Littles Dance

A wee tidbit from last year. This is the ballet that two of the five year olds did. It was adorable. They worked very hard on it.

Traveling and a Note

My impression of Dubai is that I could totally live here, I’ll grant you I was visiting in the middle of their winter and everyone that I talked to assured me that the summers made you wish you were in hell. My reasons for being in Dubai were purely for business. We needed to meet with a supplier about the forecasting for the next year and the marketing schemes needed to be set as well. The meeting was super super long. As in it started at 9 am and went till 4 with no breaks, and no lunch. No fun times for Jo. Also information overloads may have been involved.  It struck me at one point that was my first business trip. What struck me immediately after that was that I had forgotten my shoes. I kid you not I had to go to a negotiation in my sneakers.

Also an interesting tidbit was the meeting about the marketing schemes. We were tossing around commercial ideas and that was when I realized that yet again I was the only woman in the room. For people that want to focus on the buying power of women they are remarkably sexist. They need more women in the advertising agencies in this part of the world.

At any rate, this is going up a bit early because I am heading home for Christmas! Over the moon about it really and I am so glad that I decided to go ahead and do it. Plane tickets round trip from Iraq? $1,200  Not bad. Not bad at all.

In many ways Dubai felt like a better taken care of and more modern Amman.  I found all the spices I was missing and was in shock to see just about every single major brand in America (no exaggeration) was represented in the seemingly endless malls here. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything else to do except shop, but they do shopping very well.

I think the highlight of the trip was when we went to the fountains outside the tallest building in the world to watch the water shows. They are stunningly beautiful and set to epic Arabic music-scapes. The water is forced up so high that it sounds like gunshots when it falls back to the pool.

My company evidently maintains an apartment in Dubai. As well as a driver and car. Could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered that but then again it was about 2 am when we landed so it wouldn’t have taken much to surprise me. This practice has some distinct advantages as this way we could make our own breakfasts and live in a place fully equipped to be actually lived in. A nice alternative to the generic hotel room scenario. Plus our Dubai office is in the building right next door. Commutes don’t get  much shorter them that.

Thanksgiving, Holidays and Home

 The above picture is of one of Haji's kids, Sonya. She is a spoiled brat of a two year old but she is really really adorable. This is a prime example of this strange habit I have discovered of giving tea to children. Babies even. Who does that? The poor thing will have no teeth left if they continue giving her tea with sugar. Yes I understand the soporific effects of hot liquid, but tea has caffeine!

 My Thanksgiving was rather sad and depressing, but there was pie! And brown sugar! Must celebrate the small victories in life. Note, this was baked in a mixing bowel as I hadn't yet found any pie plates. (Not ideal just so you know) I just acquired pie plates and I am incredibly happy about that fact. Now quiche is on the menu. I managed to give myself a wicked burn on my arm while I was baking this sucker. War wounds I tell you, war wounds.

 This is my "kitchen" such as it is. I have a refrigerator, cupboards, a microwave/convection oven and a two burner electric "stove". Makes cooking an adventure to be sure. But I manage and I would rather have something then nothing. Especially because I'm pretty sure everything and it's mother is cooked with a great deal of oil in Kurdish cooking. My arteries would be clogged in six months.

 These two pictures are of my lovely bedroom. Note that I can seat 10 people in there. That in and of itself is a bit odd, but what really get's me is the combination of pink walls and orange furniture. I try not to think about that.

Last but not least, is my office space. My cubicle is where I spend most of my time. Note the little electric heater at my feet. This has become essential and Kak Sa'adoon is now one of my favorite office people for providing me with it. Toasty feet = yay! I have started collecting Kinder egg toys to put on my desk to give me something to fiddle with as I wait for my emails to come. The guys in the office seem fascinated with them. I guess they are as easily entertained as I am.

The house I live in is an incredibly odd mixture of opulence and skinflintedness (to create a word). The floors are marble but they are covered in cheap, badly cut carpet. They have a maid but give her the dinkiest amount of cleaning supplies I have ever seen to keep the house clean. I guess I'll get used to the dichotomy soon but man, it's just kind of bizarre.

Changes

There is a great deal that has changed in the past month. It continually amazes me how much can chance in 24 hours. At the beginning, I was here as a combination English teacher and admin assistant. Howsoever, this is no longer the case. I think they started to realize just how unsuited for that position I would be when I couldn’t speak five words of Kurdish. And I’ve got about 100  Arabic words as well. The combination is less then conducive to a job that involves sorting papers in both of those languages. There was probably a desperate scramble in there somewhere where they had to decide what on earth to do with this American woman they hired. I must say, I lucked out in this scramble. I was teaching them business English all throughout this time and during this time they realized that I actually do know what I am talking about when it comes to business. Apparently I solidified my usefulness when I explained how I saved myself 1500 on airline tickets home for the holidays by booking them separately instead of together.

All this to say, I have a new job. I will now be working in their procurement department. Basically this means I buy stuff. We import electronics, tea, coffee, rice and innumerable other things. I’m starting off smallish – purchasing the appliances, coffee and rice.  I think this is a more then excellent opportunity with great room to grow. There will be a certain amount of traveling involved, China, Singapore, London to visit our suppliers and to make contacts. The company is thinking of expanding into the American market which could mean some trips home! I’m very excited about this opportunity even though it meant that I had to sign on for two years instead of the initial one. If everything stays stable in the security situation that is. Bit nervous about that. But there is nothing I can do to change it and I’ve got my emergency bolting plans in place.

I’ve got some excellent co-workers who I thoroughly enjoy. The only other female in the company (the other is on maternity leave) Darya is my age and speaks the best English of anyone in the company. It’s nice to have someone to commiserate with about the foibles of Arab/Kurdish men. The person who is training me is named Yevgar. He is starting an MBA program and needed to shed some of his responsibilities. I came along at the exact right time! It’s a bit odd to be consulted on new product lines and to be responsible for soothing ruffled feelings on both ends (ours and the suppliers). All part of growing up I suppose.

I will write more about the interesting social interactions that I have been observing and the oddities of the wealthy next time

Here we go again

Talk about a grueling flight. I left DC around 6:30 in the evening, arriving in Heathrow around 7:30 AM (had a very amiable seat partner but no sleep) and took off from London at 1 PM. Landed in Amman at 9 PM and took off for Iraq at 12:30 AM! It was a rather dizzyingly low on sleep time

I think the bags under my eyes grew bags. They were breeding, I tell you. My amiable seat partner was a music comp student turned economics person and we had a very nice discussion about music and business. Much better then the two very drunk Greek boys from my first cross Atlantic flight. Heathrow is a monstrous airport in the best of times, and it is currently undergoing an expansion project. The bus ride to the next terminal definitely exposed the underworkings of the airport industry! I finished a novel and a half in my layover time. I had considered going into London, but was so dead tired that I deemed it the better par of sanity to stay put. The fly over London was quite nice though, I didn't realize that the Thames gets so small at times. I made a game of “spot the estate”, and by the time we flew over the Channel, I was up to 6. After an exhausting layover in Amman, we boarded our flight to Sulaimaniya at 12:30 AM. It took over two hours for the flight to work it's way through passport control as they only had one person working on foreign passports (terrible idea that). I got to the waiting area where a hoards of family members were waiting to collect their people, and saw noone I recognized. On the verge of panic and meltdown inspired by a lack of internet and cell phone I worriedly hung about the door. About 10 minutes of this later, a man came up to me and said “Haji Rasul?” After that I just gave up the very difficult task worrying and we set off for Sulaimaniya. I've discovered that you must have a great deal of trust in the goodness of strangers when you travel. He deposited me in a grateful heap of very tired Joanna at Haji's house where I collapsed for quite a long time.

I'm back in Iraq. I keep repeating this to myself in a mantra like way. I'm back in Iraq. If you had asked me at Christmas last year, or even May of last year, I would have said that there was no way I would ever return. Maybe to visit. But to live? Yeah, no. That plan took a nosedive when I was offered the job here. I took one look at the articles being written about the American economy and the serious lack of job creation and said yes. Fast forward several months and I'm sitting in a white and chrome office with Kurdish floating by my head in an incomprehensible babble as I prepare for my English class. I sit trying to decipher the difference between copy write and trademarked so that I can explain it to my class of company board members. I've yet to be allowed to do the rest of my job, a combination of office assistant and English/cultural adviser. Maybe this will pick up when the companies license to practice business in the States comes through. I've got a list sitting on my desktop of things to buy when my first paycheck comes through. First on the list is cell phone so that I can actually communicate with the friends that I have here in Iraq. I go back and forth from the office to "home" with no deviations. I have a basement apartment in my bosses enormous townhouse and while there is a bit more pink involved then I would like, it's not so bad. I spend about two hours every evening helping his kids with their English homework and try to figure out how to get Rosetta Stone working properly again so I can continue my study of Arabic and I hope to pick up French as well this year. It won't help for this job, but it definitely will for traveling later in life. So here's hoping that a healthy dose of motivation and sticktoitiveness will be coming my way soon. Adjusting. It happens every time something new comes along. At least this time around things are semi-familiar.