Out of Iraq

I flew out of Baghdad this afternoon and landed in Amman a couple of hours ago. I'm excited to spend a couple of days here going to Petra and the Dead Sea, getting a massage at the luxurious Four Seasons and doing a bit of shopping.

That said, I'm really sad about leaving Baghdad. Our crazy frat house had become my home, and the guys had become my brothers. And as war-torn as the city itself may be, I feel like it's my war-torn city. Saying goodbye was really hard -- everybody came outside to wave me off, and I wanted to cry. J, my American coworker, is one of my favorite people in the world, and I hate that I won't get to see him every day anymore. I think it's going to be very strange to go back to living alone.

Fortunately, A is in Amman at the moment as well, so I don't have to totally divorce myself from Baghdad quite yet. We're going out on the town tonight and to Petra tomorrow, so hopefully it'll take my mind off of being sad.

The quest for alcohol

We're throwing a party tonight because I'm leaving tomorrow, which led to a hilarious quest to buy beverages. It was sort of a ridiculous proposition in the first place -- buying alcohol in an Islamic country, on a Friday, during Ramadan. Poor planning led to the Friday part of that equation; the rest was fairly unavoidable.

There are a few remaining liquor stores in Baghdad, and a few of our guys -- a Christian and a couple of lapsed Muslims -- know exactly where to find them. We asked G, the Christian, to go to the liquor store where he usually buys Amstel and Corona, but it's closed for the entirety of Ramadan (which raises a question about how its proprietor supports himself, no?). We knew the location of two other stores, but they were closed too. At this point, we began to panic a little bit, because we had invited 25 people over and we figured they would be expecting alcohol. Somebody told us that there was a liquor store near the PX in the Green Zone, but we soon learned it had been shut down because soldiers were buying alcohol, which they're not allowed to drink.

And then a British security consultant next door told us about the "tactical shop," which reportedly sold beer out of a sketchy little trailer in a remote part of the Green Zone (U.S. officials call it the International Zone, or IZ). We got step-by-step directions and set out. Getting there requires a complicated series of turns at intersections marked only by small yellow signs proclaiming "tactical shop." We drove off a paved road, essentially into a dump, and saw a series of battered trailers. Sure enough, one of them had two signs: "Tactical Shop" in yellow and "IZ Liquor Store" in green. The trailer couldn't have been more than eight feet wide, and the passageway was even narrower than that because of the cases of beer stacked high on both sides. We got two cases of Corona, one case of Amstel, four bottles of wine and a bottle of Absolut (for mixing with pomegranate juice).

The party is on.

Chaos

So I've been terrible at posting this week. I apologize. It's my last week in town, and life is basically chaos. I'm trying to finish two different long-term assignments while following major developments this week. Our two best staff members quit this afternoon, a decision that may not stick but is not good for the office.

And then there's Blackwater. I just wrote that "Sunday's shooting has inflamed deep-seated frustrations with Blackwater among Iraqis, many of whom view the company’s contractors as highly paid bullies who fail to respect citizens or customs of the country where they work." This is probably an understatement. Iraqis hate Blackwater contractors, and it's hard to blame them. These guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (I think the average salary for a contractor in Iraq runs about half a million) to drive around like bad-asses in their SUVs with M-16s poking out from the sunroof. They are arrogant, disrespectful of Iraqis and somewhat thuggish. I hate to generalize about an entire 1,000-person operation, but I have never had a good experience with Blackwater. Essentially, Iraqis see Blackwater as epitomizing everything terrible about Americans.

It will be interesting to see whether the revocation of the company's license sticks and if the Blackwater guys are forced out of the country. It would be a huge turnaround, considering the prestige their contractors have carried for the last four years. Whatever happens, my American colleague had a point yesterday when he said "Damn, it's nice to see the Iraqi government sticking up for it's people."

Shopping, redux

I got to go shopping with two of my coworkers yesterday, which was a rare chance at true freedom -- no work, just looking for pretty things to bring home. S wanted to buy a painting for his mother's house in Baghdad, A wanted art to decorate his family's new home in Amman, and I went along for the ride.

With the exception of the bodyguard lurking outside, it felt fairly normal. We walked around a series of adjacent galleries, compared our favorite paintings, chatted with the owner and generally had a good time. I bought an absolutely amazing painting -- it's hard to describe, but it's an abstract painting of a couple of "Baghdadi doors," a minaret of a mosque, etc. It's royal blue with other bright colors (lots of gold) and some raised texturing. It's going in my bedroom when I get back.

The gallery owner was clearly pretty desperate to make a sale -- when my coworker asked about the price of the painting I was looking at, he said "Oh, whatever you think." We eventually settled on $20 American for something that was similar to pieces that people were charging $150 for in American military compounds. These guys can't make a single sale most days, so having three people walk in with money to spend was pretty exciting. All told, we gave him the equivalent about $100 American (for five paintings, one of them framed), and he couldn't stop thanking us.

The roof

I have a confession to make that will disappoint most of my good friends. When I moved into our house, directly next door to a 12-story hotel, it didn't occur to me to go up to the roof of said hotel. Even when I began spending most of my leisure time in the hotel, I never went higher than the third floor. I'm a failure.

That said, I finally made it up yesterday. Oh my lord, it's amazing. I'm disappointed in myself for not seeing it before now. You can actually see the entire city from up there. The Tigris glimmers on three sides and the golden minarets of mosques tower in every corner of the city. I lost my breath for a moment marveling at the beauty of Baghdad, and spotting the carcass of a bombed car a few blocks away didn't totally ruin the feeling. My head felt clearer during my 15 minutes on the roof than it has since I've been here.

A couple hours after I discovered the roof, J and I were driving by the river. J glanced at the sun setting over the Tigris and sighed. "Sometimes I love this city," he said. I couldn't agree more. Everybody warned me that Baghdad would get under my skin, that I would love it so much that I would never want to go back. I won't go quite that far; I'm pretty excited to see the Bay Area and New York and all my favorite people. But Baghdad has become part of me, and I couldn't be happier about that. I may have to find a way to get back here at some point.

Tomorrow I will take pictures from the roof, I promise.

Iftar

It becomes a bit difficult to think through complex assignments at about 6 p.m. after a full day of fasting, so the break-fast at about 7:15 p.m. is eagerly anticipated at our office. For the past two days, every single person in the house has gathered for Iftar together as soon as the sun sets -- the first time since I've been here that we've all eaten together. We all gather around a television where the government-controlled station counts down to official sundown, an occasion marked by a clip art depiction of a firing cannon. Then all 20 (or so) of us gather around the dining room table, where food is abundant.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia now that I'm in my final week in Iraq, but Iftar has been really meaningful for me. After 10 weeks of working and living with these people in very close quarters, I do feel like they are family, so it's been pretty great to celebrate the holiday with them. Our Iftar parties have been similar to an American Thanksgiving -- a somewhat dysfunctional family, all crowded around a big table, laughing and stuffing ourselves. It makes me glad I'm fasting so I can be a part of it all.

Ramadan

Ramadan begins today. Living in an Islamic country during holy days is fascinating. Restaurants close altogether, since there's nobody to buy food during the day -- everyone fasts. Among my coworkers are a large number of people who don't practice Islam (no prayers, no visits to the mosque, in several cases no belief whatsoever), but they all celebrate Ramadan. Celebrating only high holy days is obviously not limited to Muslims, but when it's such a huge commitment -- no food or drink during the day for an entire month! -- it seems particularly striking.

Because everyone at home is fasting, I am too. We'll eat two meals a day: a break-fast/dinner at 8 or so, then something light before we all fall into bed at 2:30 (or 3, or 4...). I don't really eat during the morning anyway, and if I'm running back and forth to different meetings I occasionally miss lunch, so I don't think this will be a huge problem. And no, it's not the first step to my conversion.

There is one definite problem, however. I'm leaving tomorrow night to go on a trip with the military for three days. Since I'm only fasting because everyone else is fasting, presumably I wouldn't do it around soldiers (it would be a bit awkward to say in the dining hall that I'm not Muslim but I am fasting for Ramadan). Additionally, soldiers work incredibly hard in still-brutal heat, so I think maybe I should not pass up opportunities for fuel -- and the idea of working outside all day without water sounds unappealing. On the other hand, plenty of Iraqis do the same thing...

So much testosterone

On an average night, there are three women (one of whom speaks no Arabic, one of whom speaks no English) and roughly 13 men sleeping at our house. This automatically connotes a frat house environment, a stereotype that our particular men seem to embrace. Last night we started coming up with the list of "You know you live in an Iraqi frat house when..."

10. Despite having a cook who prepares full meals, the majority of the population ate meatballs for dinner last night. Meatballs and beer.
9. You fall asleep most nights at 4 a.m. to the sound of pool balls crashing together.
8. American movies worth watching are sorted into two categories: lots of violence or slapstick humor. Major bonus points for attractive women in either category.
7. Our 400 news channels from all over the world are ranked by how attractive the young female newscasters are. Al-Arabiya currently maintains a significant lead.
6. Serious discussions ensue fairly regularly about the possibility of inviting Moqtada al-Sadr to play pool.
5. You can't convince a soul that french fries are not a vegetable.
4. People regularly wonder aloud when they last showered.
3. The general consensus determines that it's acceptable for Iraqi women to wear hijab, but never Lebanese women because they're so much hotter.
2. Running upstairs for two minutes to wash your hands before taking a cookie from a platter of about 100 of them means no cookie for you.
1. At least three people are crowded around the Playstation in their boxers at all hours between 9 a.m. and 4 a.m.

D-day

As I type, we're crowded around the bank of TVs in our office watching the start of Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker's presentation to the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Although I don't think anyone is expecting huge surprises out of this testimony, this is a big deal for us -- all of our work has revolved around this day for at least six weeks. It's hard to describe how I feel watching this: I'm bizarrely nervous, as if this is a referendum on our work, not just the military's. In some ways it is -- Ike Skelton just cited something I wrote this morning (no mention of my name), and a lot of our work is likely to come up in discussion. Political developments over the next several days or weeks could also determine the course of my company's work in the long term.

I also am nervous that there will be too much political infighting and not enough discussion about how the continued U.S. military presence is affecting Iraqi civilians. A poll in The Washington Post this morning showed that most Iraqis think security has gotten worse since the troop "surge" -- not a single person in Anbar province and Baghdad, where the majority of additional troops are based, said they feel very safe. And, of course, things are much worse where there are fewer troops. Combine that with the fact that many Iraqis don't have jobs, water, electricity, schools, etc. and you get a pretty bleak situation. Although I believe Gen. Petraeus is a brilliant guy, he's looking at this from a military perspective, which only touches the tip of the iceberg.

More later...

Finals week

Students at Baghdad University are taking end-of-term exams this week, which brings a whole host of problems unique to students in war zones. Many of them haven't been to class in weeks, so they are essentially taking exams based on independent study. Yesterday my colleague's 23-year-old daughter, S, came to our office, and I talked to her a bit about her experience in school.

S's father (my coworker) moved his whole family -- S, her mom, and her brother and two sisters -- to Jordan last year because he feared for their safety in Baghdad (he stayed behind because he earns a good salary here). They became illegal residents in Amman, doing everything they could to get their residency permits but essentially running from the law. Making it worse for S, who was a second-year college student at the time, she couldn't attend a university in Jordan because she was not a citizen (additionally, Jordanian universities refuse to accept Iraqi college credits, meaning she would have had to start over). She and her family decided that she would study on her own in Jordan and fly back to Baghdad for exams.

S said that it's incredibly isolating to attempt to replicate a college experience on her own. She doesn't know anyone in Amman and rarely goes out, studying all day in the room she shares with her sister and helping her mother around the house. As exam time came near this summer, she wasn't even sure that her hard work would pay off -- she still hadn't gotten a residency permit in Jordan, and if she traveled back to Baghdad she might not be able to reenter Amman. With just a week to go before the exams began, she finally got a permit. She flew back to Baghdad, worrying her father terribly, and is sitting for exams this weekend. Then she'll go back to Amman, continue her studies on her own, and make plans to come back at the end of the next term.

S was nearly crying as she told me what her college experience used to be: sitting with friends at coffee shops helping each other review for tests, staying out too late, developing crushes on classmates. Now she steps on campus for exams only, then beelines back to Jordan. Many of her classmates' families cannot afford to move them out of the country, so they still have a community here, and S is crazy with jealousy. She's begged her father to allow her to move back to Baghdad, but he says absolutely not. As much as he loves having S here, my coworker is counting down the hours until she is safely out of Iraq again. We're at 48 and counting...

Best picture ever

For some reason, the Americans in our compound were really, really fascinated by the Larry Craig scandal. I guess it just struck us as so delightfully trivial that we couldn't resist. We read all the coverage, gossiped about the details, etc. The photo below depicts a particularly wonderful moment in which a conversation about Iraqi politics stopped dead when someone heard a CNN anchor announce the start of the audio tape of Craig's interview with the police. These brilliant, talented people leaped off the couch and crowded around the TV to hear every word. None of us could stop laughing for a good 10 minutes. Fortunately, someone had a camera, and you can even make out Craig's face on the TV (and yet, you can't recognize any of these people unless you know them personally).

Time marches on

I don't think I was under any delusion that life in the U.S. would stop altogether while I was gone. I accepted early on that people would keep going to work, eating and sleeping and ::sigh:: even having fun without me. But I don't remember giving people permission to keep having all these life events while I'm thousands of miles away. And yet, my small circle of loved ones seems to be having a tremendously eventful summer. In the past few weeks:

• A friend got engaged
• A family friend got married
• OFH started his senior year of college
• So did my baby sister -- yikes!
• A close friend moved to DC
• A friend left my company and moved back to NYC
• Another moved to a new apartment in NYC
• At least three friends got their first grown-up jobs
  
• One good friend had a painful breakup
• A friend was officially cured of cancer, six years after I sat in her hospital room
  
• THREE favorite people, including the best friend who was already too far away, moved from NYC to Boston so two of them can get Ph.Ds or some ridiculous thing
• I lost one intolerable coworker from my very small office and gained a wonderful one
  
• One good friend moved to NYC to start law school

Maybe that's the normal rate of life, but it sure feels like the world is on fast-forward back there, and it makes me feel left out! Gchat and phone calls are wonderful, but I would give anything to have been there for any one of these events or these people. Last night one of the new Boston residents was describing a hilarious scene involving four of them hauling stuff into a fourth-floor walkup because the movers weren't going to get it all done, and it actually made my heart ache. I've got all these people describing their new lives -- new homes, jobs, relationship statuses, etc. -- and I just want to be there to lug boxes or hang pictures or buy beers. I want to feel like I'm being a good friend to people who should have good friends around, and it's hard to do that from here. I'm having flashbacks to freshman year, when I had a huge fear of being left out by my older, cooler friends.

So I have a request: can you all start having more boring lives for a couple of weeks? I'll be back soon, and hopefully you'll all be willing to help me play catch-up in person. But honestly: no more moves, no more weddings/engagement/breakups, no more new anything. Just for three weeks, okay?

Love,
Briony

Dress to impress

The more time I spend with other western women here, the more I realize how much the question of what to wear starts to dominate our lives. At home, unless I'm going to work I basically exist in jeans and t-shirts. I am not the fussiest person about clothes, to put it mildly, so in Iraq I'm forced to put WAY more thought into these choices than I'm used to.

As I've explained here before, my goal in moving around Baghdad is to blend in as a normal Iraqi woman. This means wearing a hijab and either an abaya or Iraqi-looking shirt. I own two shirts that I bought here, neither of which I would wear in the U.S. (suffice it to say they both have a significant number of sequins). So, when I'm going to an interview in Baghdad, I generally wear one of the shirts with jeans and sequined flip-flops -- there are a lot of sequins in my life. If we're going to a conservative neighborhood where an insurgent group dominates, I wear the full abaya, but I try to avoid that if at all possible.

Of course, I have an entirely different costume for trip out with the military. Besides the flak jacket and helmet, I'm also required to wear a long-sleeved shirt on the helicopters, and wearing a trendy Iraqi shirt would just be weird. I generally opt for a button-down collared shirt and khakis, plus hiking boots (which have saved me from spraining an ankle several times already).
The problem occurs when I have a need for both sets of clothing -- whenever I need to travel through Baghdad to meet the military (i.e. every time I go out with them). Often, I can get away with my button-down shirt and a hijab for the short drive to the military pick-up point, but today that wasn't the case. I went to lunch at Camp Victory, a military base at the airport -- a lengthy drive from the office, on the most dangerous road in the city. The REI shirt wasn't going to cut it.

The solution was slightly complicated, but it worked. Abaya and hijab to the airport (where I was attending a lunch meeting with Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the three-star general that is second in command to Gen. Petraeus), stash both in the car in exchange for body armor and helmet for the short helicopter ride to Odierno's home. On the way out, throw the body armor and helmet in the trunk, abaya and hijab back on. As I was adjusting my hijab for the drive home, I realized how crazy this all was, and yet how accustomed to it I've become. Tomorrow I have no appointments, and I'm going to be perfectly happy to sit home in my jeans and t-shirt.

Shopping

After eight weeks in Baghdad, I finally was able to wheedle our security guys enough to convince them to let me go out on a food shopping trip for the house. We basically have one man whose entire job is to shop for everyone's food, and he stays busy -- it's a huge job. At any given point, there are between 12 and 20 people here, so shopping is done on a large scale. I had been wanting to go for a while now, but it took a while to convince M, our security chief.

I expected to come back today and write a post about how inspiring it was to see the bustle of the market; life going on even as a war is going on, blah blah blah. But honestly, the whole trip was a little depressing. The market, which was in the neighborhood once considered the single safest area in Baghdad, was relatively empty, with just a handful of people picking out vegetables and a few shop-keepers trying to get rid of some merchandise. But it was the look in people's eyes that really got me -- everyone was moving very quickly, glancing around nervously, looking for signs of trouble. I can't blame them, as this neighborhood has been bombed eight times in the past six weeks. I wasn't allowed to speak English, so I walked silently next to our house shopper, dressed in an abaya and hijab. Even so, I felt people's eyes boring into me, like they knew that I was an intruder. I'm sure it was my imagination -- DH told me as much -- but I was uneasy the whole time.

Also, as someone still longing for the produce at Monterey Market in Berkeley, I found the selection in Baghdad even worse than in D.C. (which is saying something...). I see why we don't get served a lot of vegetables -- the choices were basically limited to tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and potatoes (not a vegetable). There were some bruised apples and sickly oranges, but that was the extent of it. I cannot even articulate how happy I will be to spend four days eating in California.

The haircut story

In one of the worst decisions I've ever made, I decided to get my hair cut yesterday. Without a translator around. I was desperate for a trim, and this lady who runs a salon downtown was in our living room with all her supplies.

I held my fingers slightly apart to indicate I wanted about an inch taken off. She nodded, repeated "beautiful hair" a few times in English, and took up her scissors. With one cut, I lost seven inches of hair from the left side of my head. At that point, I couldn't do a thing about it -- I had to let her keep cutting, as I watched in horror in my bedroom mirror.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but after the whole experience was over I ran out of the room and began to cry. This may sound totally silly, but I felt completely violated. I liked my hair. I know I gripe about how much I shed and how insanely thick my mane is, but I really liked it. And she took that away. I instantly experienced this profound sense of loss that I still haven't shaken. This happened less than a week after our compound got stormed and my car got shot at, and though that day prompted an anxious day, I never cried -- and a phone conversation with a very wise friend calmed me down. I've now talked to two other close friends about the hair debacle, and despite their best efforts neither of them made much progress trying to convince me that this was not a life-threatening crisis.

My hair is now about shoulder length at its longest point, with incredibly dramatic layers going up to nose-length bangs. Bangs. I haven't had bangs since third grade. The layers make my stick-straight hair look bizarrely curly, but only on the ends, and it does this weird Farrah Fawcett feathering thing. There are people who have this haircut, even people who look good in it, but I'm not one of them. Half of it is too short to be pulled up, and these stupid bangs fall in my eyes. I hate it.

I am pleased to say I managed to look in a mirror a few minutes ago without feeling like I was going to cry all over again. I really, truly hate this haircut, but it's not wild and crazy or even poorly executed -- it's just not me. There are many women who have this haircut, so it's not like I'll look like a freak walking down a city street. Most of my male friends probably wouldn't notice it.

Apparently the normal growth rate for hair (about half an inch a month) can be sped up slightly by limiting its exposure to chlorine and other chemicals and eating a protein-rich diet. I've resolved not to set foot in the pool again while I'm here and force down as much mystery meat as possible.