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.