While eating a chickpea sandwich

Yesterday I walked down from the office to a little vendor on the street and got a chickpea sandwich for ~40 cents. (And no, I don't mean falafel. I know what falafel is. This was not ground and fried. It was just cooked chickpeas in a sandwich.) It was while eating this delicious chickpea sandwich that I realized how much I am falling in love with this place.

But before I continue, a little housekeeping.

Most names of people/places I post in this and all other blogs will probably be pseudonyms. I will also not be able to be extremely specific about where I am going all the time or where I have been. This is probably a bit overcautious given how safe I have felt every second I have been here, but it is something I have been asked to do.

I can't give a perfect item-by-item list of why I am starting to love this place so much. As I was eating that sandwich, watching the crazy driving on the main street and looking around at a beautiful scene of Suly surrounded by mountains, I started to reflect. There are certainly differences, and even things that, from my cultural perspective, don't make a lot of sense. And there are so many things that I have not even begun to scratch the surface of. To act like I understand this place after (how long has it been... 4, 5 days?) would be incredibly arrogant. Still, I feel like the more time I spend in Suly the better it gets.

When you get on a bus here, you just pass up your money, and as it makes its way up the bus people change it out and give it to the driver, and your change finds its way back to you. Who would tap the random guy/gal in front of them on a MARTA bus in Atlanta and hand them a wad of bills? I don't think I would. I feel like there is just so much more of a collective spirit here. Your relationships are more important than your time. And it is so easy to make friends! Some of the interns and I went to a party last night, and I had not been through the door for ten seconds before I had met three new Kurdish friends. We sat and laughed as we tried to speak Kurglish with each other, and joked and hugged and got really, really confused. A huge dinner was served, consisting of a few different rice dishes, a Kurdish favorite that is something wrapped in grape leaves (I have no idea what is inside), bananas, oranges, a golfball size plum-like fruit, a delicious pudding/banana dish, cupcakes, and later a regular cake. The last piece of cake came to our table and was handed to me, and I told the Kurdish guy next to me "no, you take it," and he did the same and passed it to the guy next to him, and round and round it went for about 3 minutes until everyone had been offered it 2-3 times, before someone finally accepted it. Mind you, this cake was delicious, and I guarantee you almost everyone at that table wanted it, but each wanted the next guy to have it more. After hanging out a bit more, someone put on some Kurdish music and everyone started dancing! The Kurdish dance is a circle-type dance where everyone holds hands or links arms, and dances in a spinning circle led by someone twirling a scarf. Someone will occasionally shout some noise along with the beat and people will repeat it- YEE-AH! ... YEE-AH! ... YEE-AH! It was an amazing time. It is experiences and thoughts like these that continue to draw me in to this place.

To give an update of the last couple days that I haven't posted: on Tuesday we finally got our last two interns, Lydia and Lauren, and headed to the bazaar in two groups to show them the same first experience that we had. After the bazaar we walked to the huge park nearby, and Ben, Lydia, and I went to Zara marked to pick up some pizza (Yes, there is pizza in Kurdistan. Yes, it is better than the pizza in Italy.) and sharwma (a type of shaved meat or chicken) for dinner. We ate this next to a large pond in the park, and enjoyed the late afternoon air. Six o'clock through the rest of the night here feels amazing. The next day we had our first full office day. This started with dividing up tasks and setting personal goals. We have a very diverse group of interns with different skills, so this was fairly simple. Daniel, Esther, and Lauren are the writing team. They are overseeing a lot of different projects including the PLC blog, the weekly newsletter, and the year end review. Sophie is working on preparing for the fall tour (a huge task). Preston is working both towards our children's banquet, and on the standardization and diversification of the Klash. Lydia is our extremely talented intern photographer. Joshua is taking care of all things video (with a little editing help from Sophie). Claire is in charge of getting the ball rolling on developing "Self Help Groups" for families with CHD kids here. Ben is our fearless leader and is helping on the SHGs and the Klash standardization.

Although we have divided the tasks up, there will be plenty of teamwork involved. My primary task is maintaining/updating/using the PLC database of kids, working to organize sending kids to Turkey, and helping determine what kids will be part of the upcoming Remedy Mission. I will also be helping Jess with finances a bit and working towards gauging the interest in and possibly helping to implement an inter-organization database of kids in all the different organizations/hospitals/listings. I am super excited about my task as it is going to allow me to spend time speaking to doctors, seeing hospitals and offices, and really experiencing a lot of the medical side of PLC's work.

Speaking of hospitals, Preston, Lydia, and I went with Awara yesterday to the local heart clinic to check out some equipment for the Remedy Mission. If you haven't heard yet, the Remedy Mission is an incredible opportunity for both the kids and the community here in Iraq- we will be bringing a highly experienced surgical team in to perform 30 complex pediatric heart surgeries and train local doctors from Suly and other places throughout the area. We are doing everything over here to be ready to make a huge impact this summer through our Remedy Mission, but we still need more support! If you want to know more about it, check out this link or email me at alex@preemptivelove.org. Back to the hospital- We met with Dr. Jhafar, a surgeon, and Dr. Mohammed, an anesthesiologist. Dr. Mohammed took us into the ICU where we photographed and got information about their three ventilators (machines that keep people breathing during surgery). After contacting the leader of our Remedy Mission team, we were relieved to hear that with a few extra pieces of equipment he will be able to use these machines! This is great news as each piece of equipment we can use here is one less the Remedy Team has to figure out how to bring.

Today is Friday, which is our day off, so I'm headed out into the town! I hope that this post finds everyone healthy, happy, and full of love.

Xua hafîz.

Alex

Day 2- Short update

This morning I woke up and took my first shower in more days than I should probably admit. We ate a light breakfast at the house and headed to the office around 9ish. Jessica gave us a brief overview of some office work and house rules. We are waiting for our last two interns, Lydia and Lauren, to arrive before really getting into separating out tasks and setting more specific goals for PLC work. Can't wait to see them tomorrow!

I did figure out for sure that I will get to teach some English here- more to come on this when I have details.

After leaving the office and grabbing a bite to eat, we headed back to the house for a little siesta followed by "Interlocution" possibly soon to be renamed "Fireside Chat." This basically consists of a casual discussion on different specific topics. I'm really looking forward to having these very often!

These last few hours we have spent sitting and talking with an amazing man who hand-makes the Klash that PLC sells to fund life-saving heart surgeries in Iraq. It was a great experience to hear about politics affecting Kurdistan and Iraq from an Iraqi Kurd rather than some talking head on an american news show. Especially a 40 year old Iraqi Kurd who has lived through and experienced Iraq from post-british/nationalized petroleum/relatively safe to the Iraq-Iran war to the gassing of Kurds to the Gulf War to the US invasion and everything beyond/in-between.

It's about 11 here and I'm falling asleep in this chair, so I am going to call it a night. I promise updates will be coming with more pictures/stories/thoughts and not just a rehash of what I did all day. We have been very busy getting settled in and learning and adjusting, so I promise as we get used to life here my posts will have more content. Thanks for reading!

Xua hafîz.

Alex

Day 1 in Iraqi Kurdistan

An overview of today:

Slept in until about ten (traveling from US to Iraq = lots of tired interns). Got up and ate some delicious pumpkin bread with chocolate chips provided by the amazing Jessica Courtney, followed by a crash course in Kurdish "don'ts." We then walked a couple blocks to a delicious restaurant where we had rice, kebabs, tomatoes, beans, cucumber, some amazing stew I've never heard of, and fantastic bread. Next we returned to the house and prepared for our scavenger hunt- splitting into two teams we went into the town with nothing but a list of "essential" and "optional" tasks.

Sophie, Preston, Joshua, and I left the house and walked around the corner to the market to exchange ten US dollars for ~12,000 dinar. Walking back out to the bridge (the name of which I still cannot pronounce) we passed up on about five full busses before finally working up the courage to squeeze ourself onto one and head for the bazaar. Please note: at this point we are four extremely out of place Americans in Sulaymaniyah for the first time, who can say "Dest xosh" (thank you), "Choni? Bashi?" (Hello, how are you?), "Nexer" - short version "Na" (no), and Bale (yes) - all pronounced horribly, no doubt. Sounds a bit like a recipe for disaster- but our day turned out to be the opposite!

On the bus (and thanks to Preston's initiation with "Choni? Bashi?") we met our new friend Hajin (that is spelled completely wrong, I promise you) who spoke great English and was just a super nice guy. He gave up much of his afternoon to walk around the huge, amazing, huge, (did I say huge?) bazaar with us, showing us around and teaching us, and even buying us smoothies and helping with some negotiating! In the (huge) bazaar we bought ASIAcell sim cards, a few cell phones (got Hajin's number!), some Samon (tasty bread- one loaf costs about 10 cents), saw a road completely filled with gold vendors, saw a squirrel with a necklace for sale, met a Klash maker/seller (p.s. you can buy Klash and all profits will go towards helping fund a life-saving heart surgery for an Iraqi kid: http://www.buyshoessavelives.com/), and failed at the pronunciation of some new Kurdish phrases (Pexosh halim benasinit).

At the conclusion of our first foray into the bazaar, we grabbed another bus back to the bridge (Xesro Hal?) and walked back to the Courtney's (who are amazing hosts, by the way). Joshua T. and I went to the market and got Jess some ground beef, and then we all ate a big dinner together. After that we had some great, intimate fellowship and listened to most of Joshua G.'s life story- such a cool guy, honored to be working with him.

Tomorrow we are going to begin getting more into actual PLC work, which I am very excited about.

Much more to come, but for now I need sleep! In the meantime, please check PLC's new Remedy Mission- an incredible opportunity to help kids and communities in Iraq like we never have before!

Much love from Iraq,

Alex

Bullet Points

This post is not directly about work with PLC or Iraq, but it is certainly related. I hope you will read it and if you have thoughts about it I would love to hear them- comment or email me at alex@preemptivelove.org

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Finishing exams for the year means, among other things, that I can finally start reading books of my choosing. Today I started (started again would be more accurate) Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence. I made it to page ten, sitting in a cozy and trendy coffee shop in Atlanta drinking a $3 soy latte, when I leaned back in my chair and actually thought about what I was reading.

The story of "Darlene" occupies about three pages in the book. Those three pages contain more suffering and struggle than I will ever be able to truly understand. As I looked back at my cute red reading journal with the picture of a kitty on the cover and little paw prints lining each page, I realized I had reduced Darlene's already condensed three pages into a few bullet points:

"Darlene"

-African American woman from Harlem (b. 1955)

-Mother of 4

-Stepbrother, Stepfather, Husband all die within a year (HIV/AIDS related infections)

-Two friends (her children's godparents) die in same year (HIV/AIDS related infections)

-Three oldest children taken into foster care so she can try to care for her youngest who is very ill (suspected HIV/AIDS)

-Youngest child dies (still same year). Her words: "He was three years old. It took him six months to die."

-Becomes addicted to crack, hits "rock bottom," homeless. Later enrolls herself in a detoxification program and is diagnosed with AIDS.

Now about this point is where I would plan to say "I'm not writing this to try and make anyone feel depressed or break everyones heart" ...but maybe I am. Perhaps we need to have our hearts broken more often. You (or I if I were reading this) might say: "We all know the world has suffering and sadness and that AIDS, Congenital Heart Disease, etc. are terrible." Certainly we do. But do we know these things are terrible because we know that 40+ million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS or that thousands of children are stuck waiting in line for life saving heart surgery in Iraq, or do we know that these things are terrible because we realize that every single one of those people, every single one of those kids, their families, their friends, have a different story of suffering and struggle?

The vast majority of these people don't and will never have even a few bullet points, let alone three still insufficient pages in an anthropological volume. They are reduced to being part of an aggregate statistic. Their story, feelings, and trials are not even a number, they are part of a number. More than forty million unique, heart breaking narratives of unique, invaluable human beings become "40+ million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS."

Please understand that I am not speaking ill of health statistics, they are extremely useful and necessary, what I am wondering is what the lives of all of us who "know about" and hate this suffering would look like if whenever we saw these statistics we thought about the individual people behind them- their stories, their feelings, their families, their lives. And to take it one step further, what if we viewed these people as our own friends, brothers, sisters, mothers, or children? I suspect there would be much more willingness, and much more urgency to help those that we know are suffering.

Now I know that I certainly can't, and I don't imagine that any person living today can truly comprehend worldwide suffering of billions on the individual level. Even trying to can become overwhelming very quick. So what do we do then? I think that is a question everyone has to answer for themselves- but I do have a suggestion: Start by trying to understand the struggles and suffering faced by one or a few individuals, and try to really love them as yourself. There are myriad opportunities for this: consider Lawen and Nivar, two kids in Iraq who need surgery to fix their hearts.

Lawen

Nivar

You can read about Lawen and Nivar, as well as the many other children PLC works with, on the Preemptive Love Coalition Blog. You can support and love these kids by helping fund life-saving heart surgery for them in Iraq.

Another great organization is Partners in Health. Here is their vision, copied from the PIH website:

The PIH Vision: Whatever it takes
At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well—from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill.

Partners in Health Website

The founder of Partners in Health, Dr. Paul Farmer, is one of the editors and authors of the book-Women, Poverty and AIDS-that tells Darlene's story. Speaking again of Darlene, my thoughts tonight interrupted me from writing the last bullet in my journal. I have since added it, and it reads:

"-Now visits her 2 children who live near her every day, and son who lives in New Jersey every week."

The final sentences of Darlene's story in Women, Poverty, and AIDS read:

"She says she'll see them this way until she dies. She only hopes she doesn't linger."