certification

Friday 12 July: Day 1

Landed in Sulaymaniah – Suly.  Long line through customs.  I stared, too, as the plane glided over the northern quarter of Iraq and we passed long well-lit highways and cities whose walls now looked like neon fences.   Everyone was staring at us as we slowly made our way through the customs process – strangers meeting strangers.  The airport terminal was a military construction, less than 10 years old, corrugated metal roofs over a prefabricated steel skeleton.  We had to explain to the well-armed security officials that the jug of liquid in our checked baggage was soy sauce, which is difficult without English.

We realized that Akam, our boss, wasn’t going to meet us at the terminal and that we instead had to move our luggage to the “visitor’s point” some ways away from our landing point.  Too sleep deprived to care, though.  Travelling from Seattle to Kalar in less than a week was difficult.  Akam is warm, kind, and honest, with that gleam of sincerity one can pick up on at first glance.   His brother rode with us for the 2ish hours from Suly to Kalar.  We passed four, maybe five checkpoints staffed by sleepy armed men in camouflage. 

Iraq, dare I say it, is beautiful.  The sun started coming up at 4 am; we didn’t sleep on the flight from Istanbul and the journey was dreamlike.  The land felt both eternally trodden yet not quite formed.   In pictures, in our memories, “Iraq” is a blank desert pocketed by blown-out dwellings covered in sand.  This is not the case.  In person, there are hills, mountains, and silty dust in so many variants that the landscape felt like a watercolor (or maybe that was the exhaustion blurring our vision).  By 5 am, we’re sweating in the backseat.  By 7 am, we’re at our apartment.  Sleep is instant.

Under the quickly spinning ceiling fan our breath is pushed back inside of us.  No doubts, no promises – only possibilities.

“s’pass” – thank you

Sunday 14 July: Day 3

First day at school.  We popped in to each classroom to say hi to the students.  Everyone was excited – “little peanuts,” (as Mitsu says) laughing with us on the ground, co-teachers shaking hands and showing off English, older students eager to perform.

We’re overwhelmed.  The frenzy of activity is as if the chaos of traffic in Kigali was boiled down and injected into everyone and everything around us.  There’s so much life/color/velocity, and then the sun burns it all away, and as soon as the air drops below 100 degrees it all pours forth again.  Moving and settling in has been a challenge, with no resources and no direction, no support network, and little precedent.  When sleep deprived this strange new culture seems steeped in violence and built on brutality…

And then a stranger gives me a whole pack of cigarettes, or a team of shopkeepers assemble to help us find the right item, or a man runs across town (literally) to buy me breakfast, and I blush with the realization that a year in Africa didn’t teach me to just take a deep breath and soak it all in. 

“jwan” – beautiful

Tuesday 16 July: Day 5

We assigned essays in all of our Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate classes, but then the class roster changed, so now we have 100+ essays and no idea who they belong to.  New teacher mistake.

So then, the class assignments change – now I teach 8 to 12 year olds in the morning and advanced adults in the evening.  Mitsu teachers the medium level students.  She spent all day grading and organizing those essays only to realize that it was all for naught, and that in fact the essays were more correctly organized before she tore in to them than after, so she feels pretty dumb right now.

Finally, we stayed up all night because our boss and three friends/acquaintances came over at 11:30 pm (keep in mind – our teaching starts at 8 am) to fix our air conditioning unit in our bedroom, which we desperately needed.  A short old man stacked our side table on the wingback chair from our living room to reach the unit, almost shocked himself and kept precariously shifting his weight to make the blasted machine work, everything was just so absurd and for some reason that jet lag still doesn’t feel like it went away.

[PS – Happy Birthday to my little brother, Zach, who graduated from college, commissioned as a US officer and married less than two months ago.  Missing you, vod]

“shobash” – good night

Thursday 18 July: Day 7

Like I said, I teach two classes.  The first is made up of 8 to 12 year olds on their summer breaks; the students are studying English at the command of their parents, so the normal discipline problems that come with teaching children are compounded by a summer camp atmosphere.  To the kids, hanging out with an American is the coolest thing ever, and improving English is a secondary priority.  It shows.  Our classes start at 8:30 every morning and swing, wildly, between hilarious and exhausting. 

The second class is an adult-centric class made up of doctors, engineers, university students and incredibly gifted secondary students who can muster the courage to sit in.  These classes are everything education should be – slow, methodical, conversation-focused and abstract.  The seminar format we use reminds me of my best classes from college and all of my students eagerly participate in our discussions.  Last night we discussed the prevalence of plastic surgery, vanity in a nominally conservative culture mixed with an excess of money.  The night before, a debate between optimism, pessimism and realism.  Before that, pollution in Kalar.  And so on.

The contrast between these two classes is much like the paradoxes Mitsu and I are observing in other parts of life here:  the chaotic and the ordered, the wise and the absurd, the deliberate and the unexpected.  I’m excited to see how this dichotomy resolves itself as we learn more about our new home.

“choni” – how are you?