About town

Today we threw caution and security regulations to the wind and gorged ourselves on what Sulaimaniyah has to offer the thrill-seeker and pleasure-lover.  It took about 20 minutes.

Actual contents may differ

We began with a visit to Nawroz Tourism Park, whose ferris wheel can be seen across town like a beacon to hedonism.  The pictures of log-flumes full of people howling with delight on the sign were clearly more figurative than actual, and seem to have been taken at Disneyland or similar.  It was hard to tell if the park was open or not, but we didn't go in as unfortunately each of us was carrying a cylinder of gas, forbidden under park rules.

We didn't miss much, as the dodgems were all grounded, the zombies in the House of Horrors had all gone to work for the Iraqi government and the ferris wheel hadn't revolved since before the french revolution.

On our way back we found a good place to join Santa for a drink but apparently it isn't love time until well after dark.  No matter, for soon we found a cafe serving turkish coffee (the kind that you have to eat with a spoon) and delicious cakes.  Best of all, it was outside the four walls of this compound.

The smiles are in honour of being outside Pak City

It's actually been an excellent weekend, as last night we had a fabulous thanksgiving dinner with the cooking directed by the mother of the Child Protection manager by live TV link-up from Plymouth, Massachusetts.  We also drank home-made mead (a kind of honey wine), which had absolutely no effect on us, as the pictures below will prove.

Shake 'n Bake Apartments

We live in Pak City, a clump of nine high-rise apartment blocks that were built in about three days as a convenient method of laundering some of the grubby cash floating around these parts.  The flats are spacious, airy and well designed, and much nicer than most of the places I've lived.  Occasionally, though, you get a reminder of the fact that it took two Turkish families their lunch break for a couple of weeks to knock these buildings together.  Shutting the bin in the kitchen had the side effect of causing part of the doorframe to fall off.  The buttons for the lift on our floor were put on upside down, with the result that for three weeks I pressed down and couldn't understand why the lift would insist that I picked up an Armenian family on the tenth floor before heading downstairs.

Going up

I tend to take the stairs these days, partly for fitness reasons and partly because I harbour a secret fear that the lift will get stuck and the 'call operator' button will turn out to have been drawn on with a crayon.

Finally, and this is no fault of the builders, the blood from some long-forgotten meat has leaked and frozen in our freezer, so my peas rest on what you would get if Fergus Henderson started producing ice lollies.

The latest pudding at St John, London

I'm still here because Iraq has changed its mind on how it issues visas, so to go anywhere other than Kurdistan requires a phenomenal amount of effort on the part of one's admin department.  I'm told that the trick is to fly to Basra and from there to Baghdad, because for some reason Baghdad no longer recognises the Iraqi embassy in Jordan.  If you don't believe that there can possibly be such ruinous lack of communication within different parts of an organisation then you've obviously never tried to order a credit card over the phone with Santander.

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.

Mysteries

In 20 months in South Sudan I discovered a great deal about the world's newest nation, but I'm sorry to say that some mysteries remain.

A luggage trolley with 'Heathrow Airport' emblazoned on it found its way to active service at Juba airport.  How the hell did that get there?

South Sudan has lots of oil but no pipeline, north Sudan has a nice pipeline but no oil, neither country has any money, and yet they still can't work out how they can each have some.

My football team (Juba Unathletic) was awarded a free kick by a referee who was promptly surrounded by angry members of the opposition.  His method of calming them was to pull out a pistol from his shorts and level it at them.  None of this is mysterious, or surprising; the real mystery here is the reaction of the players, which was to lift up their shirts and jab at their chests as if to say "go on, shoot me."  In South Sudan if you pull a gun and don't shoot anyone then you are a coward.  In what way is it a good idea to test whether the ref wanted to be a coward?  Anyway, when a 15 man brawl ensued, with two AK47s being waved around, we called it a draw and left.

Soldiers in South Sudan are unable to shoot straight when fighting a war (I think that's why the civil war went on for 50 years, with a pause for half time), but if a middle aged Kenyan lady accidentally drives through a roadblock a soldier manages to shoot her in the head from 50 yards.

Our security manager used to sit at a desk with a huge detailed map of South Sudan in front of him.  Habitually he would skype me when bored, with an amusing place name he had just spotted ("Boing" etc).  The only mystery is something he spotted, and it is how the town of Longochuk (sic) is the capital of Longuchok (sic) County.

When you donate clothes to Africa, most of them end up in Konyo Konyo market in Juba.  A lot of Western references are lost on Jubans, which explains why my friends have seen a burly shopkeeper wearing a Chippendales T-shirt, and a coal delivery man wearing a Santa hat in September.  But even if he wasn't familiar with the reference, surely the 6'7" armed soldier in Rumbek must have been aware that a Hello Kitty T-shirt didn't suit his image?

When I came to South Sudan in December 2010 it was part of an enormous country on the brink of collapse.  In July 2012 I left an independent nation on the brink of collapse.  Other than separation, there has been tangible progress, in the form of Guor Marial's 47th place in the 2012 Olympic marathon, although he had to pretend to be a country on his own as South Sudan has no Olympic Committee.  I can also report that Juba has more tarmac roads than it did in 2010, and a good Indian restaurant opened halfway through 2011.  However, for as long as South Sudan loves Celine Dion, shiny silver suits and slimy okra stew, the road to recovery looks a rocky one.

Thanks for reading.

Slightly below par road conditions in Kapoeta

Football field in Juba - we won one and lost one here.  I scored one own goal, in the win.

Progress

Two tribes not going to war

The rains have come to South Sudan.  This is rubbish in many ways; planes can't land on dirt airstrips so people get stuck in remote locations for weeks, cars get stuck in the glutinous mud so we can't visit our projects, ex-pat garden parties get rained off.  An upside to the rains is that the tribes admit defeat to the elements and put down their spears and rocket-propelled grenades until they can go out on the rampage without getting their Reeboks dirty.  It has been weeks since any clinics were burnt to the ground because they were treating members of an unpopular tribe.

I think Africa breeds warrior societies.  I don't know if these cause wars, or the other way around.  When an African boy reaches the threshold of manhood at around age 14, he will likely undergo a ceremony of unspeakable pain in front of a hooting throng of his tribesmen.  This may be circumcision, or having deep furrows cut in his forehead, or four of his bottom teeth pulled out.  If he weeps, or cries out, or throws himself on the ground and adopts the foetal position (I would favour a combination of all three), he is a little sissy girl and will never be a fighter or even a man.

It is a matter of honour that when two Sudanese tribes go to war, biting is frowned upon (presumably along with fishhooking and anything below the belt).  The fact that warriors have their bottom teeth extracted to enforce this rule tells its own story.  Although it may also be to prevent biting the tongue when driven mad from malaria, dengue fever or one of those Celine Dion hours they have on African radio, and if I got tetanus I'd be pleased to have a convenient hole to feed through when lockjaw set in.

Another interesting side affect of the teeth removal is the unwitting pronunciation of 'p' as 'f' - in South Sudan you mustn't be surprised when a security guard announces to you "you can f&ck your car over there".