Kurdish taxi ride

Flagging a taxi home from a partner's office at 5 pm, the sky was vivid with sunset.  “Hello, sir. Five thousand to go across town?” I asked the driver in Kurdish; “no, seven and a half," he replied.  I stood there, not yielding and not offering alternatives.  “...Six,” he said after a pause, and I got in.  When he turned clockwise instead of counter-clockwise on 100 meter street I asked him about the route, and he assured me that this way was better.  He said he didn’t speak Arabic, but when my Kurdish failed and I used Arabic he understood and responded in kind. 

He thought I understood more Kurdish than I did, and talked for a while about his family.  I thought at first that he had five children who had all gone to Finland, but understood later—when he said he was 26, the same as me—that he was one of five children, and that all had left Kurdistan and Iraq behind except for him. All of the men like me are leaving, he added with regret.  We turned toward the citadel, zigzagging through the southwest quarter of the city and past the old minaret.  As we turned left onto a main road the sky, fading into pastels, opened up.  “The weather is beautiful,” I ventured in Kurdish, and he responded emphatically, “by God, it's beautiful here. it's beautiful here."  

In a few places I pointed to landmarks as questions to make conversation; in Arabic, I asked if he knew about the marathon that happened the week before.  Yes, they do it every year, he said, “it's a beautiful thing.”  Mostly we were quiet; his phone sounded the call to prayer, and instead of silencing it he played it all the way to the end.  “How’s your work?” I asked lamely in Arabic as we waited at a light.  "Not good, it all depends on the government. Like this woman,” he said, pointing to the woman walking along the row of idling cars asking for money.  She’s Iraqi? I asked, surprised.  “No, Syrian.”  “It's so difficult,” I said quietly in Kurdish, which he repeated.  He said something I didn’t understand, and asked him to repeat in Arabic.  “When you spoke at the beginning I thought you were Syrian, but your face did not seem so.” 

As we approached home I pulled bills out of my wallet, counting out seven and a half thousand in exact change for the thirty-minute ride.  I thought he might give some back or make a show of thanks for my generosity beyond the agreed price when I handed it to him, but he just accepted it as if it were the true cost—which of course it was.  He did a three-point turn to drive away as I reached our gate and realized that I didn’t have my keys.  Embarrassed but also a little pleased, I put my bag aside and took the two footholds to swing myself up and over. I caught a glimpse of him driving away and gaping at me, arms braced on the top of the gate, before I let myself drop behind and out of sight.

A life untethered

Ali is from Kobane, the mostly Kurdish city in northern Syria that was almost completely destroyed last year during intense fighting between Syrian Kurds and ISIS.  Soon after graduating from university with a degree in French he left Syria to look for work, arriving in Erbil in early 2014.  He found work as a street vendor, selling sunflower seeds and nuts by the main highway running through Ankawa, where we live.  His usual spot was right on our route to and from choir, so we passed him a couple of times a week.  Each night he smiled us, and his friendly greetings got more and more effusive until one evening, several months ago, he waved us over and started a conversation.  (I’m still working on the being friendly and outgoing thing.)   That’s when we learned his name, his background, his story about leaving Syria.  We didn’t really want any sunflower seeds, but got a little bag anyway, and, with characteristic hospitality, he refused to let us pay.   Every night for a while he would chat with us on our way home.   

His warm and aggressive friendliness had an air of desperation about it, like he needed to prove to himself that he was more than a street-seller.    When a man in a Mercedes-Benz drove up and bought some nuts he said something in French to the guy, who shrugged, not understanding.  Ali called out “BA in French!” after him as he drove away.  He still didn’t let us pay for the nuts.   

When I asked him about his living situation he smiled and said, “Life is hard.”  His sister was in Turkey, but he was trying to get her to Erbil.  Then, after several weeks, we didn’t see him anymore and haven’t seen him since.  Ali could still be around, with a better job somewhere.  Or he could have gone back to Kobane to rebuild, though I doubt it.  Or he could have tried his chances in Turkey, or continued on to Europe, with tens of thousands of others.  The life of a refugee defies easy description.  Unimaginable suffering.  Boundless resourcefulness.  Constant movement.  A different Syrian took his place at the sunflower stand.   

Wassiin and Kao

Wassiin and her son Kao are from Sinjar, a region in Iraq west of Mosul.  Sinjar has for hundreds of years been the home of many Yezidis, including Wassiin and her family.  But in August, 2014, as the Islamic State advanced with lightning speed into Yezidi villages--and as tales of massacres and kidnappings spread ahead of them—Wassiin and her family fled Sinjar.  First they stayed on Sinjar mountain for several weeks where they were trapped.  Eventually Wassiin and Kao made their way off the mountain and arrived at a camp in Kora, a small town north of Dohuk, a major city in the Kurdish region of Iraq.  Through REACH, a longtime MCC partner, Wassiin and Kao received MCC relief kits assembled in North America.  Winter was cold and muddy in the northern mountainous areas of Iraq, and summer is stifling and dusty.  Life in a tent camp is full of whole varieties of suffering that a relief kit cannot begin to redress.  But receiving supplies assembled by strangers halfway around the world can be a powerfully hopeful sign for many who feel that after the high-profile news coverage of last year, they have now been forgotten by the international community.   

I wish I knew more about Wassiin and her son.  I met her only once and didn't pick up any more details than this.  Yezidis--and in particular Yezidi women captured by ISIS--have been the face of minority suffering in Iraq perhaps more than any other group.  This inevitably constitutes as second victimization as their original wounds are compounded by the reduction of their identities, for the purposes of the world, to those wounds.  We--the media, NGOs, consumers of stories--are not interested in what it means to be a Yezidi, but what it means to be a Yezidi victim.  I don't know how to be set free from this.       

New shoots on the withered tree

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the ISIS assault on Mt. Sinjar.  August 6 is the anniversary of the massive displacement from the Nineveh plains.  Iraq has about 3.1 million IDPs (nearly 10% of the country's population) from the conflict over the past year and a half.  Every once in a while, for the next while, I will post vignettes about people we have met who have been displaced. 

“It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.”

Adam Bede, GEORGE ELIOT

A few months ago, against all my typical habits of privacy, I invited a strange old man into our office for tea.  We had just sent some visitors off in a taxi from the curb in front of our house and were about to head back inside, but there he was, standing near our front door in dress pants and a faded suit jacket.  After exchanging pleasantries I discovered that he was waiting for the dentist next door to open, and after a few more pleasantries, I got the distinct impression that he wanted to sit down somewhere, so I invited him up for tea in our front office—the typical, appropriate thing to do.  

Khaled, we soon discovered, was from Baghdad, but had moved to Qaraqosh a few years ago during the worst of the violence in the capital.  His wife had died a while before, and now all his sons live in Germany, so he has no close family here.  Last August he had to flee Qaraqosh to Ankawa when the Islamic State advanced
.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a young displaced person in Iraq today.  They are losing their education and with every passing month their future seems like it is going down the drain.  But in many ways, the plight of the elderly is worse.  They knew a different Iraq.  Prosperous, secular, stable.  Their country is gone, their children are gone.  Their jobs are gone.  And in a labor market flooded with young unemployed men, those jobs are never coming back.  They have nothing to do but remember what happened to them and wait around for the pensions to come--or not, depending on the financial situation in Baghdad that month.   

I could tell Khaled had been drinking, so I was worried that it would be hard to get him to leave, or that he would start asking for money or favors (in the moment, my discomfort is usually stronger than empathy) but he left after we had our tea together.  Walking down our front stairs, he lit a cigarette, then hung around the dentist’s gate, pacing, smoking, waiting for the new set of dentures.  The dentist was late, and after a few more minutes, he walked away. 

Water and community

“You always know when there is conflict in a village because there are two mosques [or churches] instead of one.”  As we stand next to a recently-constructed dam in the village of Shakha Piska, Birwa, a staff member for REACH (an Iraqi Kurdish NGO) added, “...Shakha Piska has two mosques.”

Like many small towns and villages throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, Shakha Piska has been hit hard over the past decades by a deadly combination of conflict, displacement, and water scarcity.  About 15 families live together and farm the arid land here.  Thanks to an MCC project with REACH, Shakha Piska now has a small dam that traps winter rains to help get the village through the rainless summer and enable them to increase their agricultural output so they can improve their diet and bolster their income.   

Kak Zerar and Kak Omar live in Shakha Piska and are responsible for the upkeep of the dam.

Water is drawn from a well just below the dam.  Before the dam was constructed, villages could draw about 1,500 liters every three days; now they draw about 3,000 liters every day.  On the shores of the dam, trees anchor the slopes of the hill, providing a glimpse of what this place could become and giving hope for the people of  Shakha Piska to stay on their land and remain together—a precious goal at a time of mass displacement in Iraq.     

This is the dam about halfway through the dry season in the first year (June 2015). 

Part of REACH’s development work includes helping communities to work together to address their shared needs. Rather than each family petitioning the government individually for water or electricity or a school in the village, REACH encourages communities to decide collectively on their most important shared needs and take action together.  This cultivation of grassroots democracy improves government responsiveness, fosters a sense of agency among communities that are often excluded, and helps productively transform conflict.  In Shakha Piska, the goal is for the community to share the responsibility for upkeep of the dam.  There will still be two mosques in Shakha Piska next year.  Hopefully, thanks to the work of REACH, taken over by the people of Shakha Piska, there will be new life and cooperation as well.