It Takes a Village

Life here is beginning to feel more normal - I'm living "The Real World: Erbil" in a house with 5 men over the age of 50 (one is 72), and one 65 year old woman. It's like being with a set of grandparents and several uncles. We all eat dinner together, and then watch movies, play cards, or sit up on the roof. One of the guys, Claudio, brought back two bags of gummy bears, so I'm a happy camper.

It's Ramadan now, which means life here has slowed down, a lot. We still work the normal hours, but all of our local staff leave at 3. It gives me a good chance to sit down and organize my life without anyone asking anything of me. I think I'm starting to find my footing re: actually doing my work, which is good, since I was a bit out of my depth for the first few days. I can't wait for tomorrow - it's our day off (we work a 6-day week here, which amounts to about 60 hours/week, because there's so much to do) - I can sleep in! And I hear that tomorrow someone is going to make pancakes.

It's poker night tonight - I need to get me a cheat-sheet, I think. I can't remember what trumps what. I need someone else (or 3 someone elses) who want to play spades!

It's funny how much smaller my world has gotten, while at the same time I'm exploring such a larger one. I only interact with the same 50 people, and live with six. It's almost as though I live in a tiny village in the middle of a big city. We sit up on the roof at night, and as the sun sets, it reflects off the mountains to the East. I realized I don't even know what the mountains are called! I've moved back in time, apart from the wireless internet and satellite tv, to where my existence is local. Washington makes you feel as though you can open your eyes and see the rest of the world right in front of you. From this vantage point, I've suddenly become nearsighted. I'm thinking only of what my little tribe of agricultural economists, cartographers, agronomists, and veterinarians are doing. If I expand my horizons, I see the guards and the cooks and the drivers*

Even the war feels remote, here. There are occasional gunshots, but they're usually so far away that they sound like popcorn popping. Speaking of which, we have bags of popcorn (the old kind, not the microwave kind) - I'm tempted to try my hand at poping it in a pot, and see what happens.

I've been told I need to learn to be more flexible, to take things as they come, and stop trying to make so many plans. If ever I needed to learn that lesson, this is the way. I don't think that, two years ago, I could have come here and done this. Good grief, maybe I'm growing up.


*in case you're curious, we have the cooks and drivers as part of creating jobs, not because we so like to have someone make us noodles and cheese and spirit us around in armored cars... also, since we can't go out, really, it'd be pretty hard to go grocery shopping without them.