iraq

2009-09-26T08:13:00.007-04:00

Carl writing; Carolyn in brackets.
We have recently gone through the three day holiday called Eid al-Fitr, the period of celebration and feasting that follows the month of fasting called Ramadan. During Ramadan, observant Muslims do not eat or drink during the daylight hours. Eid is a major holiday when many stores close, and at the university, many offices were closed to allow local employees time with family. This link to an AP story will give you some indication of the meaning of the holiday, and also the role that the Kurdish area of the country is playing in the larger Iraqi way of life: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090920/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_holiday_escape/print
The new American-style university referred to in the article is, of course, AUIS, and we are pleased to be part of what it is bringing to this part of the country, and hopefully to the rest of Iraq.

In this report, I will concentrate on two topics: the university and shopping for essentials. There are more photos at
http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/AdventuresInIraq and I will refer to several of them as I write.

AUIS started classes in the spring of 2008 with 50 students. This fall, we have 500. About 400 of these students are in an English language preparation program while the remaining 100 students are in undergraduate degree programs. It is the latter group of students that Carolyn and I will be working with. All of our students for the fall term were in regular undergrad courses in the spring term so we will not be dealing with any first time freshman students. I will be teaching the second half of a course in the history of the West/World. Carolyn will be teaching the second half of accounting and assisting the business office of the university in setting up accounting systems.

The university has gone from one main administration building to an administration building plus lots of modular structures for classrooms and faculty offices to accommodate the rapid growth in the number of students. I have included a photo of the administration building. Classes start tomorrow, Sunday, September 27th. The normal work week is Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday constituting the weekend. We look forward to the beginning of work with students. {We intend on sharing a little about our lives back home by way of power point slides which we will share in class.}

Getting the necessities: We have now been to Zaras three times to stock up on food and other household items. Zaras (see photo above) is a two story store that sells a little bit of everything: food, clothing, housewares, small electric appliances. It is a very small version of a Walmart Superstore. Having all this under one roof is most helpful. But we cannot depend on finding the same things there from week to week. In our first trip, there was no ground beef, but we found some English cookies (biscuits) that we like. Yesterday, there was ground beef but no cookies. We have been advised that if a store has something we really like, to buy it now, knowing it may not be available later. We have also been to the bazaar section of the city, a much older section, where lots of things are available, but only by doing a lot of walking from one group of stores to another. All of the meat sellers are grouped together – an interesting experience to walk through after living in a society that isolates the messy and gory parts of butchering from those of us who ultimately purchase a sanitized package of meat in the grocery story. {We saw live chickens and turkeys as well as ones who had just been killed.} Others sellers are likewise grouped together: cell phone sellers, baby clothes sellers, etc. {The average shop is the width of a king-size bed and about twice as deep.}

The products we consume come from all over the world. As you might expect, lots of stuff from China, but then frozen fish from Vietnam, pickled vegetables from Iran, honey and salt from Saudi Arabia, apricot jam from Syria, pots and pans from France and Turkey. To date we have not paid a lot of attention to the prices that we are paying for what we purchase. We need it, there really is no meaningful way to price shop, so we buy it.

I close this second blog with a reference to the third of the photos included above. We had just purchased some dried apricots from the young man in the photo. He agreed to a photo. The apricots are delicious, as are fresh fruits like water melon and muskmelon.

We are well. We wish you all the best, and thank you for Blog comments even when this medium does not allow for individual comments.

First message sent from Iraq

2009-09-19T08:19:00.008-04:00

Carl speaking--Carolyn in brackets: This is our first communication from Sulaimani. We approach all that we are communicating to you with the expertise of people who have been on the ground here for less than a week.First a word about the name of our town. It shows up on Google earth and on area maps as as-Sulaymaniyah, the Arabic version of the word. Around here the word used is Sulaimani, the Kurdish version of the word. But I have also seen it spelled Slemani, and for short lots of people around here just say Suli. So for purposes of this blog, I will use the latter, since it is easier to write and takes up less space. If you are wanting see an aerial photo of the city, go to Google Earth and type in the Arabic name of the city, and the software will “fly” you to Suli. We are located just off of the main road leading west out of town, outside the ring road that goes around the city, and close to the airport which is just west of us.The first two pictures were taken at our “villa” that is part of a development called Qaiwan City. A wealthy person who is helping the university has gifted the use of a number of these villas to the university, and they in turn allow us to live here at no cost. It is quite large and unfurnished for its size but has all that we need. The vision of the architect was a luxury villa, but the reality is a place that though it has very solid walls, a grand circular stairway and shiny marble floors, etc., is badly finished: poorly sealed windows {therefore dirt everywhere inside the villa} around which you can see light from the outside, light switches that operate nothing, doors that open and close on their own because the supporting wall is not perpendicular. One of the things we are learning of house construction here is that they do not put traps in the drains of bathroom sinks and showers, so some fairly unpleasant odors greet us in the bathrooms {and me with a sensitive nose.} Altogether, though, it is a nice place to live but we feel cut off from the rest of the city. Incidentally, we dress more modestly outside the villa complex than we are in the second shot so as not to give offense to residents of the area.
The currency here is the Iraqi dinar. The exchange rate is about 1,200 dinars to one US dollar so the 25,000 dinar note of which is the third of the above shots is worth about $21.00. When making our first round of grocery purchases it was hard to get used to laying out tens of thousands of dinars without at first having a sense of panic that I have made a mistake, and then having to re-adjust my thinking as to how much things really cost. A 1,000 dinar purchase is less than one dollar. The smallest denomination is 250 dinars, worth about 20 cents US. There are no coins. Cash is used for everything; credit cards simply are not used anywhere {and I am supposed to teach accounting.} I can only imagine the sheer volume of paper money a large store will accumulate in the course of a day’s sales. US dollars are accepted in many stores, as long as we are willing to accept change in dinars.
As the possibility of coming here first presented itself to us, among our earliest concerns was the issue of security. A number of friends and family expressed the same concern. We hear so much about violence in Baghdad, and now most recently in the nearby city of Kirkuk. Suli experienced one suicide bombing a couple of years ago in one of the large western hotels, but otherwise has been free of the kind of violence that the central part of Iraq has experienced. To be sure, American University of Iraq –Sulaimani (henceforth AUIS) takes security seriously and has engaged a number of Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia-turned-army, to staff guard posts at the entrance of the university, where the guards use a mirror mounted on a pole to check for bombs that might have been planted on the underside of a vehicle entering the university grounds. In our villa complex there are Peshmerga guards armed with Russian Kalishnikov rifles at the entrance gate and at each end of the streets of villas occupied by AUIS faculty and staff. They are friendly men and on one occasion we encountered a guard who wanted to practice his English with us. {I hope one of them will allow me to take his picture someday. We have been very careful not to take pictures of a sensitive nature.} But all discussion of guards and security taken into account, we are able to move about without a hint of hostility. The faculty who live in a residential hotel near the university are encouraged to take the 10 minute walk to the university if they prefer not to ride on the minibus that the university provides. We have twice been in a crowded bazaar section of the city and we have walked through a small village near where we live and we have never felt the least threatened. In fact the opposite has occurred. People with some knowledge of English have come to our assistance when we are struggling to make ourselves understood about a particular item we are attempting to purchase. It is too early to make solid pronouncements, but all of the early indications are that as long as we exercise some caution, we will be just fine.We send this first posting with our deep appreciation for your love and friendship and promise that others will follow. If there are aspects of life you are curious about, let us know. I have posted additional pictures at this website:
http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/AdventuresInIraq#

Getting ready to leave

2009-09-02T21:42:00.004-04:00

It is official now: we will be leaving the U.S. on September 13th and arrive in Sulaimani in the morning of September 15th after an overnight stay in Amman, Jordan. So, only 11 more days in the U.S. Carolyn has been hard at work arranging our business affairs so our son Christopher and his wife Bettie can take care of things for us in our absence. It has not been until we think through all of the issues of utilities, insurance, taxes, mail, and house and yard upkeep that we understand how much of our time is taken up with the business of living. I have new appreciation for the efforts of persons who join the Peace Corps or become missionaries for extended periods of time.

We now have our teaching schedules for the fall term. Carolyn will be teaching two sections of managerial accounting and working with the business office operation, and I will be teaching three sections of the second half of their west/world civilization course which is required of all students. Having gotten out of teaching survey courses 20 years ago, I am amazed and impressed with the on-line resources available to professors and students. Nevertheless, I am still bringing with me several hundred digital images on CD-roms to supplement what I do in the classes.

Planning on packing has proven a challenge. We know that there are four distinct seasons in Sulaimani, so we have to bring winter clothes as well as warm weather clothes for the early summer weeks. We have always tried to travel light but on this occasion we will have to be carrying a lot of clothes and other materials needed for living there. The attached photo of our mammoth suicases gives you an idea of how much we will be carrying.

In addition to our personal effects, I intend to bring several books that I need for teaching. Given the weight of books I am forced to keep my wish list of teaching materials short. We have Amazon Kindles for recreational reading and for downloading the Washington Post on a daily basis.

Planning on leaving reminds us of all we will be leaving behind for nine months: family, friends, home, familiar routines, clean water, etc. But we are looking forward with anticipation to the new that will be coming into our lives.

We will send our next post after we arrive in Iraq.

For those wanting to know more about the region where we will be living, you might check out these URLs:

http://www.krg.org/

http://www.theotheriraq.com/

2009-06-23T22:18:00.002-04:00

For those of you who are curious about the university where we will be teaching this fall, here are some videos posted by them telling a bit of their story. http://www.auis.org/index.php/AUI-S-Videos.html

Article about our going to teach in Iraq

2009-05-12T11:06:00.002-04:00

Here is a URL for an article regarding our accepting teaching positions at the American University of Iraq -- Sulaimani.

http://www.anderson.edu/w/uncategorized/2009/carl-and-carolyn-caldwell-to-teach-in-iraq

We will be adding to this blog as we prepare to leave the US in mid-September 2009. In the meantime we've lots of work to do here in Anderson, IN.