Friday 1 November: Day 113
Tomorrow is our first ever Open House. We’ve invited security chiefs, doctors, engineers and professors to talk about the importance of English in their chosen professions. There will be presentations, dinner, and the inevitable mob of selfies (the new lights we installed are very Instagram-friendly). We spent the past week extending and confirming invitations, knocking on doors and recording advertisements on the radio. Tomorrow is the day.
Which means that today, we clean. Mitsu and I roll up prepared to work, and we’re not disappointed. We work with Yahya, Aram and our friendly helper Mohammed to get through the List.
- Remove garbage and and random cement slabs from garden area.
- Clean toilets (a very involved activity, you don’t want to know).
- Use acetone to remove children’s drawings from projector screens.
- Detach arm desks from 150 desks and set up seating in presentation room.
- Kill. The. Spiders.
- Vacuum, scrub and squeeze 100-foot outdoor carpet.
- Move now-soaked carpets up two flights of rusty exterior staircases.
- Wait, why did the director cancel his presentation at the last minute?
- Jefferey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
- Ignore the rainbow-colored water stain that has doubled in size in the last week.
- The tea guy wants more money – find new tea guy.
- Same for the table guy.
- Actually vacuum the interior carpets this time.
- We used all the water cleaning the carpets? No bathrooms tomorrow, I guess?
- This was supposed to be a short list.
Do or die.
وردە ئیش – chores
Saturday 2 November: Day 114
Open House – the first major event of the English Access Institute since our arrival. We’ve been putting this together for the past month, piecing together guest speakers, advertising in any medium available, completely guessing at our attendance since none of this has ever been done before in Kalar. The day is upon us and we have butterflies.
4:00 pm – Mitsu and I arrive. We finish up some last-minute cleaning and chalk up the lack of early arrivers to the curious Kurdish laissez-faire attitude towards schedules. Yahya, Aram and Akam watch Mitsu and I go full-on American, frantically making sure that every possible circumstance is accounted for. Two hours before it starts.
5:00 pm – jittery, the staff sits down for a long-overdue status update. Somehow we manage to cover course length, property hunting, promotional materials, enrollment goals, nail-biting the entire time. The chefs show up with food and we agree to withhold dinner until the end of the first hour of presentations to coerce attention. Ten minutes to 6, our first guess arrives. Five minutes to 6, there’s a hundred people looking for a seat.
6:00 pm – Mitsu and I introduce ourselves. We speak slowly enough that most of the audience can hear us and those who can’t have a friend whisper translations in their ear. Akam, beaming, shares his thoughts on the relationship between stable institutions and peaceful society. The message is clear: EAI strives to be a bedrock in the Kalar community. Loud applause. The Lt. Commander of the local peshmerga (and the father to one of our brightest students) Mr. Daho takes the stage. In a brisk, articulate Kurdish usually spoken to a crowd of attentive soldiers, he discusses the relationship between English and security. Our photographer snaps pictures constantly. I think the mood is serious, but all of a sudden Daho cracks a smile and the room erupts in laughter. This is going well.
7:00 pm – Dinner hour. Mitsu and I share an “I understand everything you’re thinking” nod and sit with important guests. I’m eating with Mr. Jalal, a beloved English professor at Garmian University and the serendipitous translator who helped Mitsu and I navigate the Ministry of Education earlier this week. We make small talk, and sensing a cordial frankness, address the misunderstanding from my first visit to Garmian – the perception that the university made false promises on my behalf to bolster their image with a “distinguished American guest.” Jalal, one replaced with a sky-blue glass orb, reads between the lines. The energy of the meal is vivacious, and Mitsu’s nearby laughter keeps our conversation light and mellow. We agree to co-host a conference in late November that is more sensitive to all parties involved.
8:00 pm – Dr. Abdulstar, the Italian-trained miracle worker, takes the stage. There isn’t enough respect for proven medical practices, and in this context, learning English helps Kurds embrace positive social change. People seemed shocked to hear the doctor talk about OBGYN stigmas. We like shocked. Essa, Yahya’s charismatic brother and a local biology teacher, is next. After his thesis, a man uses the question-and-answer period to bluntly state that evolution is a lie. Akam, Mitsu and I wince in unison. Essa deftly fields the, um, question by saying that scientific inquiry yields ever-evolving ideas about human nature. We stop holding our breath. Mitsu and I are the final presenters. We compare educational culture in the US, Rwanda, Japan and Kurdistan, moving like two estuaries converging in a mighty river. The crowd participates, having swelled to over 100 – people are chatting outside and the seats are packed.
Looking into your eyes, standing in front of a crowd that feeds your fire, must be the same as glimpsing at God.
9:00 pm – we take selfies with anyone who asks, Elizabeth Warren-style. The desks are re-assembled, the floors are vacuumed, the adrenaline keeps our eyes dilated. Everyone is smiling.
We skip home.
ماڵی کراوە – Open House
Sunday 3 November: Day 115
Significant scheduling constraints: starting a new round of classes the day after a major event is, perhaps, not the wisest move. We’re balancing on one leg all day, sending contradictory messages about class durations and costs. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Can’t win them all.
نوێ – new
Monday 4 November: Day 116
An omen:
“The Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, changed the Middle East within his short life. With his death, it is said that he blessed the Crossroads of the Earth to eternal fertility, to soft springs and overflowing rivers and sweet dates. Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Persia, Syria, everywhere received the fruit of his blessing – everywhere except Iraq. That land, he proclaimed, was damned. Until the end of time, Iraq would only know heat, famine, drought and blood.”
عێراق – Iraq
Tuesday 5 November: Day 117
I should be sleeping. It’s 2:30 am and I’m behind on my journal. No sleep tonight – there’s an argument to be made for the submission to rigid habit, to force one’s self into a pattern of good practices. When we boil it down, that’s the main argument for Islam – the Epicurean respect for mindfulness, sanctified by everlasting paradise. The universe would be constructed of these patterns of submission and resistance, wrought by God into a lattice of cause-and-effect so intricate that the closest humans can emulate is in the mosaic domes of the mosque. Most everything else about Islam can be reduced to cultural idiosyncrasy, to progress away from a wasteland and to reactionary conservatism against perceived heretical infractions. Find the beauty in the unfamiliar if you want to sleep well at night.
رێککردن – order
Wednesday 6 November: Day 118
To all my huskier Kurdish brothers out there trying to buy a new shirt – I don’t know how you do it. The XXLs in the malls here threaten to rip at the shoulders. There’s few things more disheartening than going into a tight, aluminum-wrapped dressing room with 12 new shirt to try on and not being able to cinch the button parallel to my waist line on all but one. Props to you. Now show me where the American-sized clothing stores are at.
جل و بەرگ – clothes
Thursday 7 November: Day 119
Tea with Abdulstar leads us to a small park. The five of us sit on cardboard waste, laughing at silly arguments favoring the Kurdish writing of right-to-left. Pure freedom is what it is: to be in the presence of someone who knows what religious tolerance looks like, what streets full of spaghetti straps and lewd advertisements and church bells and gifted paupers with ukeleles, all of these impressions made daily for year after year and related, despite a little language barrier, in laughter-heralded coincidence that Italian’s “generalissimo” is two syllables away from a word in our own English. The cold air is welcomed by all present and the moon – la luna – shines with abandon, the park white from her luster. Every word, even the ones that ignite our liberal censors, make us giggle. Just keep talking, Maestro, for the night is young and real Italians don’t sleep until after midnight.
For the parents (with love):
certification 
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