Shoes!

I got shoes on the brain, though I didn't catch the news at all yesterday - I was too busy arguing at a shoe store.

A Dutch journalist friend with a name like a fan manufacturer bought a pair of shoes, workman boot types, from a store in Jeramana. He paid quite a bit, 1200 lira. Within the first day of wearing them, he realized there were problems. The left one had unfinished leather that rubbed against his sock, making holes, and the right one's toe was made improperly and cut into his foot. He hobbled around painfully before calling me up to try to return them and get a less painful pair.

Tariq and Ali, came with, predicting success was a longshot. "But take me and I'll speak Allawi," joked Ali.

The salesman, whose eyebrows were so light I thought he didn't have any at first, took one look at the shoes.
"These have been worn. I can't take them back."
"They were only worn once. This is obviously a flaw in manufacturing. The toe of the left one is fine and the toe of the right one is crap."
"Obviously some one stepped on it."
"THIS from someone stepping on it? It's obviously manufactured differently."

Tariq led the charge, with the Dutchman's and my occaisonal input. Ali mostly hung out in the background, offering mostly moral support. The salesman, and his manager, maintained that someone must have stepped on the toe of the shoe, resulting in it to be a different shape.
"How weak is that shoe? When he bought it the salesman assured him they were the strongest shoes available. One day and it breaks?"
"All the shoes are like that! I can get out other pairs and you can see."
"Ok show us."
"Ya Ahkhi there's nothing wrong with that shoe, it got stepped on. It would happen to all shoes."
"He can't wear the shoe it's so painful."

Tariq challenged the man to prove that it would happen to all shoes. The shoes' twin, for example, held its shape despire being worn for a day. The salesman assured him that, if stepped on, it would hold the same shape. Tariq put the shoe down, stamped on the toe a couple of time, and put it back on the counter. It held its shape, not sharing its brother's fate.
"It must have been stepped on in a different way."

The argument was getting quite dramatic, what with shoe-stomping theatrics. The Dutchman turned to a customer about to buy the same type of shoes and told him, "Don't get them. These broke after one day. They're bad boots." The manager did not appreciate the quality review. He told us to take the shoes to the goverment goods office, or offered to ship the shoes back to the factory. If there is indeed something wrong, it's from the factory and not from me.
"You're responsible for what you sell in your store," the Dutchman maintained.

The manager posited that he had nothing to do with the shoes once they left the store. You could walk out of his store and have a car run over the shoes and that's not his responsibility.

"Do you think he had a car run over his boot? For fun?"

The manager agreed to send the shoes back to the factory. Though we failed, Tariq enjoyed the arguing, so all was not lost.
"It's hard for me to speak when I'm angry," the Dutchman said.
"Oh, just wait. Angry Arabic is the most fun of all," I told him.

Today I was told twice before noon about Bush's shoe incident yesterday, where an Iraqi journalist for al-Baghdadiyya threw his shoes at Bush. First while buying fatayir for breakfast, then at the internet cafe where I am filling in more grad school applications. The guy working there was joking with another about it, then turned to me.
"You don't like Bush, do you," he said, joking. The first time I came into this internet cafe he asked me the same question more seriously. I told him the majority of Americans in Syria don't like Bush, as his supporters are probably scared of Arabs and Syrians especially.
"Bravo to the journalist!" I said.

Internet Cafes and Iraqis

It's easy to forget how many Iraqis are in Jeramana. When I first moved here, I would hear an Iraqi accent while walking down the street at least once a day. But through the summer to now, discounting my Iraqi friends, I don't hear that much random Iraqi. Except on the internet.

I'm applying to grad school, and thus have been spending a lot of time in internet cafes. Since my laptop died last spring, cafes are my only computer resource.

After work, the woman's room fills up. It's much less smoky than the "men's", which is mostly used for playing network games (this is part of the reason for the divide - men say bad words while in the heat of computer battle and heaven forbid one of us hear these words!). The gender divide isn't enforced and seems to be more a function of the rooms' purposes - all the game players are dudes and most of the chatters are ladies, but men too use the ladies' room to chat without the background noise of victory or defeat. Families, old people, children, and young ladies and men chat away with family and friends in Iraq, Europe, America, and Canada. By 8, every computer in the women's room is occupied with the occupant chatting away on skype or hotmail or yahoo messenger. While I try to convey to one school or another why I'm really special, I'm surrounded by Iraqi dialect.
"zayn, zayn"
"gultilich"
"ishtag lich!"

(Besides the tell-tale g and ch sounds, Iraqi dialect is much harsher than Shami. It's hilarious, as every single dialect of Arabic is. Seriously. While some are funnier than others- Lattakian, as spoken on De'ah Diyah, must be near the top- even Shami, which should at this point should be neutral, is hilarious when extra-Shami, as on Bab al-Hara. Lebanese - always hilarious though personally I don't appreciate the limp-wristed effete used with it. In Jeramana, lots of people speak Druzi - hilarious! I know its not only me that thinks this, as, every single person I told today I'm travelling to Aleppo for Eid, said, "Itchbak kheito?" and laughed.)

Parents hold up children to the webcam while boyfriends and girlfriends flirt. Just today, the whole room turned to watch a young man sing to his love. The man next to me helpfully tried to explain the situation to me (as if the language of sweethearts isn't immediately identifiable) by saying, "He sing to his friend." and after a minute "His friend is a girl." I told him thanks in Arabic, but I got that as most dudes don't sing love songs to their men friends (at least not in crowded internet cafes).

It's great to think about how connected technology lets us be. There are some people there everyday when I go in. Despite the distance, they can connect . But it also reminds me how we've (America) destroyed this country and scattered its people to all corners of the globe. We've broken up families and left thousands in limbo, just waiting here in Syria to go back or move to the West. They chat with those left behind and those that have them behind. And then I go back to my essays and write about how my experiences in Syria will enrich my future research.

Middle Class Refugees

According to an official at UNHCR, one of the problems facing the Iraqi refugees in Syria is their Middle Class-ness. When the money runs out "they don't have the survival skills of most refugee populations."

I Get Off My Lazy طيز

So I've decided to stop being a leech on society. A fellow Fulbrighter put me in touch with a woman who runs a weekend school for Iraqi children, so now I volunteer teaching English there. Friday was my first day.

The school is in the woman's one-room apartment in Saida Zayneb, an area outside of Damascus which is very poor, has quite a lot of Iraqi refugees, and is famous for the Saida Zayneb mosque, the main attraction for Iranian pilgrims to Syria. It takes less than an hour to get there. Saturday I went back and taught the same group of girls from before, plus two more classes. 6 hours after I had arrived, the woman who runs it was thanking me profusely as I left and I felt, well, good. "Skukran jazeelan" (thank you very much) said the woman, to which I replied "Skukran lilforsa" (thanks for the opportunity).

The students were divided among the teachers haphazardly, and I had no idea of their levels prior to beginning class so everthing was completely off-the-cuff. Their English was also so poor that I had to speak almost entirely in Arabic, following up every English sentence or word with the meaning in Arabic. The students are harder to understand than most people I interact with since I'm so unfamiliar with the Iraqi dialect and accent, but I expect this will improve. Both days, there were some French journalists buzzing about taking pictures and talking to the main woman.

Most of the girls are from Baghdad. One of the lessons on Saturday I worked one-on-one with a 14-year-old girl, who is very behind in English. Most of the students are, as Syrian schools start English a full two or three years before Iraqi schools, plus many missed a lot of school because of the war. The girl asked me if I spoke "logha ajnabia" (foreign language - English) well, and how I knew it, so I told her I was from America. Really? She asked. Is America nice? Do your parents live there? Is America pretty?

I'm never embarrassed or reticent about telling people I am from the US, except in this situation. I know they know that I am not the US government, and are obviously not going to turn on me because of my blue passport, but still I feel somewhat responsible. My friends, my neighbors, some of my family supported Bush or the war, and I don't think I can absolve myself of all responsibility just by the fact I didn't vote for Bush.

The last class on Saturday was for older girls more advanced in English. The way English is taught in school here drills the grammer but skips over conversation and listening, so I was trying to get them talking. They told me about their families. The girl who is the best in English informed me, "My family from Baghdad, and I have four brother- no, three brother now, one died, and a sister." I didn't ask how.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fucking Up a Country

I have to recommend a great book - Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It details the first year of the American occupation under Iraq, the "Emerald City" being the Green Zone around Saddam's Republican Palace where the Coalition Provisional Authority administered Iraq. Reading it, emotions veered from anger to outright shock. Where they trying to fail? I was completely against the invasion from the outset (writing my Junior Research Paper on how Iraq did not pose a threat and we should not invade in fall 2002 - apparently a midwestern high schooler has better sources than the CIA) but the glaring mistakes are so fucking egregious:

A skeleton staff was selected to run the Iraqi administration once in American hands. A man without tade experience ran the Trade Ministry. An engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers was put in charge of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, the Ministry of Housing and Construction, Ministry of Irrigation, and Ministry of Electricity AND Ministry of Health. One man. Why? The planners assumed "Iraqi civil servants would return to work and ministries would run themselves" (32). YET, the CPA also decided on de-Ba'athification, effectively barring senoir civil servants, teachers, and most Iraqis who knew fucking anything about anything in Iraq.

The CPA decided to not only democratize Iraq but change the economy into a Chicago School free market wet dream. They wanted to privatize and dismantle central control similar to post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Leaving aside the contentious issue that selling off a nation's assets while occupying it is illegal, they also did not assign shit to this all-important convergence of neocon and neolib interests. The Germans had 8 thousand people work on the privitzation of East German state factories. The Americans assigned 3 people to this job in Iraq

I could go on, but fuck, there's just too much. If Iraq was to be Bush's jewel in the neocon crown why the fuck did he devote so little people to it? I don't buy the argument of some who supported the war, but now try to distance themselves from the burning carcass Iraq has become by claiming that if not for these mistakes it all would have gone swell. It was going to be horrible, but it could have been less horrible.

Check out the book if only for the surreal discriptions of life in the green zone: staffers chasing cooze and trying to fuck in any secluded space available, Halliburton hunting down and exterminating kitty kats with extreme prejudice, a man who, in order to get his site guarded, had to venture outside the Green Zone for a full-length mirror in which CPA men could look at the asses of the chicks they fucked. Christ on earth, it's almost unbelievable.

Of course, learning about the irreparable mistakes of the first year of occupation cannot change anything, But should you ever want to know how to really and truly fuck a country up, this is a great guide.