White Baboon

The ride to Rania was a roller coaster. Great America’s Screaming Eagle with its shockless, wooden construction comes to mind. Zana’s no-name car was the epitome of luxury—beige and gold, proof of purchase still stuck to the windows, digital dash, cruise control, compact-disc player and leather interior with head-rest to floor-mat dog-fur covers. Unfortunately, drivers below the age of 40 from developing countries who have managed to somehow own a car tend to drive as fast as they possibly can whenever they can. This includes the fifty meter space between Kurdistan’s frequent speedbumps, which makes the halt they come to five inches before the speedbump rather difficult. But steady breathing, focusing on the black smoke of a distant horizon-perpendicular oil well and absolutely no reading make it doable. Besides, by now we have stomachs of steel. We have eaten straight grease, unpasteurized milk, tap water-washed vegetables and other unidentified objects from many living-room-floor spread plastic picnic cloths and have yet to become truly ill.

So when we pulled onto the shoulder in the middle of nowhere, chose a bright-red-and-white chicken, watched a man cut its head off and stick it in a blood-draining funnel, and then wrap it up in a plastic bag which we then put in our trunk and ate with rice the next day, neither of us even flinched.

We’d been invited to this mountain town by our couchsurfer’s students, Zana and Nejad, for the weekend.

The rockstar alert was a little higher here in Rania. The fair faces of the Kurds stared and followed us through the bazaar full of kebab stands, barber shops, lurid god jewelry displays and basic goods like power strips, soap and spark plugs. Some Kurds pumped our hand with a grateful glee, some said “Hello!”, others couldn’t bother. One clothing store clerk with a friendly, eager and somewhat sad smile started a conversation in English and invited us to take a seat. His story gave us chills.

“From Kirkuk, but I lived to UK for two years, but then they make problem to me. I must leave. My father, he worked to Saddam. My brother he killed someone two years ago. I was just a little boy. But people make problem to me. Now I am in Erbil. But people make problem for me here, too. We will see. ”

Stories of Kurds escaping to the UK was common. One of our hosts, Nejad, had lived there for four years. He lived in a low-income London suburb with his brother, worked day and night in a Soho falafel shop, then sent the money home to his parents for rebuilding, medical costs, basic needs.

But other kids were luckier. Zana’s father lives in Norway and sends money home to provide for the family. Zana attends the University of Kurdistan and goes home to visit his mother, the patriotically-named Kurdistan and his sisters Soma and Sonya every weekend (which in here, is on Friday and Saturday). Kurdistan is a warm, busty woman with skin the color of muddy coffee and henna-highlighted hair. She hugs me tightly and instantly and lets me help in the kitchen, a rarity. The bathroom here, like all others we’ve seen so far in Rania is a wet squat without toilet paper.

Zana took us through family albums in the living room portraying a typical teenager’s life with friends, relative’s weddings, picnics and graduations. Except Zana has two grandmothers because his grandfather had two wives

Just another day in Northern Iraq.

The Pashmerga, the Kurdish police and security officers, were everywhere. At intersections. At fountains. At soccer games. There were never any less than four guards at the gates of our compound, which includes ten-foot high walls. There were always two or three in front of the school, where our couchsurfing host taught English. During the drive to Rania with two University students, we encountered four checkpoints, two which required a look at our passport.

But our first real run-in with the police happened while taking photos there last week. We were caught off guard by two Kalishnakov-swinging camoflauged men who were not especially friendly. One minute there were two of them, the next more than 10. Our host’s face lacked reassurance or comfort.

So we followed the soldiers through mountain-surrounded Rania, a town known for its clever strategies and participation in the 1991 Northern Uprising in Iraq. We walked casually past the cement walls which contain brown courtyards, marble pillars and squat toilets. Past the women in their headscarves and ground-length velor housecoats, past the children in their fluorescent, synthetic clothing and rubber sandals. Past bench after medieval cart of men in their olive-drab traditional Kurdish garb, a cross between a Carhart worksuit, and a brown cummerbund-wrapped tuxedo, minus the bowtie. Past the Armani belt buckles and pin-striped suits. Past a Jack Daniels-bragging liquor store, sometimes a sign of a Christian neighborhood.

At the police station, four gun-wielding guards chaotically search us for a mobile phone. It was hard for them to believe we didn’t have one. Soon, we were herded toward a room and told to sit down. In the next sixty seconds, at least 15 people came into the room. We couldn’t tell if we were the excitement of the day or if they considered us a serious threat. Soon, it was another room. Then another. I wanted to hold onto Michael, but I couldn’t. Not here. Still, no one smiled. Still, our host was expressionless. I was calm, but fearful. I tried to look simultaneously scared, friendly and apologetic, my passport in my hands, ready to submit. Finally, a man behind a big desk in a heated office examined Michael’s passport. He waves mine away. I am just a woman, after all.

No problem. We can go. We can take all the pictures we want. They just had to make sure we weren’t Turkish spies gathering information about the PKK.

Cool.

When my parents arrived at our Peace Corps apartment in Bulgaria last spring, I warned them about the door. Covered in a somewhat convincing wood-grain peel with a massive gold knob, it had no less than six bolts–four in the middle, one in the ceiling and one which shot into the floor. Seeing this door causes two potential reactions: 1) Wow, Sofia must be a dangerous city or 2) Wow, someone’s paranoid.

But it’s tough to say if the reason we never had a theft was because Sofia doesn’t have a lot of crime or because we had a very secure door.

Kurdistan was crawling with security. Perhaps that’s why it was so safe.

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It was dark, but the stars and the moon across the twelve to fifteen white, armored Suburbans we passed allowed me to read the logo and tagline across their doors. On the left, a skull and crossbones in black. On the right, this cryptic tagline: “Saves Lives. Builds Futures.”

We walked, six of us abreast, our passports tucked away in the pocket of some guard’s fatigues after a signing in at the high security entrance. Me, Michael, an American-Turkish political science professor, a Anglo-Australian wandering traveler and some British guy named Neil. It was 10:00 but it felt much later. We’d been at the University of Kurdistan’s International Women’s Day Celebration this afternoon, a disorganized, but A-for-effort debacle of dance, drama, purple ribbons, visiting dignitaries, detailed Power Point slides and disrespectful audience participation. We’d then taxied to a happy hour at Café de Paris, where we’d been drinking until now. After a particularly long line at the checkpoint, our taxi had just had a minor scuffle with a drunk driver.

Now we were headed to Andy’s house inside what our friends call “New City” or “The Compound” a place which houses contractors who had jobs with Blackwater, DinaCorps USAID, UN and other acronyms. People there to support Western influence, whatever that might be.

Andy was Scottish. He was the kind of guy who understood the importance of candles at a party, wore a blazer with ease and kept his bathroom clean. Even after Michael’s bottle of MGD somehow cracked his sink basin, he still let us try on his bulletproof vest and hold his Glock while we took photos of each other looking mean.

He even kissed our feet when we told him we were tourists.

Andy was a PSD. Private Security Detail. One of many beefy, goatee-sporting, beer-bottle-holding men who were paid obscene amounts of money plus benefits, accommodation and flights back home so they would work in Iraq and protect others. Some were drivers, guards, secret service. Others helped de-mine fields.

In Andy’s backyard was the Edge, the only bar in the compound, a twenty by twenty hole with forty men and four women which blasted Shakira and Fity Cent. He ’d even built a ladder which escorted friends across his back wall and into the bar and pool next door. We talked to a lot of people who went to Baghdad once a month in armored vehicles but were not allowed to get groceries outside the compound gates in Erbil, Kurdistan. When we expressed surprise, they said without disdain: Well, you just never know.

But we did know. We’d researched Kurdish Iraq. We’d read websites and blogs. We watched then news as often as the devout Muslims prayed. We’d been hanging out with University teachers, contractors who had lived here for up to two years with no armed guards and no issues besides unreliable electricity.

But maybe when all you see in your community are guns, tanks, armored cars and security forces, maybe you start to fear the outside world. Without this fear, job justification might be weaker. You might feel guilty about the danger pay deposited into your bank account every month. You might find it difficult to stay trapped here another day if it didn’t all make some kind of sense.

What do you think?