The party was held at a local restaurant called Castello, which was known for its pizza. We had finally expanded beyond Assos and the hummus and chicken kebab dinner. All the teachers were driven to the restaurant in the shuttle bus, and we had about a half hour to mill around and take photos before the students showed up. Things around the school had been weird and tense since Nina’s attack, and I think we were all kind of relieved to have the student get-together as a distraction.
The second Awat walked through the door I forgot about everything else. He was the first of my students to arrive, and he looked gorgeous. The previous day, he had been mulling over wardrobe options. “I have black suit, and gray suit, and blue suit…” and I said, “Oh, I love blue!” He replied, “Then I will wear the blue suit!” The Kurds were very big on suits, but being in a still-developing country the suits were made with cheap fabrics and interesting cuts.
They reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch from the late ’70s with Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” with the tight, flared pants and the scary plaids. Awat’s suit was neither wild nor craaaazay. It was a deep Russian blue, and he was grinning ear-to-ear; he looked amazing.
My other students showed up, and as the evening went on, we had a great time eating together, laughing, and telling stories. I was really going to miss them. I was still being the appropriate teacher, and not behaving any differently toward Awat than I did toward any of my other students, except that he sat next to me at dinner, and at one point asked if he could eat off my plate. Like he did with his mother. Ucchhhh.
My male and female students had grown very comfortable around one another and seemed more like a family than just a class, which made me so proud. After finishing dinner, we were milling around when I noticed an empty room just off the main area. I peeked in and saw two comfortable-looking couches, with several cushy chairs, all surrounding a large, low coffee table. I decided that room was there just for my kids, so I brought them all in and we sat down and pretended we were the VIPs of the party.
Toward the end of the party, Pshtewan, one of my students who was raised in a very traditional, conservative household, took a moment to solemnly say to me, “Teacher. You were a very, very good teacher, and I want to say ‘thank you.’ I was surprised.” Then it was my turn to be surprised, for surprising him. How low were his expectations?
Student Appreciation Night was turning into Gretchen Appreciation Night, when Gulan, one of my non-headscarved girls in that same second class, grabbed both of my hands and gushed, “Teacher, thank you SO much.” Gulan was the “glossy one.” She was the most Westernized-looking female in the class and wore fashionable outfits and a lot of makeup and always had her hair looking just so. She continued, “You teach me so much more than just English.” I promise I did try to teach them to use past tense verbs, like “taught,” but sometimes in real-life situations they would occasionally forget. I wasn’t entirely sure what else I had taught her, but she seemed really enthusiastic about it, and that made me happy.
Then it was Peshang’s turn. He had been the bane of my teaching existence on more than one occasion. Peshang was twenty-one years old and could be a little intense and angry sometimes. He would grow borderline enraged in class if he said something that I couldn’t understand. I would say “Again, please?” to get him to repeat it, in a hopefully more understandable way, but Peshang would just repeat the exact sentence that hadn’t made sense to me the first time, only louder and angrier. There was one day where he was just an unbearable little shit, and I was operating on a very short, PMS-induced fuse. I ended the class early, and then went home to vent about the day. I told Ellen that I had just voted Peshang “most likely to become a terrorist.” I was really pissed.
One day I asked him to stay after class after a particularly fussy-baby outburst. With one eyebrow arched I looked him straight in the eyes and asked, “Do you want to learn English?” His eyes bugged open wide and he seemed completely shocked that I would ask that. “YES!” was his emphatic response. “I study every day! My family know I want to learn English very much!” So I said to him, “Because sometimes I get the feeling that you don’t really want to be here, and don’t really want to learn English. I want to teach you English, but you have to want to learn.”
At the end of the student appreciation party, I was shaking his hand and wishing him well and he looked at me, in a very earnest, intense way, and said, “Teacher, I want to apologize. For everything. Thank you very much.” It was an unexpected, truly rewarding moment. Terrorists are seldom remorseful, so I take back what I said.
This was really why I was here. I was strangely making a difference. Yes, I was making money, and paying off my debt, and taking vacations and buying shoes, but I was also positively affecting the lives of people who had been through some serious struggles.
Awat was one of the last students to leave, and was standing with two of my other students from his class. I was shaking hands, and saying, “Good luck!” and Awat said, although laughing a little, “I think I will cry!” I rolled my eyes, “Oh you will not. And you’re coming up to Erbil on Monday, so I will see you then.”
He nodded his head, and said, “I think I will bring you shifta!” Shifta was a traditional Kurdish dish, which was kind of like small lamb burgers. “My mom will make it!” he declared.
I stopped and looked at him with my brows furrowed and said, “No. I want you to make it.”
His eyes popped out of his head and he cried, “WHAT?!”
I repeated, “You can bring shifta on Monday, but I want you to make it.”
He started laughing and said, “No, no. I will help my mom—she will make it.” I was enjoying this, and really liked the idea of making him cook, since it was such a “woman” job in his culture.
“Your mom can help you, but I want you to make it,” I said.
He thought about this for a few seconds, then his expression changed. He looked very confident and exclaimed, “Okay! I will take pictures for proof!” I laughed and thought he was probably going to have his mom make it anyway.
I said my final good-byes to the remaining students, told Awat I would see him on Monday, and went back to the villas with the other teachers.
The next day I was checking my work email and had this in my inbox:
From: Awat
To: gretchen
hi, best teacher in the world, last night i coud not sleep. i miss you very much
Oh, holy shit. My heart pounded. Jen and Ellen were shocked and then worried. “Gretchen, no! He’s Muslim! No!”
I started thinking about Monday. He was officially no longer my student. The more time I spent with him, the more I was convinced that it wasn’t just a simple crush. I thought about him constantly. I hadn’t felt like this about anyone in a very, very long time, if ever. I felt connected to him on a much deeper level. He truly could be my soul mate. He could be the Ashley to my Scarlett! Or, wait, Rhett was actually The One, wasn’t he? I couldn’t really use a Gone With the Wind analogy in this situation.
This was getting complicated.
The night before Nina left, a large group of us was sitting out on Johnny and Chady’s front porch, having some beers and talking. Nina came out of her villa with a large red suitcase and rolled it over to where we were sitting. Everyone immediately stiffened.
Nina chirped, “Hey there!” and we all responded with a hesitant “Hey….” Attempting to diffuse the tension and make small talk, I asked if there was anything in her suitcase. She said, “No, not yet,” and I took that opportunity to steer far away from the elephant on the porch and voice my complaint about the poor use of suitcase props in the beginning of the Debra Messing movie The Wedding Date. Debra Messing’s character was going on an overseas trip, and her bags were very clearly empty, and that irked me, although, in hindsight, it was a brilliant way to avoid over-weight luggage fees.
Nina responded to my nonsensical tirade by saying, “Oh, people say I lo
ok like Debra Messing.” That was not the direction I wanted the conversation to take. While everyone else remained silent, possibly marveling at how Nina looked absolutely nothing like Debra Messing, Jen, ever the diplomat, said, “Yeah, I can see that; you’ve got the red hair.” Nina quipped, “Yeah, I also get Julia Roberts a lot, but I’m much hotter than her!”
Nothing was more bizarre than this. Nothing. No one said a word. I mean, because what do you say to the girl who had recently been attacked, in the strange foreign country where you were all living, and who was now leaving, but not before telling everyone how she was hotter than several beautiful, internationally famous celebrities? This was why people were uncomfortable around her. I was at a loss. Shit, shit, shit, say something. Make it better.
After an awkward silence I blurted out, “God, I know. People are constantly telling me I look like Angelina Jolie, and it’s so annoying.”
Everyone looked at me and burst out laughing. I looked nothing like Angelina Jolie, and no one was constantly telling me that I did, but I was still not sure whether to be offended by the sheer force of all the laughing. Nina, on the other hand, did not laugh. She just stood there with her big, red, empty suitcase, and a puzzled look on her face. Part of me felt like hugging her, and another part of me couldn’t wait for her to leave.
The university administration waited three weeks before addressing Nina’s attack with the faculty and staff, and even then, they didn’t really address it.
An actual town hall meeting was held, under the guise of discussing general expat safety. By this time I had gone back up to Erbil and was not able to be present for the meeting, but Ellen and Jen gave me the CliffsNotes version.
Chancellor Tom referred to the attack as “the incident,” but he didn’t really say anything beyond the fact that there had been one. Based on “the incident,” most of the new faculty and staff were anxious and wanted to know whether it was safe for them to walk around the city. Ellen and Jen said these questions were answered by the female dean of students, who Chancellor Tom was now (allegedly) secretly dating and who dressed like Joey from Friends when he was wearing all of Chandler’s clothing.
She took the recent trend of layering to a new level and was always covered, neck to toe, with sweaters and multiple scarves. There may have even been some opera gloves as well. She did not mess around with the dress code. Jen and Ellen said that during the meeting, while she was supposed to be addressing the general security questions from the new faculty and staff, she went from tense to psychotically shaking, and finally began shrieking a tirade about how the Western female staff was currently dressing. The town hall meeting devolved into a disastrous verbal kerfuffle.
Nina’s attack had unintentionally thrust us into a new war zone, and the enemy was tank tops. The administration was more concerned with discussing how the female staff members were dressing at the villas than addressing legitimate safety concerns.
We were told from Day One that we could dress however we wanted at the villas, as they were completely blocked off from the city, and we could feel like we were at home there. The Cultural Awareness pamphlet specifically noted “Dress Code—University building, local markets, and shopping malls.” It did not include the villas. We dressed as we would have at home: shorts and tank tops in hundred-plus-degree heat. The overdressed dean of students was threatening everyone’s right to comfort by suggesting that, even when inside the villas, we should cover up.
Upon hearing about the tank-top tirade, I wanted to stand up and yell, “Hey, LADY, this is UNACCEPTABLE! UNACCEPTABLE!* You can’t cover up this sexy! The sexy is on the inside!” You also can’t just come in here and start swinging your judgmental accusation lariat around. I heard Mammy’s disapproving voice inside my head: “You can’t show your bosom ’fore 3 o’clock, Miss Scarlett!”
The oppression is now coming from inside the building.
Strife seemed to be swirling around the university, and another jarring event occurred not long after “the incident.” Someone scrawled an anonymous, threatening note and taped it to the overdressed dean of students’ office door one afternoon. The resulting murmured gossip that spread like a water-main break throughout the school was that it was a death threat from a disgruntled student. Chancellor Tom exploded. In an email-read-round-the-world he managed, in one fell swoop of the “Send” button, to offend every instructor at the university by suggesting we were indirectly responsible for the death threat. We weren’t effectively “controlling” our students, or teaching them proper respect or some crap. Then he venomously spat out an order that we were no longer to refer to our students as “our kids,” as if that somehow encouraged violent, anarchic behavior. I wasn’t the only one who did this, we all thought of them as such, and it was more a term of endearment than anything else, but Chancellor Tom was not having it: “This is not a family.” (Well, if it was a family, we know who would play the rageaholic stepfather.) Rather than assuaging the university’s potential collective worry and anxiety with calm, rational guidance, his rant just drove a sharper wedge between the administration and the instructors. The Tom Pappas email was an awesome spectacle of written temper tantrum. He may as well have ended it with, “You threaten my girlfriend, you meet me at the bike racks at 3:00 p.m.!” The irony of all this was that his, again alleged, girlfriend, the one who had shrieked the loudest protests at the town hall meeting, was married. My guess was that the judgmental lariat swinging was designed to deflect any judgment that may have been heading her way.
The proverbial fan had been hit twice at the university, the drama had escalated to outrageous soap opera levels, and I was relieved to get back to the relative calm of Erbil.
* When faced with adversity, or perhaps an obstinate authority figure, or simply someone who is not helping you achieve your objectives, my friend Card’s dad says, “You need to say to her, ‘Hey, LADY, this is UNACCEPTABLE!’” Card’s dad is of the generation where all women worked in the steno pool, and men in management positions said, “Have your girl call my girl,” and things of that nature. On many occasions, I now find myself saying “Hey, LADY,” but just inside my head.
ASTOUNDING
ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF PART 4
Running total spent on overweight luggage: $3,720. It is astounding that in spite of my careful planning and dedicated use of the Balanzza, this number continues to increase.
Debt eliminated: $33,453—shazam! I’m feeling terribly impressed with myself at this point.
Countries traveled: 5—Austria, France, Croatia, Greece, and England.
Pairs of shoes purchased: 10. I would like to remind everyone that this is a running total. I would also like to point out that two of these were gifts for my sisters. Never mind that Ellie decided to sell hers on eBay for a horrifyingly low amount. It’s the thought that counts. But really, Ellie, Stella McCartney slingbacks for $27? Someone was a happy bidder that day. No, no, it’s the thought that counts.
Soul mates met: 1—I think.
Cultural tolerance level: 7. I am not a fan of fasting, whether for religious reasons (Ramadan) or otherwise, and a brutal attack by locals on a Western female did not help this rating; however, learning more about the culture via my fantastic students pushed the needle on this one higher than it would have been. In contrast to my above-average cultural tolerance level, my university administration tolerance level was at an all-time low.
Part 5
Love! Exciting and New!
Chapter Twenty-eight
Afternoon Delight
I was triumphantly returning to Erbil, where no one would tell me I couldn’t wear a tank top in my kitchen. For this semester Steve would be joining me as my coworker/villa neighbor instead of Adam. (Adam’s fiancée had secured a job with the university and joined him in Suli, so he was happy and I was happy for him.) Steve was the one-who-was-not-Brandon, from the Royal Jordanian flight, Joe’s brother Same-Same. He was a little needier than Adam, and a little aimless at times, but for my fi
rst weekend back, he was still down in Suli, so I had Erbil all to myself.
Adam was being replaced by Steve, and Chalak (our Man-About-Town) was also being replaced. He had been fired, basically for excessive sitting-on-the-porch-swing-and-smoking, rather than working, and also for talking about Warren behind his back.
Chalak’s replacement was a cousin of Rana, the HR director. I desperately wanted to know how to say “nepotism” in Kurdish. Apparently he needed a job, and even though he didn’t speak English, they hired him to be our driver. All I knew about him was that his name was Dadyar and he was married with five children.
On Dadyar’s first day he brought our new Ethiopian cleaning woman, Vana, to the villas around 10:30 a.m. I was rejoining the Progressive Dinners and had volunteered to be “appetizers” on the circuit that night, so I needed Vana to clean the deck and the downstairs area of my villa. No one had been in Villa #69, the boy villa, for a couple of months, so it didn’t need to be cleaned. Nevertheless, Dadyar took Vana over to Villa #69. I was in Villa #70, enjoying my lunch and getting a bit of sun in my makeshift solarium on the balcony.
At 2:00 p.m., I looked down at the deck area and saw that it still hadn’t been cleaned. That was strange. I went downstairs, walked over to Villa #69, and tried to open the front door. It was locked. I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I called Dadyar’s cell phone.
Dadyar: Hello.
Me: Where are you?
Dadyar: Home.
Me: You went home?
Dadyar: Yes, home.
Me: Uh…okay, but the deck still hasn’t been cleaned.
Dadyar: You at villa?
Me: Yes.
Dadyar: Okay, I coming now.
I was curious to see where Dadyar would be coming from, as I didn’t really believe that he had gone home, so I peered out the window like Gladys Kravitz and watched. Less than a minute later I saw both Dadyar and Vana emerging from Villa #69. They had been inside the villa for over three hours.
I Have Iraq in My Shoe Page 18