I Have Iraq in My Shoe (31 page)

It was lonely times in The Iraq.

Marilyn Monroe sang, “When love goes wrong, nothing goes right…” Love went wrong, and so did my new class. It was wrong to compare one class to another much in the same way that it was wrong to compare one of your offspring to another. Or in my case, to compare one pair of shoes to another. But we did it anyway. My new class was, plainly put, not very bright. If my new class were a child, I would say they would most definitely be repeating kindergarten. If they were a pair of shoes, they would be Crocs. I am sorry Crocs lovers, but you’re wearing gardening clogs outside of the designated garden area, and it’s an affront to all the other shoes.

In an effort to generate positive buzz about the Erbil CED program, Warren and Jill arranged a pro bono contract with the Ministry of Planning. I had a class of nine students in Level 2 (English novice speakers), and Steve had eleven in Level 3 (intermediate English). One of the most noticeable differences between my first semester and this one in the Erbil villa was the number of students and, subsequently, the concentration of body odor.

The villa seemed large when there was just one person in it; however, introduce twenty native Kurds, only five of whom were women, and the villa became an oppressive Crock-Pot of unpleasant smells. Basically, my entire villa smelled like body odor Sundays through Wednesdays. When any of the Suli staff would say, “Oh, you’re so lucky! That setup in Erbil is sweet!”, I would ask them how their trailer/classrooms smelled at the end of each class, then say, “Okay, multiply that times ten, and imagine it being released in your home.” Lucky and sweet, no.

The problem with the ministry class was not that they weren’t bright, but rather that Warren wanted to cram as many students into one class as possible, regardless of language aptitude. A couple of my Level 2 students really should have been learning the alphabet, but Level 2 they were, and Level 2 we would have to plod through.

At the beginning of one class, I explained we would be “choosing hotels.” “What is choosing?” I asked, rhetorically. “Selecting, picking, etc. If you have four hotels, how do you
choose
at which one to stay?” One hour into class, I read aloud from the textbook, “How important are these factors for you in choosing a hotel?” The jovial, portly, gray-mustached Rabar says, “Teacher, ‘choosing’ is what?” Sigh.

I was especially concerned with the potential of Ahmed. His knowledge of English was extremely basic, and he struggled with every lesson. The textbook we used had a variety of activities, one of which was “pair work.” Pair work was done in each unit, and at the beginning of the course, I paired off every student with a partner. It was unfortunate that Ahmed’s partner was Rabar, because they were “the confused one” and “the even more confused one.” Both men were truly very sweet and respectful, and seemed to want to learn, but the course material was just so far beyond their comprehension that it would have been impossible to teach them and the other seven students at the same pace.

For the pair work in every unit, I would always say, “Okay, get together with your partner and…” whatever the instructions were in the book: get together and practice introducing each other, get together and discuss your food preferences, etc.

One day, in our fifth or sixth week of class, we came to the Pair Work section of unit 4. I said, “Okay, get together with your partner and practice the conversation model.” Ahmed raised his hand and said, “Teacher. I do not know what is ‘partner.’” We had been working with partners for the past three weeks. This was not a new word. I thought he was kidding, so I laughed. He looked confused. Then I looked confused and asked, “Really?” Everyone else in the class looked confused, and looked at him like
they
thought he was kidding. He said, “Partner. I not understand.” I was flabbergasted. I could not believe that he was saying he didn’t understand what “partner” meant, since we had been doing the pair work every week, and every time my instruction would be, “Get together with your
partner.
” But I wanted him to understand it, so I decided to make it very clear. I started with Dastan in the back corner of the room:

I literally went around the room to every student and asked them this question. I saved Rabar and Ahmed for the end.

Ahmed looked at me from under confused eyebrows, and paused, then said, “You?”

Everyone burst out laughing, including me, although mine was that laughter that is close to crying with frustration.

My frustration erupted more frequently with the ministry class. I couldn’t figure out why, but they just seemed less sharp than all three of my previous classes. Perhaps it wasn’t a matter of intelligence, but interest in the class? The ministry students were taking the class free of charge, at the insistence of their boss, many of them studying at a level that was too advanced for them. My other students had enrolled voluntarily, and had been so much more motivated. I missed my Suli classes. I missed Awat.

“…The clock won’t strike, the match won’t light, when love goes wrong, nothing goes right.”

Not only was the new class not smart, but they were also not honest. They were cheating. The day after the first exam, I graded the tests and passed them back to the students, so we could review the correct answers and they could see which answers they had gotten wrong.

Two of the students, Seraj and Hidayat, each surreptitiously changed one of the answers, then approached me and claimed I had made a mistake when correcting their tests. Since there were only nine students in the course, I remembered every error that each student had made. I remembered that Seraj had incorrectly identified a verb, and I remembered that Hidayat had left an answer blank. It was obvious to me that Seraj had added “ed” to the verb to make it correct, and Hidayat had filled in the answer that had initially been blank.

I could not believe that grown men would try to cheat on a language exam. I spoke with each one separately, looked each one in the eye, and said, “Did you just change this answer?”

One of the lessons we studied in Level 2 was about body language, and there was a study that showed 70 percent of communication was nonverbal. In their nonverbal way, they were admitting to cheating. Both of them shifted uncomfortably, paused, and said, “No…” while smiling nervously. So, in my nonverbal way, I told them I was not changing the grade on their exams. I narrowed my eyes and said, “Yes, you did.” They both accepted this and went back to their seats.

I felt like I was teaching eight-year-olds. In class they would whisper answers to one another. If I called on Rabar to answer a question, Hawall would bend his head close to Rabar’s desk and mutter something under his breath. I was practically yelling, “Cheating will not help you understand English any better! Hawall, what will Rabar do if he is talking to a native English speaker and doesn’t understand what that person has asked him? You won’t always be standing next to him to whisper the appropriate response.”

In addition to this, during the classroom break, someone went into my refrigerator and drank an entire bottle of my mango juice. I didn’t see this happen; I just saw the evidence of the empty container later. Dalzar and Renas never ate my food.

God, what was wrong with everything? Erbil wasn’t the same anymore. Cheating and lying and eating my food were the new standard: Dadyar and his cleaner-girlfriend, Married Ashton, my new students.

What the hell?

In addition to his Level 3s, Steve was teaching a beginner-level conversation class, and Dadyar was permitted to join the class with his wife, Tavan. The class was in the evening, so there was, disappointingly, no chance for an awkward-but-inevitably-scandalous soap-opera-esque run-in with Vana, the pert Ethiopian cleaning lady. Roughly three weeks into the course, Steve sent me a borderline frantic email:

I was as discouraged with New Erbil as I was with New Warren. No one likes change.
Bring back Classic Erbil and Classic Warren, please.
Katherine had called an end to the Progressive Dinners because they had gotten to be too much work, and all sorts of people were showing up without contributing food or drink. Several of the really fun English Village expats had packed it up and moved back to their respective countries, and the village was starting to feel more like a ghost town than a Happy Place.

The ghost-town ambiance was enhanced by the periodic dust storms that swept through the region and blanketed everything with almond-toned grit. They were sort of exciting to observe, from the safety of my living room, and I sat with my face pressed against the window watching the dust whip and swirl through the empty streets. Someone had said the dust blew in from the Saudi Arabian desert, which made it sound very romantic, but there were so many people spouting off random, unsubstantiated theories about Iraq that I decided to remain content in my ignorance of the actual facts, rather than make myself rabidly crazy trying to get a straight, confirmed answer.

For example, the population of the cities in Iraq seemed to be nothing more than general guesses. After a Google search I found that Erbil’s population ranged from an unlikely 170,000 to 3.3 million within the short span of seven years. After my second visit to the master statisticians at Security, I was confident they were probably counting me as two people. Who knew what the real number was?

In spite of my despair at the diminished luster of my former home-away-from-home, life still had to go on, and Steve and I settled into a comfortable routine, not unlike an old, sexless married couple. After class we would make lunch, and then bring it out to one of the deck tables to eat while we enjoyed the sun and took in the lazy neighborhood vibe.

We had also befriended a sassy little kitty cat who seemed kind of stray, but kind of not. He was mostly white with gray and brown patches, and had the sweetest little face. He would run right up to us and try to rub against our legs. At first I was wary of touching him (Number 5 in the Cultural Awareness pamphlet—don’t touch stray animals), and Crazy Andy would start bellowing about scabies, but I gave him a close once-over, and he seemed surprisingly healthy and clean for a stray, and I had seen him groom himself on numerous occasions. It is not smart to touch stray animals anywhere, but I just couldn’t help myself—I loved him! I named him George, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon where the giant Abominable Snowman wants to hug Bugs and squeeze him and keep him and call him George. I wanted to hug, squeeze, and keep this little kitty cat, but I knew that I could really only get away with the “call him George” part. I kind of felt like I was cheating on Herb, but it was fun when Georgie became part of our daily routine. He magically appeared around 11:00 a.m. every day, when the students started showing up.

Georgie was a social kitty and preferred to be around people. I suppose he also preferred to be around the turkey I was leaving in the heavy glass ashtray I had designated as his food dish.

If Georgie was out roaming the neighborhood, and I saw him in the distance, I would call “Georgie!” and clap my hands, and his ears would perk up and he would come bounding down the street and through our front yard. He was the sweetest, cuddliest kitty, and would just crawl into my lap and then fall asleep. Before we could stop him, Georgie would run right into the villa if the sliding glass door was open, and after a while I just got used to him coming into the classroom while I was preparing for class. He would jump into my lap and make himself comfortable while I sat at the computer. In one of his increasingly rare Old Warren moments, while visiting Erbil, he had given Georgie the clever last name of Catstanza.

Georgie was the one shining spot in the rapidly downward-spiraling world of Erbil. There would be occasional days when he wouldn’t show up and I would worry about him—was he getting anything to eat? Were other people in the compound feeding him and giving him water? Katherine confirmed that she had seen him in her neck of the compound, five blocks away, being fed by one of her neighbors. I was only jealous for a second, and then felt relieved that he was being cared for by other people too.