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.

Tired

I don't have a good idea of something to blog about. I want to blog every day because I think some people read it, but recently there have been no comments, so maybe we're down to just my mother at this point. Can you folks tell me what you'd like to read here? Which posts are particularly interesting? What I haven't posted about that you keep wanting me to? Reassure me that I'm not talking to a brick wall here.

Love,
Briony

Walking

Tonight I walked over to the hotel across the street for a glass of wine with a bunch of other westerners. On the way over, one of our guards escorted me, brandishing his AK-47 the whole way. This hotel couldn't be more than 100 steps from our front door, but in order to go anywhere I need an escort.

Still, even our security guards aren't obsessive enough to sit and wait for me to come out, so I got to make the long walk home by myself. I didn't think anything of it when I set out, but while I was walking down the block I realized how nice it was to just walk at night by myself and look up at the sky. It was the most relaxing moment I've had since I've been here, and although it didn't last long it was fairly refreshing. Most people take for granted the ability to walk down a silent street late at night, but I think I had forgotten how wonderful those moments can be.

Hey what else can we do now
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks
Oh oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh Thunder Road, oh Thunder Road
oh Thunder Road

...

Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken

Violence

This is the stuff that many of you don't want to hear about. Maybe skip this post and assume I'll write about puppies and rainbows tomorrow?

My company has never had any of its people killed in Iraq--that's 90 people. That being said, there have been a number of close calls, several recently. One of our guys was with a troop unit yesterday when mortar shells began to fall on their camp. He kept hearing them explode, coming closer and closer to where he was sleeping, and then his window shattered. When the violence stopped and he looked out his window, he saw a shell less than 10 feet away. He walked away without a scratch.

A couple of weeks ago, another one of my colleagues got caught downtown as one of the soccer games was ending. Traffic stopped and hordes of shirtless young men with AK-47s descended on the cars. Because my colleague is male, he can't cover himself up and look more or less Iraqi, so if someone had noticed he was American he could have been killed on the spot. Eventually he and the driver had to park the car and walk home, through crowds of people shooting into the air and fighting each other (and this was after a win...).

Eight car bombs have detonated in our neighborhood in the past month, killing well over 200 people and giving our house a pretty good shake each time. One of them, earlier this week, exploded on the road I take to the Green Zone about 15 minutes before I left. One day last week, four car bombs went off--all at intersections or checkpoints I had been at around those times the day before. While on the way to an appointment, my driver suddenly swerved, then pointed to an oil can he had narrowly avoided. "IED," he said. "Hit it, it goes boom."

The nature of this war is lots of random violence, which makes it occasionally scary to be here. We take every possible precaution, but there's still some luck involved. So here's to a bit more of it.

The trouble with love

In Iraq it can be the simplest things that cause all the trouble. I just spent an hour consoling D, who was in tears because of her boyfriend. The man in question lives next door, but they rarely see each other because another man in his office has connections to the Mahdi Army and has made threats toward them. They talk on the phone almost every day, but he regularly tells her that he is moving out of the country soon and won't take her with him. Today, she asked him to write down her parents' contact info in case something happens to her, and he didn't want the commitment (although he tells her all the time how much he loves her). D's parents live in Basra, a few hundred miles away, and most of her close friends from college have moved out of the country, so she's very lonely--and this boyfriend doesn't seem to be helping matters.

Dating and love are incredibly complicated matters around here. It makes me grateful for what I've got, even if it is 7,000 miles away. If you're in the same place as someone you love today, give them a hug, okay? For D and me.

Art for art's sake

Today I visited an art gallery in northern Baghdad, where I got to spend an hour chatting (in English, no less) with several painters and sculptors. We talked about how art has changed since the war began, the difficulty in trying to sell art in Baghdad and the reasons they choose to remain in Iraq. One man estimated that 80 percent of Baghdad's artists either have been killed or have fled the country. He told me he hated Saddam, but that he has to admit life was easier for artists before the Americans overthrew the dictatorship. Art for art's sake is no longer respected, he said--now, Moqtada al-Sadr might hire an artist to paint his portrait, but nobody wants to buy a beautiful abstract painting.

Several artists also lamented the role religion has begun to play in artistic expression. Paintings that show women without their heads covered, for example, are frowned on in many circles. People tell artists that they're wasting their time, that they should be "doing something useful." Almost all of the galleries in Baghdad--once considered the cultural capital of the Middle East--have closed. Just three students graduated from Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts this year.

But despite the solemn tone of a lot of our discussion, I found the visit somewhat inspirational. In the outdoor cafe behind the gallery, two dozen artists and students sat around drinking coffee and talking about art. The women wore jeans or knee-length skirts and removed their hijabs.
They spoke passionately about the role of art in a troubled country, about their love for Iraq and their dedication to expressing that love through sculpture or painting. As I walked back to my armored car and retied my hijab around my head, I felt a little less confined.

The visa question

Today's Washington Post has an important article about an unusual memo from the American ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker. Crocker is asking the Bush administration to provide visas for all Iraqis working for the U.S. government, including everyone from translators to service workers. Crocker wrote that he fears the government will lose its entire Iraqi staff unless they have the promise of a U.S. visa at the end of their service. ""Our [Iraqi staff members] work under extremely difficult conditions, and are targets for violence including murder and kidnapping. Unless they know that there is some hope of an [immigrant visa] in the future, many will continue to seek asylum, leaving our Mission lacking in one of our most valuable assets."

Crocker is certainly correct in his statement that Iraqis working for Americans risk their lives every day. As I've mentioned before, even those working for Americans unaffiliated with the government must lie about their employment even to their closest friends. Still, millions of Iraqis have been displaced--2.2 million to neighboring countries and another 2 million within Iraq, according to the U.N.--thousands of whom quit their American jobs out of fear that they would be killed. The promise of a one-way ticket to the U.S. would likely go a long way toward the ability to maintain a stable Iraqi workforce. But the article raises an important question: if you admit Iraq is unsafe for these people, what message does that send to everybody else? Shouldn't the goal be to make Iraq safe enough for Iraqis to live here?

The proposal has interesting ramifications for those of us working in the private sector, whose Iraqi coworkers would not be covered. Several staff members in our office are increasingly bitter that our company has not arranged for them to move to the U.S. By the time American security contractors, media companies, etc. leave Iraq, they will have to confront a difficult question about they level of responsibility they should take for the welfare of their staff members.

Opening thoughts

My goal for this blog is to chronicle the eight weeks I will spend in Baghdad, Iraq during July and August 2007. The content that appears here will not be about the war per se, but rather about my experience living and working in a war-torn country. I am neither a soldier nor a political operative, and for a variety of reasons I do not plan to discuss politics in this forum. Instead, I will write about people I meet, things I see and the impressions such experiences have made on me personally. I don't claim to represent anyone but myself, which is why I will write under an assumed name.

Essentially, this is the most effective way I can come up with of telling people who are interested about my life in Iraq. I will have regular internet access while I am abroad, so I expect to update regularly. I would love to hear from all of you through comments posted here or via e-mail.

p.s. This site cannot be found through a Google search, and I do not intend for it to reach anyone other than my own family and friends. If I have sent you the link, I ask that you be judicious in deciding who to forward it to. I don't expect to be revealing state secrets on this page, but I would prefer not to see my words quoted elsewhere. I don't think anything I will say here will be of any interest to people who don't know me, anyway.