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...