certification

Friday 14 February: Day 218

Valentine’s Day.  I surprise Mitsu with a nice hotel booking in Suly, in the tallest building in the city.  We spend an evening at a lovely restaurant and talk about God and meet up with lovely expat teachers at a cafe and have a great night.

But the real joy is the drive to Suly.  Our friend lets us borrow his car and Mitsu drives.  It’s a blast.  The road cuts between rolling green hillsides and spinal mountain ridges, and the rivers we drive near are rushing rapidly from snowmelt, and families are picnicking on every flat green space we pass.  But we’re not really focused on that.  Instead, Mitsu is trying not to kill us, which is a feat.  Literally no one we saw drove at or under the speed limit.  Kurdish drivers – men, all of them men – drive like lunatics, taking the rail-less blind mountainside turns at blistering speeds only to slam on their brakes and cut back in line as another lunatic swings around the bend.  Everyone is cutting off everyone, only to destroy their brakes decelerating for one of a thousand hidden speed bumps or mammoth pot holes that ravage the drive, and of course no one is wearing their seat belts except us.  My job was to keep her calm and light-hearted, which was not easy, but we managed to survive.

The best parts of the trip came at the military checkpoints, when these heavily armed men would go wide-eyed with surprise seeing Mitsu behind the wheel.  She’d bat her long eyelashes and laugh, say “Slaw, kaka!” in what I swear was a California girl accent, and invariably waved on through without the slightest request for a driver’s license.

This is what traveling with royalty feels like.

شاژن – shazhn – queen

Saturday 15 February: Day 219

Dinner at the Mandela Cafe.  Candlelight.  Pictures of artists, politicians and great minds cover the walls.  A print of Marx’s “Workers of the World” speech, written in Arabic calligraphy, is next to our table.  Kurdish men stand up to shake the hands of their female guests.  The owner and designer gifts us a bottle of wine after hearing our conversation, his tattooed waiter sharing dreams of one day working on a ship.  Soft sounds of lofi hip hop flicker with the flames in front of us.  Mitsu sits across from me, wine settling in to our bellies, and our hands dangle in the space between our plates.  My finger brushes hers, and we’re not talking about the logical prerequisites to a spiritual investigation but about rocking chairs and house boats and sleeping with lions and graduate school and a thousand other realities, but most simply felt in the synaptic gap between the back of her hand and the palm of mine.

مۆم – mohm – candle

Sunday 16 February: Day 220

At dinner with four older students, oil workers from Hanaqin – the lawless (read: ungoverned) city in the disputed area south of Kalar.  They drive to my class every day, past frontlines of Peshmerga and Iraqi military forces, to learn English.  The oldest student is the CEO of the company.  At 60, he relates that the most significant technological invention of his lifetime was medical anesthetics.  The side of his face is burned badly and reconstructed, his right eye constantly shifting between a hanging asymmetrical gaze and the most burning stare imaginable.  I shiver at the thought of facial reconstruction surgery without painkillers.

We are at the last table in the restaurant, and we are loud.  Another student, a jolly father in his late 40s with the likeness of a Kurdish Norman Rockwell Santa Clause, relates the trials of learning a new computer software at work while we guffaw.  The third man is square and tall, his English refined enough to quip, and he tells us about the ancient Jewish population of Hanaqin – they’re still there, the lunatics.  The main road is named after them.  The fourth student, the youngest, smiles and just listens, laughing at jokes understood moments later than everyone and blissful to be present for the conversation.  The tea kept coming and no one could stop laughing and when it hurt to breathe we looked around and saw the staff laughing with us.

پێ دەكەنێت – pedaknet – laugh

Monday 17 February: Day 221

Class doesn’t stop when the generator dies.  We just move our desks next to the window, open up the blinds, and continue on with the lesson.  The light reflecting off the yellow wall outside creates a vintage glow on all of our faces.  The glare on the white board is powerful and its catching these long beams of hanging dust particles that make the room feel monastic and introspective in that special academic way, and I hope my students are starting to paint their world in a new language.

تۆز – toz – dust

Tuesday 18 February: Day 222

We’re walking to school and there’s a truck parked under a pipe releasing excess water from an unseen rooftop tank in to the bed of a truck and the water is splashing in to the open window of a carriage and out the rear of the bed and the scene has this fantastic Dada-esque quality to it, only I can’t tell if the owner parked the truck there knowing it would get a nice wash or if he’s going to be surprised when he comes back to find his cabin soaked through, and we laugh.

حەلەق و بەلەق – sili – silly

Wednesday 19 February: Day 223

A group of four dogs are sleeping in the sun near the bus stop we walk by in the morning.  A team of twenty men are pruning the bushes of the park, simultaneously picking up months of accumulated garbage while flicking their cigarette butts on the wet grass, and I can’t help but feel as though I’m burning an image of Kalar into some sort of crystalline memory to be fondly recalled in my old age.

بڕيى – brtn – pruning

Thursday 20 February: Day 224