Cabin Fever

I've been in this compound for three weeks now, with brief excursions to the shops, a Saturday afternoon walk and a trip to a Turkish restaurant where we shared no common language with any of the waiting staff.  Meanwhile on my doorstep is Sulaimaniyah, whose throbbing nightlife Lonely Planet urges travellers to visit before the hordes arrive.

Soon I will be living in a windowless house in Baghdad so I should probably save a post called Cabin Fever for then, but at least then I won't have a sixth floor balcony looking out over town.  Just over the compound fence is Sarchinar football club.  When I watch their Friday afternoon game from my balcony I am reminded of the Far Side cartoon where a cat presses itself against a window through which two trucks have collided and spilled their contents.  The trucks are labelled Bob's Assorted Rodents and Al's Small Flightless Birds.

Venue for Friday's game: Rodents v Birds

Someone else who was desperate to get out was one of my colleagues, who has a hilarious story about his passage to England to seek asylum about a decade ago.  He made the channel crossing sitting on the  roof of the driver's cabin of a lorry, absolutely motionless for 13 hours to avoid detection.  Before his asylum hearing he'd been advised to pretend to speak no English, on the absurd basis that he must have been undeclared in Britain for months in order to learn it.  He duly starred at the judge and shrugged when asked any questions, but his cover was blown when the judge spotted him reading what she was writing down and she threw his case out.  He spent two more years in London, having further adventures, mostly in the pizza restaurant business.  Maybe I'll write more about him later.

I did get out last week to register as a resident of Kurdistan.  You are supposed to have a blood test to see if you are HIV positive and intend to share it with the locals, but for some reason they took one look at me and waived this requirement.  If I thought hard enough I could probably think of a reason to be offended.  I have an ID card that makes me look rather fat and incredibly smug.

Fat and smug

The language barrier

The only Kurdish I know is 'thank you' and 'how are you?'.  If someone asks me how I am, I ignore their question and ask them how they are instead; sometimes I thank them for their answer.

Every day a Kurdish lady comes to clean our apartment.  We have cheerful but brief and slightly confusing conversations in her native tongue.  Her remit is to mop floors and dust stuff; she is not supposed to do our laundry.  Nonetheless she insists on washing and ironing all the clothes she can lay her hands on.  I feel slightly guilty at this extra work she is doing, but I don't have the linguistic tools to put a stop to it, and oddly enough I haven't yet rushed to my English / Kurdish dictionary.

The other day I advised one of my team to transfer money by hawala, a clever Middle Eastern cash transfer device a bit like Western Union.  The agents have no guarantee that they will receive the reimbursement from each other, but trust in honour, familial pride and presumably the threat of broken legs.  My finance officer seemed a bit bewildered at my suggestion and with good reason, as I was insisting that his cash transfer was done by halawa, a tasty confectionary made with pistachios.

My Arabic is improving at a glacial pace, but I am getting good at annoying my Egyptian housemate by reading out the words on cereal packets very slowly and incorrectly.  My progress is hampered by the fact that I have the book but not the accompanying cassette, so I may develop my own unique accent, which might be interesting.  Mastering Arabic is by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar; a look at the fly-leaf reveals that Jane wrote it and Mahmoud drew the pictures, which I find quite amusing in a racial stereotype sort of way.

My spare time

The Arabic bit says "corn flakes" - beautiful language

Sulaimaniyah

This is the view from my balcony in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

It's a good base for Save the Children's operations in northern Iraq as it's pretty safe - we drove to the supermarket a couple of days ago and not a single molotov cocktail was lobbed through the window, although I did see some pretty alarming graffiti that read "WE HATE MEN".  Before you get in your car you have to check for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) underneath in such a way that no one notices you are doing it, so shoelaces get a lot of retying.

People have been being mean to the poor old Kurds for centuries, though the ones I've met have been lovely.  Saddam treated Kurdistan like a wasp nest in the corner of his garden; now that the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is Kurdish, they've come back into fashion, prosperity has returned and spaceship-like buildings are mushrooming in all directions in Suli.

SC imposes a 9pm curfew here, though to leave the compound at any time you need a note from the Pope, a specially-formed militia of navy seals forming a human pyramid around you and an Apache helicopter hovering above.

I'm battling with the lingo - Kurdish is tricky.  I had a crash course with a chap I met on the plane who fled to England 12 years ago and just got his UK passport.  As a Liverpool fan he headed straight up there when he got off the boat.  Tired of theft, violent crime, civil strife and the hopelessness of the local people, he left Merseyside and ended up in Norwich.  Anyway, he taught me the rudiments but progress is slow, particularly as I'm also trying to learn Arabic, which is also hard and is written backwards.

Below is the view from my desk.  The apartment block on the right is full of staff at the American University, who are here to explain why the US occupation of Iraq was a great success.  I hold the Bush administration responsible for the volatile security environment in Iraq and the fact that on a Friday night I am sat in front of my computer rather than in front of a belly-dancing snake charmer or whatever it is they do on Friday nights here.