How I spent my summer vacation: in Iraq

KURDISTAN, Iraq — This could be Northern California.

My grandfather owns a small farm here, overlooking a dirt-colored village. The hills are lush with apricots that drip from the trees like fuzzy, over-sized marbles, and at dawn the sun lights the craggy outline of mountain ranges stacked one behind another.

Looking closely reveals a village of mud houses half sunken into the earth. Looking closer, you’ll see the crowded pens of goat and sheep. A thin, mint-green minaret rises from the mosque, and finally, the flag of Kurdistan.

I spent my summer here, a place where I traced my roots to the dry brown earth. It was here that I gained a grandfather, a myriad of aunties and cousins, and a glimpse into a way of life few Americans will ever see.

In this village, there is one tea shop where the men play cards into the evening, and one store that opens late in the afternoon, sometimes not at all, and sells half-cold drinks and melting ice cream. Among the brown houses and past the green mosque is a school, where I taught English.

When I arrived at the four-room building, the first thing I noticed was the heat: a still, pressing, 100-degree heat. Then I noticed the dust and the 40 faces, slick with sweat, looking expectantly at me — my students.

The first day after class, I asked the older girls who are hardly younger than I am, if they wanted to go to university. Once they understood what I meant, their blank faces burst with emotion. “Very very very like,” they said.

I later learn that they are the first generation of students from their village who have a real chance to do so.

After all, Kurdistan is a country that doesn’t exist on any agreed-upon map, and the Kurds have a long history of persecution. This village was one of 500 that were razed during Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. My students’ older siblings, who grew up in this era, never finished high school.

Despite the many museums memorializing the 1988 Halabja attack, in which 5,000 people were doused with poisonous chemical gas and killed on their doorsteps, this has become a region of peace. Sitting cross-legged on the floor around a dozen dishes at family dinners, conversation almost always revolves around politics and often becomes heated, but hardly ever touches on this past.

Since the 2003 invasion by the U.S. and its allies, things have improved dramatically for the Kurds of Iraq, and right now they are living a more stable and unthreatened life than any can recall. This is the same country that makes the newspapers daily for bombings and gunfire, but this happens hundreds of miles from here. For the Kurds, the war is the best thing that’s ever happened. Kurdistan is a country of Bush-lovers.

At first I think this fascination with America is what’s drawing the students to English class in the middle of the summer. I’d seen the boys shoveling cement and laying brick in the unbearable midday heat, and I knew the girls worked all day too, inside the house.

But day after day, the students came. The boys showered and changed out of their traditional Kurdish clothing into jeans. The girls traded the loose ankle-length dresses for western-style clothes, and brought lists of Kurdish words to be translated into English.

What they wanted most was to be able to speak English, something I wasn’t sure how to impart to them so effortlessly.

One day we talked about our plans for the future. The students, whose fathers are nearly all shepherds, want to be doctors, engineers, lawyers and reporters. One boy wants to be a driver.

Another day we practiced talking about family. Many of the students come from families of 10 or more, and I was embarrassed to admit I only have two brothers, no sisters. In Kurdish, the expression for a girl without sisters is the same expression for “only child.”

All this aside, it’s sometimes easy to forget I’m in Iraq.

The girls are very much like any teenage girls, despite the fact they won’t speak to the boys in their class for fear of ruined reputations. They still whisper behind their backs, giggling and pointing out which ones are jwana — beautiful — and which are jwan-niya — not beautiful.

When the boys leave, the girls become louder and more forward. They play Kurdish music and we dance in the classroom, holding hands and moving our bodies. It doesn’t matter that the room is sweltering: We seem to forget this and everything else as we’re pulled into the rhythm, one girl raising her voice in a trill and swirling a wide scarf above our heads.

After four weeks, their English has improved so much that I joke it’s their turn to teach me Kurdish, and I instate a new rule: In class we speak English, and after class, we speak only Kurdish. They love it, and become as adamant about teaching me Kurdish as they are about learning English.

In the end, we’re all young and have a world of dreams in tow, and this, I decide, is more jwana than anything else.

This report comes from a journalist in GlobalPost’s Student Correspondent Corps, a project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.