Riding in cars with boys with AKs

Last week I was taking a share taxi from Erbil to Duhok, a journey of about two and a half hours made more difficult because of the roundabout journey you have to take to avoid Mosul. Halfway there, my driver decided to switch me to a different taxi because he had to make a detour into dangerous territory. My new driver set off at a breakneck speed, as though someone had challenged him to see how fast he could make the journey. At the last checkpoint before Duhok, we were pulled over for a significantly longer delay than usual.

“Where’s your passport?” the checkpoint officer asked me.

“What?” I responded, blankly. With a residency card, I never travel with my passport, as it’s unnecessary and it seems rather a lot safer to keep it at home. “In Suli,” I said vaguely. The officer frowned. Then he turned to the guys in the backseat. They unfortunately, in addition to not having their passports, appeared to be unregistered refugees or in some similar situation. The three of them (including two younger boys) were pulled out of the cab and questioned by police. In all of the taxis I have ever taken in Kurdistan, no one has ever been removed from a cab and sent back to their starting point with a police escort. Until now.

The changes are subtle, but they’re there. It starts with a vague warning from the government (passed on through various NGO friends) that Da’esh (the derogative term the Kurds and Arabs use for the Islamic State or ISIS, and one that I will happily use if they are insulted by it) is now ‘officially’ targeting civilians and public spaces. Right, avoid the bazaar. We can still go to the beer garden though, right? And it moves from there to canceling plans to travel to areas that may be more dangerous than usual: Halabja, Kalar, Chamchamal.

These warnings frustrate me more than scare me, because in order to do the job I want to do properly and well, those are the places I need to go to. But I still won’t risk it.

And then there is the inevitable guy who squishes into your share taxi and throws his AK in the trunk with your groceries, or just props it against the back of your chair so when you glance back, you realize you’re staring into the barrel of semi-automatic weapon that is clearly loaded. Safety, indeed.

Before I came back to Kurdistan, I was worried about how I would feel here. And for my first few days, I was nervous – to tell drivers making banal conversation where I was from, whether I was married, who I worked for, or to venture into the bazaar on my own. Or take a taxi to a different town I hadn’t visited yet to find information from people I’d only had the vague sense that existed.

These feelings eventually wore off, for the most part. I’ve written before about violence and detachment on here, and that’s not exactly what is happening this time, but rather a certain level of, well, acknowledgement that, yeah, it’s not the same as it was before, that there is a tension now, that yes, things are dangerous, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to leave my house.

To do the job that I want to do, I travel across the region and try to sense these differences in the people that I meet and speak to. Sometimes I feel like there are only so many times I can ask what has changed in the time of conflict, and expect a different answer. And sometimes I can’t believe my own impatience when I ask the eighth or twelfth group of refugees how they feel or what they expect will happen: because of course they all feel lost, and worried, and hope they will be able to return home soon.

I have never, really, been in favour of military intervention in foreign countries. And I expect many people will disagree with me when I state my support now of Western air strikes and military support. Because as much as we can bitch and complain and point out how it’s already the West’s fault for what happened here, that doesn’t matter in the face of events happening today. I have met so many people – so many! – in the last three weeks who have come to Kurdistan with nothing, out of complete and utter fear: Yazidis who barely survived the massacres of Mt. Sinjar; Arabs from Fallujah who are terrified of winter in the mountains and worry they’ll have to return to their city, even though it’s still under siege; kids living in the broken glass and rebar of construction sites without shoes; mountain villagers clearing landmines themselves that have been there for decades, while Da’esh lays new ones in the west; Assyrians who look over the Mosul dam reservoir waiting for the day Da’esh strikes again; those frightened displaced boys in the back of my taxi who were sent back to wherever it is they came from.

And in the face of this, I cannot be against intervention. I am tired of seeing the broken, exhausted faces of people who have nowhere else to go, and I’ve been back less than a month. No matter how you read between the lines, the events happening to the west and south of Kurdistan and across into Syria are horrific. There is no reasonable side to Da’esh. And for those who argue that they arose out of a vacuum left by the last ‘intervention,’ yes, that is true, but that doesn’t help us move towards an end to these atrocities. And to stand by and watch the humanitarian crisis unfold and do nothing – well, inaction, in this case, is only perpetuating the crimes.

I don’t think we should compare horrors that occurred in the past to what is happening today – but for a moment, maybe we should pause and think about Rwanda, or Halabja.

I think humanitarian intervention is a difficult theory and a slippery slope and easy to criticize from the comfort of our homes across the West. But I also deeply believe that nothing will change here unless there is external support. The Iraqi government has already fallen apart, the peshmerga are spread thin, and the Syrian Kurdish rebels are brave as hell but getting tired. I’m starting to get used to that guy in the back of the cab with his AK, and somehow, inexplicably, I’m starting to feel safer for it, even though no part of me ever would before.

I don’t want to live in a world where security is defined that way. It’s completely absurd. But winter is coming, Da’esh is out there, and this isn’t going away.

Mosul dam

Mosul dam outbuilding destroyed in fighting

Outpost at the Mosul dam

Displaced Yazidis in Erbil

Displaced Yazidi boy in Erbil

The war back home

About six weeks ago I was on a train between Vienna and Munich and decided to write something about how I felt leaving Kurdistan, and why I still intended to go back in September – despite the comfort of being on my way home after surviving a horrific gas explosion, and the rising danger of militants throughout the region that are now called the Islamic State.

I wrote about 400 words and then stopped. I couldn’t figure out what was going to come next. I didn’t know what was going to come next. I still don’t know what’s coming or what’s going to happen, and this time I’m writing from an airport, and this time I’m not leaving – I’m on my way back.

The rise of the Islamic State and the violence that first struck Mosul, then Kirkuk, then moved south towards Tikrit and Samarra, and then exploded again with the devastating humanitarian catastrophe that is Mount Sinjar was not something I expected to happen. The week before ISIS struck Mosul I remember being at home in Suli, mildly annoyed by the lack of articles in the Iraq beat of Al-Monitor, an excellent online news source that focuses on the Middle East. One day, there wasn’t anything deemed newsworthy, the next, everything fell apart.

And because so much of it fell apart after my departure on June 20, it was hard to reconcile or understand what was happening in a place I had come to regard as ‘home’.

The representation and accuracy of the conflict in media has been difficult to navigate. Iraq is cited as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists, and the recent deaths of James Foley and Steven Sotleff should be taken seriously. But at the end of June, everything still seemed pretty normal, despite the fact that Kirkuk is only about an hour away from Sulaymaniyah by taxi. I followed the news as I wandered through Europe, but regular updates from friends on the ground in Kurdistan appeared that the conflict was isolated to specific regions, and the interior of Kurdistan was safe and comfortable (or at least, as much as it ever was).

It was the massacre of Yazidi populations west of Mosul in early and mid-August that began to change how I felt about the idea of return, and gave me serious pause – for the first time second-guessing myself and my decision to return. Suddenly, the place that has become my home over the course of the last year might no longer be able to be home.

I skyped with a good friend from Toronto earlier this year – before the explosion, before I was totally disillusioned by teaching. “What will you do next?” she asked me. “I’ll stay here,” I told her, at the time completely believing it. Suli was home, is home, the friends I have there have changed my life in a profound way in the last year.

Finding a home in a place so far removed from where you are from is unique, and the reality of expatriatism is difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it. So when I stood in my mother’s living room one afternoon in August, sobbing as I listened to the events happening on Mt. Sinjar, and reports of US airstrikes across the plains west of Erbil, it was difficult for me to reconcile what I would possibly do if I couldn’t go back, while being overwhelmed by the understanding of what the conflict would mean for the country, for people who have suffered through conflict too many times in their lives.

The most frustrating thing, beyond the reality of the horrors taking place across Iraq and Syria, was that suddenly everyone was an expert. We had to rely on foreign media outlets in the West to tell us what was happening in a place I still regarded as home, and syphoning between the realities of the situation with media sensationalizing was exasperating*. When another friend asked me, in the context of an interview, who we should be looking to for quality journalism in the region, I named my friends who have been reporting on Kurdistan, from within Kurdistan, for significantly longer than the last few months. They are the quality storytellers whose work will last.

 

I’ve been away from Kurdistan now for almost three months. Much has changed for me, and for the country, but in many ways, much will be the same. It’s not a choice I’ve made lightly, and the number of times I’ve reassured friends and family that I’ll be okay, that I’m not going looking for trouble – well, I’ve lost count. Each time I assure someone, some small part of me wonders whether I’m making the right choice.

That being said, as I’ve slowly made my way back from Winnipeg to Toronto to London, I’m reminded by why I love Suli, why I love Kurdistan, why I want to be there, and why I think it’s important to share those stories. At the same time, I’ve finally been able to realize that home isn’t a single location, and you don’t have to tie yourself to any specific place. And that I’ll know when it’s time to go.

 

 

*I should note here that I don’t mean that media sensationalized the threat or overwhelming violence of ISIS. I mean, rather, this rather maddening habit to say an entire region is exploding when it’s isolated to very specific areas. Iraq, and Iraqi Kurdistan, both cover a lot of space, and it’s not all covered in extremists.

Girl(s) on fire

I was really organized last week. It was Tuesday, what is usually the longest and most frustrating day of my week, but I managed to win over all my classes and came home satisfied with a day well spent. I came home and made a list of things I needed to finish that week. Return materials to school in anticipation of the end of term. Find flights for the summer. Book vacation in Turkey with my mother. Prepare gardening project for the refugee camp on Saturday. Finish marking exams. Prepare a game for reading club on Wednesday.

Cranking tunes, I chopped veggies in my tiny, narrow kitchen, mentally preparing to apply for a few jobs that were closing at the end of the week. On my gas stove, I already had onions started, and filled up a pot to boil water. I turned the gas on the middle burner for the water, and lit the hob.

Gas fire always has that nice, hot look to it, doesn’t it? Orange and blue. I love how fast the heat comes. So much more efficient than an electric stove. I watched the burner circle catch flame. Then there was a whooshing noise. Fire rippled down the stove towards the front. Then there was a bigger whoosh and … that was it. Just orange and blue flame all around me. In front of me, beside me, on me. I could see, I couldn’t see. It was hot, it wasn’t. It was an abrupt, massive flash, and I was in it.

You never expect the kind of horrific accidents you hear about or read about all the time to happen to you. Hell, with all of my ridiculous stories, my ventures into mine fields, my narrow escapes from drug smugglers and gun-wielding hotel room invaders, from suicidal taxi drivers in multiple countries, from motorbike rides on Asian highways, I was pretty sure that when it was my turn to go, I would at least get a good story out of it for my obituary. I didn’t think it would be a freak gas explosion and a kitchen fire. Because I was pretty sure, in that moment, that that was it. I was done, I’d been this far, I’d be gone at 27 in the most common, and the most unlikely of ways.

My kitchen is too narrow to jump back. I turned, horrified, on fire, or something, I couldn’t tell, couldn’t sense, didn’t know. Ran the 10 feet to the end of the kitchen and into the larger living room. Fell to my knees yelling something, a pile of ash fell from my face.

Get up. Shower. Water. Stumbled to my feet, wondering if my face had melted, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I got in the shower, I was still there, hair hanging in limp, charred chunks around my face, everything smelling of burning. Jumped in the shower, shaking, ripped off my shirt and a necklace, with the odd clarity of knowledge that happens to you in moments of extreme danger, knowing that I could not let my clothes stick to my burns. Everything seemed fine on my torso, but skin was hanging off my hands and wrists and forearms in alarming, pale lumps. My feet were burning burning burning at the bottom of my jeans, but nothing else seemed hurt. I put my face under the water, crying, knowing I needed more help. My phone was in my back pocket. I pulled it out with shaking hands, trying to call my friend because I don’t know what Kurdish 911 is. But I couldn’t do it, I was about to go into shock, I knew this, I was hysterical. I left my bathroom, stumbling to open my apartment door, pulling myself through, falling onto my knees because of the pain in my feet, sure that now that I was somehow, magically, still alive, I was absolutely going to be disfigured, possibly about to faint, screaming for someone to help me.

My neighbours, a family of doctors who speak perfect English, were serendipitously coming up the stairs. They rose magnificently to the occasion, taking me in, calming me down in the bathroom as I wept and screamed and shook, called 911, got in touch with the friends I had tried uselessly to call, and got me safely on a stretcher, carried down 3 flights of stairs because it wouldn’t fit in the elevator, and in an ambulance in about 15 minutes.

 

In moments like this, you kind of assume your body will let you check out. I desperately willed myself to lose consciousness, so it didn’t hurt anymore. I didn’t want to know or to remember any of this. But everything remained clear, focused, indescribably painful, even when I closed my eyes in the ambulance and was rolled into emergency.

 

The burns I sustained are superficial, which is basically a nice way of saying I didn’t need skin grafts. They are deep second-degree burns, and 11-days on, there is still painful, raw skin on my feet, though the rest have scabbed over and are now itchy as fuck. I am walking again, as of two days ago I don’t need to use a straw to drink anymore. I know exactly how lucky I am to be alive, to get through this with minimal scarring – I hardly lost any hair (though regrowing my bangs will look weird and take months), I recognize myself again, my face and neck somehow, impossibly, the least serious of my injuries, making me just look like I currently have a wicked sunburn and small, fresh new eyebrows.

The first question people have asked me, after how it happened, is why I’m staying in Kurdistan to recover. To me, the idea of leaving right now is sort of preposterous. Traveling home is too massive an undertaking to consider, I’ll return for my intended visit as I always planned in August. The other option was flying to Jordan or Turkey for treatment.

But here’s the thing – aside from having truly wonderful friends who cared for me my first week better than any hospital I could have paid for – Kurdistan is actually really good at treating burn survivors.

It is common knowledge here, and a quick Google search will turn up articles as recent as the past week on the BBC and Al-Monitor and an Economist report from March that an alarming number of women self-immolate in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Every day when I visit the burn unit for treatment, the majority of the other people recovering are women. And the majority have vastly worse injuries than I do. Today I walked into physio and saw one woman whose entire face, torso and arms were fully bandaged. The women have burned faces, burns that run up their arms to their shoulders, cover their thighs and bellies down to their feet. But while I rock up to the burn unit in wholly inappropriate tank tops and skirts because the idea of wearing more clothing when I feel this way is unbearable, they are always carefully and beautifully clothed in long dresses with hijab.

It is this clothing that creates such a great danger to these women. Often made out of cheaper fabrics and polyesters, a woman leaning over a lit burner on a stove has barely a chance before her dress catches and she is engulfed in flames. For the women for whom this is an accident, it is terrifying. For the women for whom this is on purpose, one assumes they hope it will be quick.

Self-immolation is, tragically, a popular way to commit suicide among Kurdish women. It indicates the deeply problematic home situations faced by many wives and mothers, for whom this is the only way out. Women are often confined to the home, and a death by fire can be easily excused as a cooking accident, ensuring she will not be stigmatized after she is gone. Those who survive will rarely admit their actions were taken on purpose – when I explained the stove explosion to my doctors, they acknowledged this with minimal surprise, so common is it an answer.

The Economist writes that self-immolation accounts for over half of all female suicide attempts in Kurdistan, and quotes Kurdish NGO WADI that the majority of families have experienced someone attempting it. Al Monitor notes that more than 1000 women in Kurdistan have died from self-immolation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. I have never visited a burn unit before I started going to the one here, but every day it is full, and far too many patients are women. Maybe I am naïve in thinking that this is not the case in other countries, but it just seems impossible. Every day with the regular ones who were burned in a similar time period to me, there are new faces, new desperate cries from the bathroom, from the bandaging room, whose injuries I catch glimpses of in a clinic that seems far too small for the number of people requiring its services. There are children, for sure, and men here and there. But for the first time since I have arrived in Kurdistan, I have found a place that is not a private home where the majority of people are women. And it’s the burn unit. It just seems so monstrously fucked up.

 

My own efforts towards rehabilitation have been long and slow and painful, but they are paying off. The dread and pain I faced in the first few days of being unwrapped and washed and re-bandaged have given way to a sort of eager examination, to see what new changes have happened to my burned skin overnight, how much I’ve been able to heal since yesterday. Every day everything gets a little bit easier; my physiotherapists are thrilled by my progress, and, I think, my commitment. So I cannot imagine going through the sort of accident I went through on purpose: self-immolating, dealing with that initial pain, then not dying, and then having to face the agonizing journey to a recovery you never wanted to have.

Reducing gender-based violence in Kurdish Iraq is something that requires further effort and commitment. And, despite my own experience being terrifying and awful and totally accidental, I feel, in some way, as though it has granted me insight to a part of the society I live in that I would never have had access to before.

As I heal, and see some of the same women every day in physio, we smile through burned faces and acknowledge each other, no matter how much or how little effort we’re putting into our recovery. Because whether or not our trials by fire were accidental or planned, at this stage, we’re all in it together to get through, to get out, and to face another day.

A cynic’s view of elections, or, gunfire and fireworks: An expat guide to living through a foreign vote

In the weeks leading up to the Iraqi elections – the first since the withdrawal of American forces in 2011 – downtown Suli was a riotous celebration of democracy. Or something. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway. Any evening of the week, you could sit on a patio or rooftop on Salim Street – the main drag – and watch every car and truck in the city drive by: horns blaring, music blasting, flags fluttering in the warm night air, people hanging out of every window, setting off fireworks from inside their vehicles.

As Election Day neared, things started to get a little out of hand. We were given a day off school, and a video of Mam Jalal casting an absentee ballot in Germany went viral, causing such intense celebrations in town that 11 people including a female university student and a child were hit by accidental celebratory bullets flying wildly through the air. Sixty meters from my compound on the edge of the city, the friend of a coworker stepped out to buy a watermelon and was shot in the neck, someone said. That afternoon, as gunfire went off all over the city, all of the children at school who take the bus home were put under temporary lockdown. Ten minutes later when it seemed to subside however, everyone shrugged and went cheerfully home as usual. A violent thunderstorm broke later that night, which seemed an ominous beginning.

Weekend plans to travel to northern Iraq were cancelled as rumours spread that Iraqi airspace and borders were closing in the 24 hours before the election, and we wondered how on earth we would spend our four day weekend, trapped in Suli, in 30 degree weather.

The morning of dawned clear, and despite dreaming of air raid sirens in the early hours, all seemed quiet. I spent the first part of the day reading up on the predictions and various Al-Jazeera, Rudaw, and New Yorker analyses of Maliki, of Kurdistan, of the unrest that seemed imminent.

And then… well, nothing really seemed to happen.

election afternoon

 

It was hot, it’s always hot, and we drifted to the brand new Shari Zwuan, the multi-million dollar Grand Millennium Hotel that recently opened because we heard their new bar was swell. In the taxi on the way, my friend suddenly asked whether the biggest, brightest hotel in Suli was really the best idea; who knew how many politicians and targets would be hanging out there as well? Ah, too late, onwards into the stifling city.

While we lingered in the lobby, a concierge who had just moved here asked where people go to hang out and have fun in the city. We shrugged, hotel bars? Such is the obnoxious life of an expat, where we seem suddenly allowed to lie around these luxury establishments where I would never think to wander in to at home, simply because we’re foreign, we’re here, we sort of have the money (or we can pretend to). The afternoon drifted into evening and the first pop-pop-pop sounds in the city began. Ah, we nodded, knowingly, gunshots. It was expected, after all. But wait, no, just some boring fireworks, set off around the headquarters of the ruling party. We watched, distracted by conversation, mostly disinterested.

We convinced the concierge to give us the wifi password, but the news still seemed quiet. We got drunk on expensive patio beers and I wound up at a friends house, much later, on the edge of the city, dancing on a balcony in the early hours of the morning while the rest of Suli contentedly and quietly slept off their day at the polls. The fireworks subsided, and maybe we were playing the music too loud, but the gunshots seemed to be gone.

I was planning to write something academic on the elections. Talk to some Kurdish friends about how they voted, and why they voted, and what they expected. What does it mean. But that really isn’t my story, is it? I’m just here, lingering, not allowed to be political, because everyone I teach is the child of someone important or rich (the same thing, let’s be real), so why not tell it like it was. We got day drunk, watched some crappy fireworks, and all the wonder and curiosity and hope that leads up to every election seems to dissipate the next day.

Because that hope always disappears doesn’t it? How many elections have I experienced, where the political nerd and human rights side of me obsesses and reads and writes and expects something. In 2007 I went to Obama primaries in North Carolina, completely in awe of the change that I thought he would bring. In 2010 I had my passport, money, and a change of underwear in a bag at my front door, just in case the Canadian consulate called to airlift us out of the Sri Lankan elections. In 2011 I was actively involved in the Vote Mob fervor that swept Canada. In 2013 I was an international observer in Cambodia, on the tense Vietnamese border. Hell, I was devastated when Judy Wasylycia-Leis lost to Sam Katz (still, whyyyy) in Winnipeg’s 2010 municipal elections.

Each time, I hope for and expect some great change, each time the weeks or months leading up are fraught with tension, with worries, with gossipy rumours, often with violence (as the decapitated soldiers in eastern Sri Lanka, or the cars on fire in Cambodia have showed me). But the next day, everyone just goes to work as usual, and continues on their way (okay, unless you’re in Ukraine).

Election flags hang above the Suli bazaar weeks ago

 

At school yesterday I wondered aloud who had won here in Kurdistan, because I simply just lost track. I remember when we did our Vote Mob in Winnipeg for the federal election, and everyone was so confident that the youth vote numbers would be so impressive, that we would finally show our government that we matter. Did Statistics Canada ever actually release them? Did we ever talk about them? As we wait for the numbers and the change, we sort of just lose interest again, forgetting, until the next time we are expected to practice our civic duty to cast our ballot, when our sense of righteous indignation emerges (“how dare our leaders get away with the things they get away with,” right, Rob Ford?).

But I guess, our civic duty only matters when it matters. The rest of the time we just float away and get on with the parts of our life that we think matter more.

Democracy is broken, and not just because more people die in an election year in some countries because of celebrations than of anything else (someone told me that recently). Democracy is broken because we only care when we care. And the rest of the time we let corruption and apathy get the best of us.

The New Yorker’s article last week on the Iraq-US relationship got a lot of things, unfortunately, right: that the whole process is flawed because a puppet administration here is supported by another broken administration across the world. You can’t just wander into a country and have a war and then wander away and in your wake say BAM! DEMOCRACY – YER GO. And you can’t give that hand in hand with capitalism either, because those two theories are simply incompatible.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to get at here. But maybe that my residual guilt of spending election day drinking at a hotel and then partying on a balcony (for reasons totally unrelated to the election) are misplaced. Because why not? Why hope for change and difference and a future with a real promise when tomorrow everything will be the same anyway. We may as well make the most of it while we can.

Hasankeyf matters, or how Iraq is running out of water

The way we came to Hasankeyf was from the southwest, winding up the long Tigris River valley from Mardin in southern Turkey. We were stopping for lunch in the small, picturesque town on the ancient river – heart of an ancient civilization – after spending a couple of days perched in Mardin, drinking afternoon beers on the edge of Mesopotamia (it felt), or on the edge of the world – the Syrian war a distant but tangible thing on the long, hazy plains beneath us.

Arriving in Hasankeyf and wandering its main little lane, lined with shops and a few cafes that dangle precipitously over the river, it’s easy to get lost in its charm. Enthusiastic carpet sellers and rug makers, blanket weavers and others selling a hundred unnecessary souvenirs linger in front of their stalls, while behind them, a cliff dotted with the remains of an ancient city reminds you that despite its village charm, Hasankeyf was once the heart of something much, much bigger.

Which is why it’s a serious bummer that in less than six months, the whole place will be gone, flooded by the dammed Tigris to create a large reservoir in the heart of southern Anatolia.

The worst part about this is that the loss of a gem like Hasankeyf is only the tip of the iceberg.

The systematic damming of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers across southern Turkey has been happening for a century, leading to the disappearance of, I’m sure, a number of lovely and archeologically interesting towns and river valleys. But of equal concern (though perhaps an archaeologist would argue with me here), it has been subsequently decreasing the annual inflow of fresh water to Iraq.

A few weeks ago I attended the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani’s second Sulaimani Forum. The Forum is designed to address a wide range of topics facing Iraq and particularly Kurdistan. Panelists were members of government, local and foreign academics, NGO representatives, and journalists. I attended panels on Iraq oil policy and its ramifications on regional stability, on the future of ethno-sectarian conflicts in the Middle East, and, especially, on water as an instrument for cooperation across the region.

The conference was well organized and moderated, and the panel on water was particularly illuminating because it shed light on two specific facts that I had never heard, and was subsequently horrified by, care of Andrea Cattarossi of MED Ingegneria.

The first was that in seven to ten years, Iraq is going to run out of fresh water.

The second was that Iraq is losing two per cent of agricultural land to desertification every year.

Think about both of these for a moment.

Seven to ten years of water and then… what? It’s seems incredible that in a country where oil, gas, and water all cost about the same, the one we take most for granted is the one that is going to go first. It also makes me feel incredibly guilty about the fact that my toilet’s been running for days and I have yet to fix it.

The water crisis doesn’t just mean an end to drinkable, useable water. It means a steep decline in agriculture, in food security, in village health. There is already a water scarcity at the village level, and this is only going to get sharply worse in the next few years. This is clear when I visit the bazaar – the majority of the produce I buy there has been imported from Turkey or Iran. In fact, Kurdistan already imports most of the things it needs. Oil is obviously the one glaring exception in this – and the most profitable export to the region – but oil production also requires water for the refinement process.

It just seems incredible that the place where agriculture arguably was born is, with the loss of its water, about to lose all ability to produce much of anything.

Obviously Turkey’s stance on water isn’t the only thing contributing to this; decades of war and violent conflict and precarious governments and shady corporations and the Oil for Food program have all contributed to the decline of agriculture throughout the region. But all of those issues can, through time, be navigated. As a natural resource, the loss of water will be as devastating as any of these, and the impact will have equally great, or larger consequences.

All of the panelists discussing this issue at the Suli Forum called for immediate attention to the loss of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers across Iraq, but no one seemed to have a plan for where to begin. Turkey, clearly, is completing the Ilisu Dam without much discussion about how this will impact Kurdistan – or at least not in anything I’ve read. It doesn’t appear to be an alarming or pressing issue to anyone except those running the #hasankeyfmatters campaign.

But it’s clear that something has to be done: because the loss of this little town on the edge of the Tigris in southern Turkey is actually about the loss of something much greater. Its ancient history will have something in common with our current history – both disappearing because of the arrogance of humans who have put their present before a longer, richer future, and who will then wonder when we fail nature how we’ve lost.

 

What we don’t talk about when we talk about landmines in Iraq

Last Wednesday was “Fancy Hat Day” at school. Kids came in wearing homemade hats of every size and shape, some covered in plastic fruit and candy bars, others with giant butterflies and balloons and glitter, some with dinosaurs and army figurines pasted to them, one even had her mother, a baker, bake her a hat out of bread, finished with a pastry braid around the edge and tiny bread butterflies off the top. It was rather impressive. And one of the kids, whose dad works in mine action, wore a paper top hat covered with pictures of landmines, cluster munitions, and danger signs. “It’s about awareness,” his father stressed to the child’s teacher.

Thrilled, I took a picture, and promised to post it the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

 

 

Because here’s the thing: I never, ever hear anyone talking about landmines in Iraq unless a) I bring it up, or else b) they’re one of my friends working in commercial mine action (who I actively seek and out and probably drive crazy with my questions and curiosities).

For the last few weekends, in an effort to take advantage of the warm February Iraqi weather, I’ve been going on hikes with some friends. One Sunday for an unexpected school holiday we went to the Iranian border town of Tawela. Another time we visited the site of the ancient stone carving of Naram-Sin in the mountains about an hour south of Sulaymaniyah – an adventure which took us up a dirt road off the empty highway and deep into a craggy mountain, still slippery with fading snow. On both occasions, between the jokes and snacks and photos, there was a nagging worry in the back of my mind. I winced when our driver, who was scrambling over rocks with us, lost his footing and skidded across loose, gritty limestone to grab a tree and stop from falling into the gully; and again later when we wandered off the path to find a place on the side of the hill to take a pee. At any moment I have a bad habit of expecting the worst to happen. Because I can never really stop thinking about the reality of unexploded ordnance wherever I go. And in Iraq, it’s particularly bad.

It’s difficult to find an updated estimate of how much land remains to be cleared in Iraq and how many landmines are supposedly still in the ground. The Landmine Monitor, though excellently run by the ICBL (I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure to speak with a number of their researchers in Cambodia, Thailand, and Iraq, and all of them are wonderfully thorough in their work) is brief in its discussion of the issues, and its last update was apparently a year and a half ago. But, in conversation with people working in the industry, the number is appalling – thousands for sure, possibly millions.

My frustration by the incomplete nature of the data is further aggravated by the lack of reporting in regards of to ERW. And this is because the UXO issue in Iraq is incredibly complicated. The long history of laying mines across a number of wars, as well as the separated government administrations of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, and finally the fact that commercial companies have a much larger presence in clearance than humanitarian agencies all contribute to a confusing and tangled nature of mine action here.

In addition to the Iraq Mine Clearance Organization (the national organization for clearance in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan), there are a few other humanitarian mine action agencies conducting clearance including Mines Advisory Group and Norwegian People’s Aid. These organizations report their clearance statistics to the Monitor every year. But there are an even greater number of commercial clearance companies, and they are not required to report their activities. This leads to incomplete clearance maps across Iraq, and leaves a possibility that the same ground will be cleared again, wasting time and resources. This is because humanitarian clearance must adhere to a set of international regulations and standards – and as commercial companies are not required to do so (because they haven’t signed any international treaties), humanitarian agencies cannot, with any authority, report an area that was cleared by a commercial company as safe because of the differing clearance standards.

This is more frustrating for the accuracy of reporting, rather than for actual clearance – because the commercial companies mainly work for oil companies. This means they literally bid on minefields to clear as quickly as possible so the land can be immediately drilled. Humanitarian agencies clear land with a different priority in mind – mainly that it will be safe for civilians. But this isn’t necessarily black and white either. Because in addition to this, the US State Department provides much of the funding for humanitarian Iraqi mine clearance, and their priority is to clear ERW leftover by American troops, which means whole areas of, for example, Iranian ERW may be left in the ground and put much further down the list of priority clearance, even if they are contaminating an area of greater danger to civilians. The whole process is incredibly politicized. Though I’ve been told as well that Kurdistan is considerably more organized in its mine action than southern Iraq, which sounds like a bit of a mess. When commercial interests cross with humanitarian ones, things get confusing. And all of these factors contribute to a hugely complicated issue right across the country.

The last – and I think most glaring – difficulty in determining the size of Iraq’s ERW problem is a complete lack of accident reports. Whenever a landmine incident happens in, say, Cambodia, the Cambodia Campaign to Ban Landmines knew about it immediately, either through the HALO Trust or through the Cambodia Mine Action Centre. The newspapers (including two English language papers) always reported accidents, and they were immediately circulated on international listservs. I am still on those listservs, as well as subscribing to a number of local news sources and news alerts. I have never heard of a landmine accident in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Are they not happening?” I asked a friend in the industry.

“They are definitely happening,” he replied.

Civilian interactions with ERW and UXO resulting in casualties and death happen on a regular basis – especially in the border regions and especially to shepherds. Where were these mystery landmines, then? I wondered. They are literally all around us. Sulaymaniyah down to Halabja is heavily mined, as well the entire Iran-Iraq border all the way south to Basra. In addition to the thousands and thousands of mines laid along trench lines during the Iran-Iraq war (yeah, trench lines, I didn’t know that’s how that war was mostly fought either), Saddam Hussein’s troops laid mines haphazardly throughout the region, sometimes apparently throwing them out of helicopters – meaning they may not be properly set, but that there’s still a shitload of live munitions scattered across the countryside. Lately, marine clearance in the south in gaining popularity as well.

Anyway, all this means that maybe my paranoia when we go hiking is somewhat merited. Whenever we consider heading off the path, I text a friend in commercial mine action (who is also ex-military) to ask him about the landmine situation where we are, and he always immediately orders me to get the fuck back on the path. And he would know.

So it worries me that we don’t talk about ERW here, that it’s so easy to forget about this global catastrophe as soon as I leave mine action and work in something else, for even a little while. I suppose in Iraq we are distracted by the car bombs in town and the pipeline sabotage in Kirkuk, and the explosions that rocked Baghdad’s Green Zone a few weeks ago; the landmines, no matter how ubiquitous, aren’t really our most pressing issue. But if Cambodia and my friends at the CCBL taught me anything, it’s that they should be. Because even the smallest, flimsiest, little plastic bombs that look like toys have a life-changing impact. And until we start talking about them here, they’re not going to be an issue. So I’m going to print out the picture of the kid wearing the landmine hat and put it in my classroom. Because that’s the best place I can start.

 

On violence and detachment

After five years of undergrad and then another year of graduate studies, I have a tendency to think about and understand concepts and places theoretically. When I think about power, it’s in a Foucauldian sense. When I think about feminism I think about systemic oppression. And when I think about violence, I usually have a tendency to think about it structurally. Which is why it can feel a little surreal when you are faced with the reality of violent conflict directly in the place you live.

It’s easy to pretend we live in a bubble here on the outskirts of Suli in Kurdistan. I live in an apartment complex about a three-minute walk down a hill from the school where I work, in a sort of incredibly-poor-security compound (there aren’t really gates, and most of the fences are broken). Many of my friends live up here as well. Life is pretty quiet – during the week I may nip down to the bazaar or go for a walk down the road, or we’ll catch a cab to favourite watering holes. I don’t really leave the confines of the city during the week, as school simply takes up too much time.

But in the two months since I’ve lived in Kurdistan, two car bombs have gone off within the city limits of Suli – widely perceived to be the safest and most liberal city in the region. The first one was barely reported, and mostly made its rounds through rumours. I believed it when I saw the old men at the front of our compound using a mirror to check under approaching cars. The second bomb was barely reported. No one mentioned it; I think I read it on a newsfeed.

The fact that no one spoke about them surprised me – especially in my workplace. In fact, we only brought the incidents up when darkly joking that maybe school would be cancelled the next day because of the risk (it wasn’t). They happened, I read about them in passing, and moved on.

Every once in a while, a truckload of heavily armed military police will pop up and make a checkpoint on the main ring road around the city – though they usually just wave you through. Last week a group of them were outside of my apartment building, and I wondered idly who was visiting that merited that kind of security.

A few weekends ago we drove out to the lake at Dukan to rent cabins. It is beautiful, desolate country, all bare mountains and rocky highway. On the way, we were searched at a checkpoint (“Don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine, they just do this sometimes,” my friend assured me as we were ordered to clamber out of the van. And we were.), and later we passed the prison where Saddam Hussein was kept before his execution. A fortress on the edge of his world, really – I told a friend in Winnipeg about the way it is perched at the foot of the empty mountains and he remarked how almost cartoonish that description was. Exactly the place you’d expect such a man to end up – but a place that seemed so otherworldly to me I could hardly believe we passed it so casually.

I just saw a headline by a local news source describing three separate explosions in Kirkuk today that killed four and wounded 10 others. I skimmed it briefly, without much feeling, actually, despite the fact that we drove through the unsettling haze of Kirkuk’s desolate, rocky fields full of fires from the oil wells twice this weekend on the way to and from Erbil for a weekend to relax and visit friends. Kirkuk is about an hour away.

Even when I visit Arbat refugee camp outside the city and chat with the people there about their lives in Syria, how they got out, and how they found their families, what they feel about their possibility of return – the violence of their reality is separate from who I am and what I’m doing here, in many ways. I asked a Syrian social worker in the refugee camp yesterday how aware he thinks the children there are of their situation; of what they’ve left behind and where they are. “Of course they are aware,” he told me, and I felt like an idiot, because of course he was right, and it’s ignorant of me to assume they do not. Children may be able to lose themselves in the games we play with them, but they have all been direct witnesses to the violent conflict in their country. Despite the fact that the kids in my class here in Suli are more likely to steal stickers and tell on and one-up each other in their stories of vacations or how many iPads they have.

But maybe that is why my bubble seems so impenetrable. It’s crazy to me that it can be so easy to avoid the reality of violence, of living in a heavily militarized state, that I could easily just walk up and down the hill to school every day and rarely encounter it. It almost seems like you have to go looking for it to understand it, and yet, it’s still around us all the time. Like last week when visiting a favourite place for beers in town, my friend and I started chatting to one of the bartenders – a man with a quick grin and a ready hand to crack you another Heineken the moment you require. It turns out he fled Syria’s war last year, and is now only one of the many, many displaced Syrian Kurds who struggle to reconcile their new life in Iraqi Kurdistan with their inability to return home.

To be here and yet not here is maybe the reality of life as an expat. You witness the events around you, and yet you can sort of float through, untouched by them. Or as touched by them as you allow yourself to be. There is a strange space between being interested and aware and involved and letting that completely envelop you (and emotionally destroy you), and being interested and aware and involved and believing you are immune to the events around you. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out your place in that space. Because despite the fact that I can live here and border Syria and meet its people and drive through Kirkuk and ignore the trucks full of soldiers everywhere and pass Saddam Hussein’s prison and stay off the landmine-infested hills and makes obnoxious bets in Erbil about whether or not the explosion we just heard at 2am was, in fact, a bomb – I will always have an out as long as I live here. And though I roll my eyes with everyone else whenever my residency card is requested at a military checkpoint, because I’m annoyed that he’s slowing us down on our way back to make pizza at home or something, I know how infinitely easier my life is because I have it and a foreign passport.

And when we ran into a young British couchsurfer who casually intended to travel through Syria, I could confidently tell him he was an idiot.

When I left Sri Lanka, I left devastated by the stories I heard and the work I did – unable to detach myself from what was happening around me. Since then I have learned how to separate my own feelings from the realities of other people around me (local or foreign). But in theorizing violence, isn’t there a danger too of pushing yourself too far away from the events you witness? I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. I have a tendency to do that, too. I guess for starters, I just need to break out of the bubble more often, to worry less about how many pages of math and comprehension I have to get through with my class tomorrow, and remember that I came here because I want to learn about a place, and to understand it as best as I can.

Lake Dukan

Afternoon tea at Arbat refugee camp

What I’ve learned about imperialism from Grade 4

The week before winter holidays, I was asked last-minute to cover a class for another teacher. Handed a brief outline of the lesson (“Age of Exploration and the Spice Trade”), and the class textbook, I left the cozy confines of the infant department – where, contrary to anyone’s expectations, I have become surprisingly comfortable – and headed to the main atrium of the school. Enter: Grade 4.

I realize, obviously, that most teachers start out as substitutes, and this sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants with a class you have never met before is a thing you just get used to. I mean, I think. I don’t really know. They don’t teach you how to be an elementary school teacher in the politics department.

But the thing I forgot about after spending every day with 6-year-olds who screw up their faces in concentration while they struggle to explain in English when they need to use the toilet, or require an eraser, is that when you enter a room of excitable 11-year-olds, they can actually talk back to you. Whatever, I thought. It’s one period. Our curriculums are organized in such a way we basically are told which pages are taught every week, and you teach it appropriately. Anybody should really be able to teach anything, because of this. How bad could it be?

So there I was, with a 45-minute class ahead of me on the spice trade and the Age of Exploration. I asked one of the kids to read aloud so I could covertly borrow a workbook from another and scan the questions I was supposed to be using to teach the material. Which meant I was a little caught off guard when the student reached the part about how shipping routes were introduced as an alternative to land routes because “the Turks and the Tartars” effectively ended the caravans.

Wait, what?

One of the students already had his hand in the air, “Miss, what are ‘Turks and Tartars’?”

There are two things I want to note here. First is my frustration with an American syllabus that, though designed for international schools primarily in the Middle East, is so obviously Western in structure and content that grade one gets taught phrases like “Tom likes to play baseball.” Tom isn’t really a name that catches the ears of Kurdish kids. Neither are Jack, Joan, Meg, or Pam. And shouldn’t Tom be playing football, the most universal of sports?

Second is the ongoing realization of just how Western-centric my/our education is, and the impact that has on myself, and the world around me. This is sort of a wonder to me: that I could spend so much time in university challenging myself to understand alternate histories and frameworks and ways of understanding power, only to come here and be surprised by the fact that the dominant narrative is still being taught. I feel naïve for assuming otherwise – that my personal route through political theory would magically be reflected in the mass reproduction of the American elementary school system for use overseas.

But none of this can take away from the fact that an 11-year old Arab kid just asked my what a Turk was.

“Um, it’s not really a word we should be using – it was about people who lived under the Ottoman Empire, during this period…” I start, stumbling, hugely uncomfortable. How do you announce to a class that their textbook, because of where it’s from, is using a derogatory word used to describe, basically, some sort of gross assumption that there was an ‘uncivilized’ (wtf does that mean anyway. Screw you, Europe) horde of mounted, barbaric militants in the 14^th to 17^th centuries chasing down nice, organized European merchants who just wanted to bring home some silk and cinnamon? Because that’s exactly what the damn book was doing.

You can’t really pause for more than about 15 or 20 seconds when you teach elementary school. Do I open up a conversation about how the words we use to describe peoples and cultures change the way we think about them? How language impacts our politics? Devin, they’re in grade four.

But it was too late, 10-year-olds catch on quick.

“Turks are from Turkey?” one asked.

“He’s a Turk then!” Another gleefully pointed at the sole Turkish kid in the class.

The kid grinned and announced, “Yeah, I’m from Turkey!”

“Well, they’re not words we use anymore,” I said, trying to keep the conversation from unraveling.

To my deep shame, I decided to power on through with the curriculum, instead of stopping to let the kids discuss the angle the textbook was taking to describe the “Near and Far East”. Where the fuck was Edward Said when I needed him.

“Basically, groups of people in this region,” I pointed vaguely to central Asia and Iran, “attacked the merchant caravans, so they started using ships instead,” I said. Just like that, I skimmed over a few centuries of resulting imperialism and orientalism, and moved on, because I wanted to finish the questions before the end of class. I sort of hated myself.

What I find most difficult to come to terms with is that all of this deprives the children here, the children directly from this area that I vaguely indicated on the map, the knowledge of their own rich history – minimalizing that whole history into a few groups of brigands whose apparent sole purpose was to prevent European traders from reaching their destinations. I was furious, and couldn’t decide whether I was more angry at the book or at myself.

“Look!” I said, distracted, “the trading routes go right through where we are. It doesn’t show Sulaymaniyah, but who can show me where Baghdad is on the map?”

 

This class epitomizes my struggle with what I do, and how I do it. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had reservations about teaching English overseas. Part of me is sure that it only perpetuates a modern impression of imperialism. But… I’m here anyway. And I’m incredibly happy here. And I don’t know what that says about me.

When I live and travel in places far from home, I am always reminded that the stories we tell are our own stories, and that part of the reason I like to be in these other places is that I am finally offered some small insight into someone else’s narrative. I worry that when we teach from the perspective of the spice trade, or the age of exploration, that narrative begins to disappear. Travel allows us to realize that the world is a smaller place than we thought it was; but maybe it’s because we’re making it smaller when we lose these other narratives.

Travel is a selfish thing – both individualized and inward-looking as it tries to understand concepts of other, this focus on the question of how do I fit into this place. But at the same time, if those other narratives are able to be told and explored and understood, then we can keep asking questions, and keep hearing other stories, and keep wondering at other languages.

I shouldn’t be surprised that the age of exploration is being taught from the perspective of the West to children living in this part of the world, because I know that imperialism is still happening in a thousand different ways. But I am surprised, because the story from their perspective is actually exciting as hell, and I’m sad they don’t have the chance in this curriculum to learn that side of the story. What frustrates me further is that it feels like the curriculum is actively keeping that side from them. And I don’t know how to get around that in my job.

I returned to the infant department after class, and instead of having my class learn about family members by describing Jack and Tom and Meg’s families, I asked them to write about their own, so we learned about Farah and Saro and Hozyar’s families, and they finally were able to learn the words for sister and brother and mother that we had been struggling with all week. They finished the day happy, and I reconciled myself with the small victory.

But I realized that the next time I get asked who the ‘Turks and Tartars’ were, I’m going to be able to tell everyone to close their books, and answer it the way I should have.

Dance like nobody’s watching (because nobody is): an afternoon at Arbat refugee camp

Early yesterday afternoon in the clear, bright winter light of the school yard, my grade 1s were suddenly all calling my name. “Miss Devin! Miss Devin!” They pulled me over to the corner of the yard where they have a view of the low mountains surrounding Suli’s gentle valley, and pointed excitedly. The tops of the mountains were dusted with snow, and my students were thrilled.

An article went around the internet in the last day or so – photos of various cities in the Middle East covered in snow. It’s a common aspect of winter here in northern Iraq, but there’s something a little surreal about seeing photos of palm trees sagging and wet with the new snow. It makes for some beautiful scenes.

The photos I was struck by weren’t the ones of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, or the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but the ones of Syrian rebels in Aleppo, firing from under sagging orange trees, and a man and his child in a refugee camp in Aleppo. Because as pretty as the photos of our major landmarks are, I cannot begin to imagine how uncomfortable heavy, slushy snow becomes when you live in a refugee camp.

I visited one in the pouring rain last weekend, and that was bad enough.

The Arbat refugee camp is about a half hour east of Suli near the Iranian border and houses some 3,000 displaced Syrian Kurds, who were bussed here by the KRG after crossing the border into northern Iraq from Syria. The camp is perhaps one of the more manageable ones, the smallest in the region, and has yet to reach capacity. The 3,000 refugees here are only a fraction of the almost quarter million Syrians who have fled to Kurdistan because of the conflict in their country (the majority are located closer to the Syrian border, near Dohuk).

tents in the refugee camp

I was invited to visit the camp on Friday with my friend who volunteers with RISE Foundation on her weekends. RISE in an NGO that implements a number of projects assisting refugees across Kurdistan, and the specific one underway in Arbat is a movie afternoon for the children here. Once a week, with the assistance of a Syrian teacher in the camp, RISE’s Luke sets up a projector, a screen, a soundboard and a laptop, and for an hour or two, the children who live here have a brief escape. This week, almost 200 children ducked into the UNICEF children’s tent to watch a collection of Pixar’s animated shorts. It was almost twice as many as had participated the week before.

This week, on my first visit to the camp, I was able to help out with something in addition to the crowd control the movie viewing requires (kids, refugee or otherwise, are still kids, and are fidgety as hell). As the rain drummed on the roof above us, children made their way into the tent, dropping their dilapidated sandals, rain boots, and canvas shoes at the entrance. Others arrived barefoot or in soaked socks. Luke and Tessa were prepared. Realizing last week how few children wore socks in their shoes and boots, they put out a call to friends and family who donated enough money for us to buy almost 200 pairs of socks (bought in the bazaar earlier), 30 tuques, and 16 scarves.

For the next twenty or thirty minutes as kids poured into the tent, we distributed the socks onto pairs and pairs of cold, wet, dirty little feet. Many of the kids, after being handed their pair, gave us incredulous looks. When they stared at me, I mimed putting them on. We were treated to wide grins when they realized this was something they got to keep and wear immediately. I pulled socks onto the smaller ones while they patiently rested their hands in my hair to help balance while they offered each tiny foot to me. They settled in to watch the movie, with fresh pink, purple, and white socks poking out from the edges of their trousers.

I’ll pause here while some of you are undoubtedly nursing quiet academic criticisms towards the ideas of charitable handouts, or white-Westerners-helping-the-Syrians concerns. I’m going to dismiss them both. The Arbat camp is operated by UNHCR, UNICEF, and other small local NGOs that each contribute different skill sets and operate various projects in the camp, such as RISE’s movie afternoons. The KRG does not have the capacity to provide enough aid to the number of Syrians who live in camps within Kurdistan’s borders. Being able to ensure that most of the children in the camp now own a pair of socks – because someone had the money and capacity to purchase them and the ability to provide them – is one of those small assurances that, if we can do it, we damn well should. This would be impossible in the bigger camps where there are thousands of children, and it is necessary to work through the administrative channels of UNHCR to donate aid and supplies. But in Arbat, with only 3,000 people, and a fraction of them children, it can be done.

Almost immediately, some of the first boys who entered the tent and keenly watched us checking sizes and attempting to make sure kids were getting something that fit caught on to our system. Shortly, we had some self-important young helpers, who shepherded in new arrivals, waved around the various colours, argued, traded, and efficiently pushed through the smaller children lingering in the doorway. The socks disappeared quickly as more and more children appeared, and when we lost track and tried to offer the same one a second pair by accident because they’d left and re-entered, they cheerfully shook us away and showed off the pair they received earlier.

The UNICEF tent is a safe place for the children on the edge of the camp, accompanied by a brightly coloured playground. Inside, a rough carpet decorated with pictures of cars and trucks warms the canvas floor, and artwork by the kids is strung between paper chains on the cloth walls. Despite a small heater in the corner, it’s still cold inside: I wore a shirt, a plaid, a hoodie, and a scarf for the afternoon, and everything felt damp. But for the kids, it’s a place to get away from the tedious-ness of the camp, and the movie afternoon is an opportunity for their parents to have some time to themselves.

For the most part, they sat quietly watching the movie, laughing uproariously at parts – slapstick humour is one of those universal things everyone understands, despite different languages and histories.

And after we’d run out of shorts, and the kids started preparing to head home, an iphone got plugged into the soundboard and suddenly, dance music was blaring through the tent. Immediately, there were kids dancing on plastic stools, kids making a conga line, kids jumping and falling over and stepping over each other and picking each other up and clapping and jumping harder. For a few more minutes, the reality of where we were was quietly put aside, and all of the excess energy from the afternoon was dispelled, the rain forgotten, and the UNICEF tent buzzed with the laughter and movement of the kids of the Arbat refugee camp.

When we left the camp as the light disappeared in the late afternoon, I looked back across the muddy tracks, where the low UNHCR-tarped tents are aligned in straight lines, like every picture of every refugee camp you’ve ever seen. A low fog was moving down off the hills into the camp and the rain was lifting. The small fruit and vegetable stand that is set up at the entrance with the words “potable water” adorned on it was the only structure that offered any colours against the ubiquitous canvas and mud. A few distant people were walking up the gentle slope towards what looked like a small, standing water reservoir near the makeshift school, preparing for another cold night in the camp. We walked down the highway looking for taxi, and they all disappeared behind us.

We drove back to Suli as darkness set in properly. At my house, I scraped mud off my boots and was thankful that my windows were glass, and kept out the rain. I turned on all of my heaters, checked emails in bed, visited the only nice bar in town for wine with friends. I wracked my brain trying to remember the name of the camp, but failed and had to be reminded by friends later. I tried to google map it, but it doesn’t exist, of course, as it’s not a permanent structure. Just 3,000 lives, hanging in nameless limbo, as a war rages at home.

The next morning, as I opened up the curtains of my warm, clean, dry apartment, I was treated to a sight already being passed around the world on the internet: the tops of the hills around me, like the muddy tracks of Arbat’s camp, had changed colour overnight, and were now bright and clear with newly fallen snow.

fog rolls into the camp

from the entrance of the UNICEF tent

 

A brief hiatus: looking for landmines in Kurdistan

The first time I walk into the classroom and see 32 tiny children staring at me, I am deeply, profoundly terrified. I have less than two days with their departing teacher before they are handed over to me. It is not enough.

I scribble down their names on a map that I draw roughly on the back of my timetable.

Rayan, Ribin, Riyad.

Sam, Sama, San, Saro.

Muhamed, Mohammed.

Shako, Sha, Shayaz.

I worry that their small round faces all look the same, like every other child I’ve ever seen. I wonder how I will even learn the names of 32 tiny people when it took me a month of undergrad honours seminar to figure out who the other eight people I was arguing with for three hours a day were.

I arrived in Iraq with little to no knowledge of what lay ahead of me. An old roommate – a best friend who I hadn’t seen properly in years – taught in the region for two years before going to do his Master’s.

“Go to Kurdistan and teach English,” he urged me, during a skype session where I wondered bleakly about my future. Thanks to Mines Action Canada and the Cambodia Campaign to Ban Landmines, I finally knew what I wanted to do, but, stuck in Toronto working part time in a bookstore while I did pro bono disarmament and human rights research, I was tired of being poor and having to pay $8 for beers.

One thing was clear. If I wanted to work in mine action, I had to get back to a part of the world where they were a daily problem. Enter: Kurdistan. I’ve been dying to return to the Middle East since living in Turkey six years ago.

Other friends I know successfully teach English around the world – in Spain, in Korea, in Thailand. I tossed around the idea for a moment as I skyped with Alex. I had only ever taught in non-traditional classrooms. I didn’t really want to teach English. In fact, I had profound reservations about the concept of teaching English in the developing world.

“Well, I don’t really want to go to Korea or anything,” I said to Alex. He grinned at me on the screen. “Then you’ll fit in perfectly. Neither does anyone in Kurdistan,” he said.

Three weeks later, I faced this classroom of tiny people, who looked at me with giant eyes as I tried to speak as slowly as possible (a difficulty, I know).

Teaching English is actually about as far out of my comfort zone as I can imagine. Present a lecture on cluster bombs and Syria? Sure. Argue my way across the Apartheid Wall between Israel and the West Bank? Send me in. Walk through a minefield? Yes, please. Teach English, maths and social studies to 32 six-year olds, and 60 seven-year olds? Jesus Fucking Christ.

The school I teach at in Sulaymaniyah is a private one, and the majority of the students are a far cry from the children I taught in Cambodia and Sri Lanka – children who were directly impacted by violent conflict. Kurdistan is fairly stable today. These children do not have any direct experience of war, even thought their parents and grandparents certainly do.

But even though these children engage in sticker wars and wear uniforms and play and squabble in that universal way that children do, there are things about Suli that are distinctly unfamiliar. When I walk to school in the morning, I always acknowledge the uniformed soldier on the corner where the buses turn, armed with his AK. I jog around the German Village (the compound where I both live and work) and avoid the various guards casually smoking in their small shelters, rifles slung casually over their arms. The old Kurdish men who stand watch at the compound entrance last week pulled out something I hadn’t seen in a while: a reverse mirror on a long pole for checking under approaching vehicles. Because a car bomb exploded on the other side of the city last week.

Kurdistan is a small island of calm in an increasingly unstable Middle East. But I don’t think of it as a place at peace. And while I spend my days teaching medial vowels and basic addition to the small children who live here, I realize that, if I came here looking for landmines, I’m going to find them.