His name is Shekh Osman, and he lost his leg to a land mine during the first Gulf War while escaping to Iran. He has nine children, but knows no work to support them aside from selling what he can on the street, which he’s been doing for seventeen years. Business isn’t good, and no one is helping him. “Only God,” he says.

I knew all of this because earlier that day, I was helping one of my journalism students, Payam, with her final project, which happened to be about Shekh Osman.

Payam is a small but exuberant 18-year-old girl who knows where to buy anything at the Sule bazaar and will haggle with taxi drivers until they agree to her price. She is working on starting a radio show, and teaches English to younger children at a language institute. Payam seems completely impervious to the limited freedom for girls in Kurdistan, a place where people click their tongue in disapproval at the very mention of a girl walking alone on the streets, which is aiba, or shameful.

Payam is one of a kind, but she’s not alone. There’s Amanj, a university student who teaches a class about the environment and plans on getting an an advanced degree in environmental engineering abroad so he can come back to Kurdistan and improve things. There’s Broosk, a high school senior who leads a group of other young students in projects like cleaning up the city and raising awareness for kids who work on the street. This week they purchased $400 worth of new clothes to give to the dozens of teenage boys who sell on the street and wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy a new outfit for Eid.

I’ve been very frustrated at times during the past month over what feel like deep-rooted, intractable problems that plague Kurdistan. But these thoughts have no traction when I’m in the presence of Payam and her peers.

Pictured here is the original of a photo I first saw years ago as a kid, continents away on the menu of my aunt’s Kurdish restaurant in St. Paul, which remains the only Kurdish restaurant in the U.S.

Here, in age-blurred black and white, my grandfather is unrecognizable as a child with thick black hair. He and his sister give no hint of the seven younger siblings on the way. Seated is their father, Abdul Karim, and standing is my great-grandmother, Hepsa Han, who my great-aunt Saadia says I resemble.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the University of Sulaimaniya with a few of my English conversation students, who are in their second year of evening classes studying English there.

Here’s a photographic tour.

“‘Wasta is the way of life and won’t change anytime soon…unfortunately!”
“Fuck off and never come back”
“Hope you will indeed come back to the Region one day!”
“putting you through the humiliation and testing your anger level is part of the visa process”
“i dont think you should be in Kurdistan if you cant handle such situations”
“Another fantastic article!”
“so what did KRG say? Delete your article or get deported?”
“i thk KRG mailed u 2 corrupt u”
“When we writte something like that we get death threat but fortunately u got a an email , u know wt i mean”
“maybe she can still get a death threat.”
“welcome to the media world. not much different to political life”
“In kurdistan anything is possible money and power has made our politician blind”

I may have portrayed Kurdistan in a negative life and depicted myself at my worst, but I stand by what I wrote because it’s a truth that should be told. Wasta may be worse elsewhere in the Middle East, but to use that to justify anything would be mistaken. Yes, things have gotten better and not worse, but signs of improvement should only be a sign to raise our voices louder for change.

The truth is, I love Kurdistan, and no matter how agonized or angry I may get at times, I wouldn’t feel so passionate if I didn’t feel so strongly about the place. Of course I’ll be back here, and I don’t think I ever really doubted that.

Today has been a testament to the power of words, and of social media to spread them. I had perhaps the best day yet in Kurdistan after teaching both a journalism class and an English class to some extremely bright, ambitious, and kind students who give me so much hope for the future of Kurdistan. Negative articles may always get more attention than positive ones, but it’s the promising and happy memories that will stick in my mind when I leave Kurdistan, and that’s what I’ll be thinking of when I make plans to return next year.

I actually said that out loud, and in a government building too, but let me start from the beginning.

Wasta. It might not be in most dictionaries, but ask anyone from or familiar with the Middle East and they’ll tell you exactly what it is.

Though two years of formal Arabic isn’t good for much else in Iraq, it does inform me that the word wasta (واسْطة) comes from the root w-s-T, which relates to “the middle,” and the form wasta literally translates into “means.” As wasta is the means to pretty much everything here, that is appropriate, although other translations equate it to “who you know,” “clout,” or “agency.” It mostly has to do with who your family is.

I keep Iraqi Dinars in my wallet, but everyone knows Wasta is the real currency of Kurdistan.

The second day of Ramadan, I had to wake up early and go to the Department of Residence to extend my 10-day entry visa for a month (failing to do so would make it difficult to leave the country without a hefty fine and heftier hassle). I’d been up until sunrise, eating and drinking so I could keep fast during the day, so my tolerance was a bit compromised by sleep deprivation.

The Department of Residence is a open air maze of offices that is particularly hellish in the heat. First, through the women’s door and past the female security guard. Next, taken from office to office with the pesh merga who’s doing all the talking for me while I play helpless witness to the endless series of increasingly heated exchanges. Back and forth down the crowded hallway. Then, walking to nearby shop to get photos taken, nevermind that you reminded everyone you needed to get these beforehand. Because it’s Ramadan the only shop still open is packed with a dozen people– too crowded. Long walk back to the car. Long drive to a far away store where you wait 30 minutes for a dozen thumbnail photos of myself, frowning. Back to the maze. More heated conversations, and finally, an AIDS test, which takes place in an office identical to all the others plus some gloves and needles, like getting blood drawn in the waiting room of a dirty clinic.

From the beginning, my limited Kurdish was letting me comprehend what I already knew what was being said, but didn’t want to hear. This is the granddaughter of so-and-so. This is the granddaughter of so-and-so. My family name, my family name, my family name.

Like that was all I would and should need to cut the lines, to skip the process everyone else had to go through, to get away with anything. Like the rest of the people in the room couldn’t hear those same words and weren’t staring at the American girl to whom the rules didn’t apply.

I was at the end of my rope, and a lot of other things I usually only hear from my mom when my brothers and I are really misbehaving. Like ready to pull out my hair. Like livid.

Because wasta isn’t just how you get your visa extended here. It’s what runs this place. It determines how people treat you, if you have electricity in your house and sometimes even what grades your kids get in school. It determines if you’ll be able to breeze through checkpoints or get interrogated, and how fast you’ll be served at a restaurant.

This is the point when I said that really awful thing that I know I don’t mean (but did at the time). Thankfully, I don’t think anyone understood what I was saying.

I was angry because wasta is so ingrained into society that people living here don’t even seem to take any issue with it, especially not if they’re on the right side of it. I guess it’s no surprise that as a headstrong American, this makes my blood boil. I detest special treatment, and my constant encounters with it here do make me question my intentions to return.

I know I’m probably only scraping on the surface of wasta, and I know I’m still coming from the perspective of someone who has been helped more than hurt by it.

But I also know is that wasta means little social mobility, little hope of “making it for yourself,” and little opportunity for the drastic changes and reforms Kurdistan so desperately needs. Because it’s so tied to respect, it reinforces the cultural norms related to women and honor that severely limit women’s rights and freedoms. It stifles education. It even stifles free speech: because politicians are the ones with all the wasta, most of the press is run by political parties, absolving the government from much of the criticisms the press would otherwise provide, meaning those who do speak out are quickly and expertly silenced by threats or by death.

Wasta, true to its Arabic root, seems to be in the middle of all the dirty happenings in Kurdistan.

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes
Then you really might know what it’s like,
Then you really might know what it’s like to have to choose

I scribbled the lyrics furiously in my journal and commented on the irony of the intersection of foreign and familiar.

Two summers abroad later, it’s a memory I laugh at. This intersection of mundanely familiar relics of America and the West with the utter alienness of a foreign country has emerged as a salient feature of being abroad.

* * * * *

It’s uneasy to admit, as an easily-amazed idealist, that I may have become a bit jaded. Yet despite the ubiquitousness of the AK-47, the sweltering heat, and the attitudes about women that will never feel natural to me, I’ve been feeling strangely at home here. I know my way around this city. The shocking heat doesn’t surprise me. I’m about as comfortable shaking hands with a prominent politician as I am sitting cross legged on a bare cement floor and eating l with my hands. I may never decode the rules of proper greetings– a nod or handshake? one, two, three, or four kisses on the cheek?– but I’ve even come to terms with this perpetual blunder.

When I was in Kurdistan last summer, I think I mentally added “…in Iraq” to every activity I did, adding novelty in the same way teenagers tack on “…in bed” to fortune cookie predictions. Watching TV in Iraq. Taking roadtrips in Iraq. Celebrating birthdays in Iraq. Eating dinner in Iraq.

This mental game has worn out (as has my inclination to call this place Iraq and not Kurdistan, the preferred and more correct term). It all seems kind of ordinary.

Perhaps I’ve just never been abroad for so long. I imagine this is something routinely experienced on study abroad trips that last four months, six months or longer. Perhaps its a symptom of returning to a place a second time. No one here believed me, I’ve been informed, that I’d be back. Perhaps it’s that I’m planning to return a third time, for an entire year, after I graduate this spring (which now, as a returner, is a plan taken seriously).

I’m a little less naive this time around and with that things have changed. I asked a lot of questions last summer and needed a new set this time around. Underneath the surface of this place are answers that aren’t always pleasant to swallow. This summer I feel much less like an outsider visiting and more like an insider who is — either blessed or cursed– to be here for the long haul. As a result I’ve been putting off commenting on the things I’ve been thinking about most. Women’s rights and gender relations. Wasta, an Arabic term that translates to “clout” or “who you know” and is a concept that runs this place. Freedom of speech. Health as a human right at the distortion of that idea in this place. It’s not that I can’t or won’t comment on these– I plan to– but the more mired I am in Kurdistan, the more difficult and increasingly personal it is to say anything at all.

I guess I have a bad case of “the more I learn, the less I know” (and sometimes the less I like it). It’s frustrating, disappointing, and it means sometimes I just want to go to the American gym, eat Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese for lunch, and stop asking all these damn questions. In the end, it’s a good thing: I don’t know what I’m doing here if it’s not to get a better grasp on the reality of this slippery world we live in.

Yet, here I am, in Kurdistan during the holy month of Ramadan. It’s 3:30 in the morning and although the windows are only showing a hint of light, the call to prayer is announcing the sunrise and with it the start of the fast that will last until sunset. To keep fast all day long in a place this hot, you have to drink a lot of water before the day begins.

In the evening, as the sky turns pink and Dubai One cuts from its programming to broadcast the call to prayer, set to a silhouette of a mosque, we gather in the kitchen. The already prepared food is served into dishes and carried to the table as the local muezzin joins the televised one in call to prayer. Without ceremony we break fast, first with dates and then soup, and then the feast that’s overwhelming after fasting all day. Coca cola and mastaw, a drink of yogurt and water. Long-grained Kurdish rice, fried potatoes with onions and lambs, and bamya, an okra and lamb stew. Shifta, ground lamb that’s baked and fried, and a salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and lemons. When we can’t eat anymore we clear the table and bring dessert. First chai, with lots of sugar. Then traditional a Ramadan dessert: freshly fried donuts soaked in sugar glaze, peach cobbler topped with thickened cream, a custard made from milk, orange jello, salted nuts, and a plate piled with peaches, grapes, and plums. Happy Ramadan, or, in Kurdish, Ramazan pirozbet!

I wasn’t sure if I was going to fast until I started to, and it wasn’t so much a conscious thought out decision as much as it simply felt like something that should be done. My great aunt who I’m living with didn’t even realize I was fasting until the third day of Ramadan, when she asked why I didn’t want any of the food she’d offered.

I said, “I’m fasting,”

She said, “good,” then went to the kitchen to finish preparing the iftar meal she’d invited the rest of the family to that night.

There’s certainly a lot being said about Ramadan. I’ve seen a dozen headlines, like NPR’s “What you might not know about Ramadan,” and I’ve heard the criticisms, like how Ramadan is as big of a mass marketed consumer-fest as Christmas.

While I can claim no wisdom on the topic, I can say that the point of trying to analyze or “understand” Ramadan seems rather distant and irrelevant here and now, as the evening light turns the room gold and my grandfather and great uncle arrive, then the youngest relative, 37 days old, in tow with his toddler siblings, and the loudness of the young and the old all settle around the table as the fast is broken.

By the time the sun had set the flames were visible as a solid ring moving steadily down the mountain it encircled. We were only a 15 minute drive away from a city of million, but it felt far more remote as we watched from afar in silence except for the sound of insects whirring and chirping.

In a wealthy and highly developed region of Eastern Turkey, watching the fire seemed like an activity filed under “entertainment.” It almost seemed like a show demonstrating Turkey’s modernness. A parade of high-tech fire fighting machines showing the wealthy just how developed the country was.

As a commenter pointed out on the previous post, while Turkey is quick to put out fires and tack the bill onto the perpetrator in some regions of the country, the same government is simultaneously lighting the fires with intention in other parts– namely the poor, predominately Kurdish Southeast.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the fire burned for two days.

BY morning the flames were invisible in the sunlight, and I hoped the fire had been extinguished over night. But smoke appeared by afternoon and that night, the fire began to climb the next mountain. After two nights the black area left in its path looked like a shadow cast by a giant cloud, but the sky was blue and empty.

No one knows how it started. An accident; a cigarette butt or burning heap of trash that lit the dry grasses. Some say it was intentional, lit by someone who hoped to develop the land in the future. Allegations that it was started by Iran or Turkey seem highly unlikely, though it would be believable in a region closer to the border.

The environment usually takes a back seat in areas of conflict, where security and basic human needs are the first concern. The land now called Kurdistan was repeatedly burned, razed, and doused in chemicals during Saddam’s Anfal campaigns against the Kurds in the 1980s. The history of Iraq reads like a list of back-to-back coups and wars. Of course it’s behind. The streets today are still strewn with empty bottles and other rubbish, and piles of abandoned garbage smolder in abandoned lots and the outskirts of villages. Yet the last two decades of peace and the recent wave of new investment makes Kurdistan a region in transition. It’s places like Kurdistan that must start leading the way with the development of more forward-looking environmental policies and attitudes.

The flames are out. But I hope this fire, and the many others that have burned outside the city and elsewhere , act as a wake up call.

The first fire appeared one languid afternoon on the peak of a hill in Datca, a peninsula for priveleged vacationers. Beach goers calmly pointed it out. They took out iphones and snapped photos, returning then to their games of backgammon, their beers and beach chairs. When after about 15 minutes a helicopter whirred into view and dumped a load of ocean water onto the burning hill, everyone clapped. Within perhaps an hour the fire was speedily extinguished by a team of 4 helicopters, several fire trucks, and a brigade of yellow suited firemen climbing up the hill like little ants.

Later that night, ants surfaced as the cause of the fire, indirectly at least. That afternoon a boy and a girl, both eight or nine years old, had climbed the hill with a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays into a tiny, ant-killing beam. When this bored them, the tossed the magnifying glass aside and headed down the hill. But the perfect weather– sun and no rain– also made for perfect fire conditions. Before they reached the bottom, the hill erupted in flames like it was a volcano. The children hid.

Later that night, they were found safe and sound, to the delight of their families, I’m sure. But along with their kids, the families received something else: the bill for putting out the fire.

Turkey has incredibly strict laws protecting the environment. Those responsible for starting wildfires are responsible for paying the damages. The word was that the cost in this case came out to about a quarter million dollars.

The child culprits no doubt belonged to one of the wealthy families who owned a home in this private vacation spot filled with Turkey’s old money elite. They’d be able to foot the bill. And the fire was swiftly and efficiently taken care of. Elsewhere in the world, it’s very different.

Then my cousin and I decided to drink coffee at 1 am in an attempt to be awake when the next halparke kurdi or kurdish dancing song came on. Which is how I wound up still wide awake at 5 am: problem solved.

I threw on some leggings under my shorts, grabbed a pair of my cousin’s gold soccer cleats, and headed out into the pre-dawn glow.

By the time I made it back to the Fuad Family Compound, I wanted to limp– those sweet gold shoes were a tad too small, and I now have eight neat blisters on my feet. However, I was determined not to show any weakness in front of all the pesh merga soldiers, who looked at me with consternation when I’d left. I felt like I’d just finished a big race, though the competition– social norms and public scorn– was a bit different from the well-trained athletes of high school track & field. I arrived home with not only a much needed route for independence and escape, but also a better sense of my geographical surroundings.

Google maps doesn’t have any road names for Sulaimaniya, despite a twitter campaign to modernize the map. Though the roads actually do have names, as of recently, landmarks are the preferred method of orientation. My grandpa always insists on giving me joke directions: turn left at the first pile of manure and turn right at the second pile of manure, he’ll tell me. (He’s also known to once have found the airport in an unfamiliar city by following airplanes as they landed, so the joke is half on him). You get around this city by learning the names of hotels and shopping centers and the locations of politician’s houses.

Still, I’m a map person, so when I got home at 6 am I logged onto GoogleMaps and then MapMyRun and roughly located my route. I’m not sure when I’ll be awake again at such an early hour, but I can’t wait to go running again.