I waved and we both said, “Hi!” in unison as he sat down across from me. When he was settled, I asked, “Why are you wearing a suit? Did you have to work today?”
“No, it is my day off!” he said.
“Is that all for me?” I asked him.
And he shrugged and said, “Yes!”
Well, the intention was very sweet, but he had this blue, plaid button-down that I really liked and… No, no, I reminded myself. We had finished with that.
Awat ordered two cups of tea from the waiter, and I pulled the bag with his book out from under the table and handed it to him. He reached into the bag and slid the book out and looked at the cover. I watched expectantly. The curiosity on his face broadened into a wide grin, and he looked at me with his hand on his heart and said, “Cristiano! Thank you very much!” I clasped my hands with glee and singsonged a “You’re welcome.” I loved a successful gift reception.
I tried to get him to tell me the “something important” immediately after he opened the gift, as he turned the pages and pointed at the photos of the soccer star, but he shook his head and said, “Maybe later.” The Kurds use “maybe” when they mean “definitely,” which I have tried to correct on numerous occasions. Like when I would ask a student, “Will you be in class on Sunday?” and they would say, “Maybe.” So I would ask, “Why might you not be there?” and they always looked confused and said, “Yes, I be there!”
So I would wait until “maybe” later for Awat’s grand announcement but thought I might be leading into it by asking him about his new girlfriend.
Awat: She is crazy about me!
Me: And you are crazy about her!
Awat: Maybe not as much.
Oh no. Maybe he hadn’t grown up quite as much as I had hoped.
Me: Why?
Awat: I don’t know. She know everything about me. She call me and text me every time!
He meant “all the time.”
He then pulled out his cell phone to show me all the messages and logged calls from her. I told him that I believed him, and then continued prodding him about why he didn’t like her as much as she liked him. I think people should only be in relationships with those they truly adore. They should want to be around them all the time. They should be excited to see them. They should be thrilled to hear from them. It shouldn’t be a chore receiving texts from them “every time.”
The conversation wandered into even more bothersome territory when Awat complained, “My life so complicated. With job, with school, with girls.” I demanded, “What do you mean ‘girls’? I thought you just had the one girlfriend?” He went on to explain that yes, he had only one girlfriend, but there were two other girls who called him all the time. He got all worked up, whining about how it was so inconvenient.
He continued to talk about these “other” girls who called him and told him that they loved him and wanted to be with him. I asked him how he would respond when they said things like that. He claimed that he told them he did not return their feelings, but they would just respond with “That’s okay!”*
I found myself back in full teacher/lecturer mode and tried to explain to Awat that he needed to take some responsibility for this. I said, “I think you like having these girls call you all the time. You like the attention.” He tried to shake his head slowly to disagree, but I could tell he was considering what I said. I continued, “If you really don’t want these girls calling you, block their numbers, or just don’t answer the phone when you see it’s them calling.”
Honestly, this all just seemed like basic common sense to me. But where was all this common sense when I thought I was in love with him? I stared across the table, at the excessive hair gel, and the bad suit (carefully avoiding the hole in the crotch), and listened to him ramble on incessantly about how many women were in love with him, and thought, “Oh. My. God. Had I really thought I was in love with him?”
He was a good-hearted person, but he really was just a child. In countries where boys and girls are basically separated from each other from adolescence until their twenties, the emotional development is stunted. Men in their twenties here were similar to teenaged boys in Western countries. Even as we sat there, discussing other topics, at one point he stopped me in midsentence to point out to me that two girls, sitting at a booth behind me, were watching him. I tried hard to keep my eyes from rolling. My disappointment deepened.
Awat: I meet my girlfriend for second time in car park [parking lot]. When no one looking she take my hand like this [he takes one hand in the other].
Me: So you were holding hands?
Awat: Yes, holding hands, and then she do this. [He squeezed his hand.] What the word for this?
Me: Squeezed?
Awat: Yes! She squeezed my hand and say, “I want to kiss you.”
Me: Wow, this girl is bold! I like it!
Awat: Yes!
Me: Did you tell her that you can’t kiss her until you’re married?
Awat: (shrugging) Maybe I kiss her.
Me: WHAT? I thought you said you wouldn’t kiss a girl until you were married?
Awat: Yes, but I think I change my mind.
Me: WHAT?! But I thought that was very important to you! Because of your religion.
Awat: (shrugging some more) Yes, but I think maybe change my mind is okay. But I ask your advice. What is your advice?
Me: Nooooooooooo. No no no. You have to make that decision on your own. That is very personal, and I thought it was so important to you because of your religion.
What happened to him? His moral convictions had seemed so strong before. That was one of the things I had found so attractive about him. He had walked the walk. Oh, heavy sigh.
We had been sitting and talking for two hours and we were both starting to yawn, but I still hadn’t heard the “big news” he had. It clearly wasn’t that he was engaged. He paused, grinning at me.
Awat: Big news is…I want to go United States.
Me: Ohhhhhhhhhh. Huh.
Awat: Yes, I want to go, and bring my family. I think I need sponsor, and I will pay them!
Oh wow. Did he mean me? This was a very different tune he was singing. When we used to have our after-class conversations, he would say that he hated Kurdistan and wanted to move to Europe. Then on other days he would talk about trying to find a bigger house in Suli. He was kind of all over the place with his future plans. The United States idea was a very new development.
Me: Um…a sponsor? Have you researched this? I don’t think the U.S. does that kind of thing.
Awat: No, I don’t know, but I think yes.
Me: I think no.
Awat: I think maybe, but I will check. I will pay the person for sponsor!
Me: Okay, but do check into the specifics. I really don’t think we do that.
I did not offer to help him. The creeping suspicion that his entire motivation for spending time with me was driven by ulterior motives made me feel ill. I suddenly realized that while I did care for him, I didn’t want to take care of him. I had instant flashes of his whole family moving to the United States and being entirely dependent on me. It wasn’t even as if they were refugees. Awat’s family was one of the wealthier families in Suli, and from what he had told me, it sounded like they had a pretty good life. Where was this coming from? My head hurt. I felt dirty.
That last little bit of the conversation had kind of soured the afternoon for me; it was more disappointing than the crotch-hole suit. It really had been good to connect with him again, but I felt used. Embarrassingly, had that same conversation happened three months ago, in the throes of my delusion, I probably would have giddily (read: stupidly) considered it.
Awat paid for our tea and then walked me down the stairs and out to the street. I smiled, shook his hand, and said, “Good-bye.” My crush on him was absolutely a thing of the past, and that conversation had guaranteed, 100 percent, that it would stay there.
Karzan pulled up in the Pathfinder, and I climbed in. We both waved t
o Awat as Karzan drove off toward the villas, and I thought, “There’s closure, and then there’s cah-low-zhure.” Three syllables.
* The university was always accepting donations of books, for the library. I was going to donate He’s Just Not That into You. These girls needed to read that.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Ethics, Schmethics
Since my Crocs class was learning the course material at a slower pace, we did not have enough time to complete Unit 10. However, it was still to be part of the final exam, so I wanted to introduce as much of the grammar as possible. It may or may not have been a coincidence that Unit 10 in the textbook was “Ethics and Values.”
I passed out the Unit 10 exam and explained that we would go over the exam as a class, but then I needed everyone to return them to me when we were finished. We have to be very careful about keeping our exams, so they aren’t leaked to other potential future students.
We spent all day Tuesday studying possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his/hers, ours, theirs. I flipped through the exam and found the pertinent sections, and we reviewed those multiple choice questions. At the end of class I collected the exams.
Wednesday I redistributed the exams, and we proceeded to attempt to tackle factual and unreal conditionals, and the concept of the moral dilemma.
Example:
“If I eat too much, I gain weight.” This was a factual conditional.
“If I found a gold watch in the restroom, I would take it to the Lost & Found.” This was an unreal conditional, and a perfect example of a moral dilemma.
The students took some time to understand the moral dilemma, as they were confusing it with a standard dilemma/decision to make. I asked the class for an example of a moral dilemma, and Hawall said, “If it is raining, I take umbrella.”
Um, no. I mean, yes, you should probably take the umbrella, but that—oh never mind.
I tried to expand on the idea by saying, “Usually a moral dilemma is something that you wouldn’t want anyone to know about…” I then told them about the time I ordered the ski bag from the company online, and how, when the package arrived there were two ski bags inside. My moral dilemma was, do I:
Do the “right thing” and alert the company to the error (which would more than likely result in my having to go to the trouble of sending one bag back to them), or
Keep the bag and say nothing to the company.
I told my students I had just said “thank you” out loud to the empty room where I had opened the box and gave the extra bag to my sister, but I pointed out this was actually not the “right thing” to do.
By the end of class, the students were exhausted and still mostly confused. They complained, “Teacher, we think Unit 10 no on test.” I had to explain I couldn’t control what was on the test, they were already printed, and that yes, Unit 10 would be on the final exam. They all appeared semidistraught.
After I dismissed them, everyone gathered their things to leave when Rabar said, “Teacher, you need this?” and held up his copy of the Unit 10 exam. I gasped. “YES!” and then looked accusingly at everyone else, who had all surreptitiously tucked the exams away in their respective belongings. On their faces were varying looks of sheepishness and annoyance (directed at Rabar). I was shocked, appalled, dismayed, and confused. In the first place, Rabar was the one student who would undoubtedly fail the class (his exam scores never exceeded 60 percent) and was in the most need of sneaking the exam home. In the second place, this was the Ethics and Values unit! We had spent at least fifteen minutes discussing moral dilemmas, and then here we had a real-life moral dilemma.
I should have lied about keeping the ski bags.
Moral dilemmas were clearly the theme of the day. Katherine called me to go running in the park and intimated that she had excellent gossip. We had finally discovered a large family park across the road from English Village. From the street it didn’t look like much; however, once you made it beyond the gates and down one of the dusty paths, it opened into a lush, green, well-manicured extravaganza, which was the prime spot for many Friday weddings and general family merriment. Only the occasional Westerner used it for exercise, so we were frequently the subjects of gawks and stares and pointing from children.
Katherine’s gossip was good. Apparently Married Ashton had been home over Christmas break, with his “unhappy family” of beautiful Russian wife and one-year-old child. He suffered through the charade to keep up holiday appearances, but then rushed back to Erbil to be with his true love, the Spanish Gabriela. He had confided to Katherine that this time he was serious about Gabriela and was really going to ask his wife for a divorce. I was amazed. He had been complaining about his situation for such a long time, without actually making any changes or trying to do anything about it.
“Really?” I said. “Good for him!”
Katherine replied, “Just wait.” She said that when Ashton called his wife, presumably to have the divorce conversation, before he could say anything, she told him she was pregnant with their second child. The child that had been conceived over Christmas break.
The ministry kids had concluded their semester of English study, and we had three days of final exams in which to chart their progress.
I projected the following up on the whiteboard, explained this was their final writing exam, and didn’t anticipate any additional questions:
Choose two topics. Write an essay for your chosen topics, with at least three sentences each.
Your favorite artist
Your personal values
Your personality type
Your food passions
Straightforward, no? Even for low-level students.
But as soon as I put the essay topic up, at least four people raised their hands and started asking questions.
Azheen said, “Only two topics we choose?” Then she said, “Artist? Not art?”
Rabar asked, “Write one, two, three?” (I had explained, ad nauseam in class, what an essay should look like, and that no, it should not be three numbered sentences.)
Then Aryan asked, “You want we write one paragraph, then two?”
Solin asked, “For about artist, I tell you, and also explain?”
I had to explain, again, that part of the exam was being able to understand the instructions. And honestly, I don’t think the instructions could have been any easier or clearer.
The following was a perfect example of the disparity in levels of the students in my class.
Dastan (who was at the appropriate level) wrote:
My favorite artist is Julia Roberts, she is born in USA I think she is best acterses in Howllyood, she is winner award in Acadimic Oscar.
I’m crazy about Julia Roberts, and I like all his films, because when I see someone his films, realy I feel it is not film, it is real. I think all Julia Roberts films is fantastic.
If I have a time I’m watching to Julia Roberts films every day, because I’m Jilua Roberts films addect.
Grammatical mistakes? Yes. Creative spelling? Sure, but he gets his idea across effectively.
Rabar, on the other hand, wrote:
Your food passions.
I’m passions a chiken becouse for Healthey is good, and this food is not costly and for used is eassy, I am passions but know I don’t too eatean becouse I’m tried and I hav’nt eatean Lot food becouse all piple this vaery good for disussion and confention.
What?
The ministry kids had varying results on their final exams. Some actually did well, others barely passed, and Rabar was a solid “fail.” What was more disappointing was Warren and Jill’s pro bono offer failed to produce the dubious result they had hoped for, and the ministry did not pay to re-enroll any students in the course.
From: Warren
Sent: Friday, January 29
Subject: Transition
Dear CED,
As I have discussed in the past, CED is poised to go through an administration transition at the positions of Director and Deputy Dir
ector. Very shortly, I will be leaving Iraq after almost 3 years of working for the university…
[And this continued on for several paragraphs.]
I expelled a heavy, yet unsurprised, sigh. Warren was leaving his contract early, just because he was sick of Iraq. He was supposed to stay until May.
I wondered if I could add a few concrete blocks to his packed hockey bags.
Chapter Thirty-nine
My Villa/Hotel/Office
From: Jill
To: Gretchen
Subject: Wednesday night
Hey, Gretchen,
You will have two visitors Wednesday night. I will be staying in the small room, and Tom in Warren’s room. He will not be arriving until 9 or even 10 p.m., and we will both be out of there before 3:30 a.m. Sorry about this, but he is traveling back to the U.S. and since there is a prof staying in the men’s villa, there’s no choice (plus, he’s the Chancellor). This will also be a very good opportunity for me to point out to him the lack of privacy in the villas. They’re already on board with a move to a new place, which will offer both more privacy and also greater room for expansion, so consider this icing on the cake.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jill
Jill and I had very different ideas on how to ice a cake, and she was mistaken about my understanding. Forget the Iraq War, forget the War on Terror; we were still engulfed in the War on Gretchen’s Privacy. Distress ran through me like Indian food. Who thought this was a logical idea?
I Have Iraq in My Shoe Page 25