Look What I found around here in Iraq, Khabat, Erbil 010411

Today we visited Khabat, a village 20 km out of Erbil to conduct a survey about widowed women. The survey is part of a bigger project that is intended to be used as a base for an income generating project. This village has refugee families from other parts of Iraq because the region [Kurdistan] is the safest area in Iraq. Some of the women are the wives of the disappeared men and are still waiting for their husbands to return and they still do not know whether they are really widows or not. But in this situation their personal status is unclear leaving them with complex problems and unable to find closure and move on with their lives. For example, there are still mass graves to be identified and excavated. Women are extremely vulnerable in this situation. Another problem is the women with husbands who left their wives.

There are several women head of households either because they are divorced or widows. This leaves a big burden for this women that often have very little or no source of income.



We arrived to Khabat and waited over a cup of tea, as we were trying to go over the lists that were provided to us. Our local contact Faisal, who works with the municipality,arrived and took us to the major's house. There, with another cup of sweet tea, where we were sorting the lists from the Ministry of Martyrs and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. The major is a more accurate source of information, since he knows the women and could identify immediately, who was who just by reading the names from the list.

After the major’s house, Kak Faisal took us to a house, there was a woman called Belal, who lived with her 2 children, Mohamed and Ahmad and her mother. We sat there and had some more tea and started the survey, explaining to the woman that we were going to provide her with some training that will give her some skills for her to bring some income to the house. The woman, 26, was abandoned by her husband and left with nothing when he married another woman. She now lives on a rented house with her mother, who is a widow and receives a modest income of 200,000 Iraqi Dinars ($167). The woman only completed primary school and she forgot how to read and write.

The infrastructure in Khabat is very poor, no sewage system

Me with Mohamed and Ahmed, aren't they adorable?

As my colleague, Dastan talked to the woman,in Kurdish, I noticed his soft and sympathetic tone. The two children, 4 and 5 years old were sitting beside us as we talked to their mom. I was immediately in love with them and trying to play games and gain their friendship as I was thinking what kind of future these children will have here in Iraq. Will they be able to go to school? What about their young, and beautiful mother? Will she be able to find a loving husband that takes care about her and her two boys. It is unfortunate, but I think the answer is no! Will this generation of men continue this cycle of violence against women?

We were making a survey and were welcomed in every single house, here we went with the major, which is a very reliable source when looking for a specific set of women, young and with children to be able to provide them with training to make them self sufficient.



After this first interview, we went to the municipality and there we met with a woman that provided us with another list of women and more tea. By now I am really hungry and hoping this sugar overload helps me.

It’s all kind of confusing and sad, but I am glad to be here and have this opportunity, to see the real face of Iraqi women. There are so many things that I would like to know about these women, which are about my age, and most of the time younger than me. I look at their eyes and I see how strong they are, I mean, you have to be strong on this culture to survive all the oppression that this society imposes on women. All the pressure is on the woman, she has to be perfect in order to accepted and be able to marry, perfect in her husband’s eyes, for her own family, for her husband’s family and in the end for what?

But sometimes we faced rejection from the men living with the women, this very traditional society does not allow women to work out of the house. If they are widow or divorced, they have to move with a relative and cannot provide for themselves, making them and their children poor and vulnerable.



Sometimes I am just glad that I was not born in this kind of society, and that I don’t have to deal with this. THANK GOD!!!!Sometimes I just feel sorry for them and I am angry that we as women have to accept this, just because “it’s the tradition” or because that is what women are supposed to do. I can’t believe we are on the 21st century and dealing with these issues that are leaving women illiterate, poor and dispossessed if they are widowed or divorced. I am frustrated because there is a lot of work to do before these “traditions” are changed and women are able to break this unjust cycle of oppression that leads to poverty and violence. Maybe it will take a generation or two, to educate men as well as women but I think it can be done, it MUST be done.

These children are vulnerable in many ways if their mothers are unable to have an income.

Two weeks, lots of tea and too much to handle in Kurdistan, 122710--Ankawa-Erbil, Iraq

Today it has been two weeks since I have been in Iraq. The first couple of days, I just felt out of place, just I wanted to go back; no friends, missing family, nowhere to go after work, I couldn’t even feel the spirit of Christmas. I was so sad and I cried every single day for the first 5 days, I felt completely disconnected. I had so many illusions to be in Iraq, and was so excited to come here, the cradle of civilization, the land of Abraham, Babylon, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, Baghdad, the center of the Islamic world in the 12th century and I was finally here and nothing was clicking. I knew it was just a process, that it was going to be all right, that it was normal to be sad, (I never felt like that in Palestine), but I could not stop crying, I guess after 6 months, and another holiday away from home, everything was finally hitting me.

For the first time in 6 months, after sleeping on a tent, on the floor, on the kitchen, and not having a specific place to sleep, I have my own room, even when its temporary. Despite having my amazing kingdom, I was still sad; the feeling of being alone and far away from home, and the fact that I couldn’t do anything on my own made me very frustrated. I just went to work, was sad all day and went back to the house, sat on my bed to cry. Now, I realize how helpless it feels to be displaced, to depend on others to fulfill your most basic needs like eating, or just getting back home. I know how vulnerable one feels and even I can’t compare my situation, but MAYBE this is how refugees and internally displaced people (IDP’s) here in Iraq feel. The feeling of powerlessness not being able to be self-sufficient, having to depend on the government or on NGO’s to fulfill their needs for housing, food, water.

My co-workers were trying to make me feel at home, playing Spanish music and they even got me a Christmas tree and we mounted it and put some lights on it. That was so sweet. I have been drinking a lot of tea too, tea at all times and in EVERY place and with a lot of sugar, I guess that's why you see my face a little bit more round. At work, most of the people in the organization is Kurdish, but there are 2 girls that are Arab. One of my co-workers is one girl from Baghdad. She moved here 4 years ago, running away from the sectarian violence between Sunni-Shi’a that was at its peak around 2006-2007. She is a very lively and outspoken girl, she told me that her father cannot find a job because he cannot speak Kurdish and also he was from a different political ideology, but that he receives some money from Baghdad. The other girl that works with me is originally from Mosul, but she and her family lived in Syria, also because of the sectarian violence. She told me that her sister husband was kidnapped but was able to escape because he opened the trunk where they put him. He just took a taxi to the Syrian border and waited there for his documents to be able to enter into Syria. I met another guy that was also from Baghdad that told me that they lived here because his father was kidnapped and that they were lucky that he is alive, after they paid $150,000. “We are lucky that my family has money” he said.

There is a cool mixture of Arabic-Kurdish language, you have to pay close attention, because in a second they change from one to the other. I can't figure the Iraqi-Arabic and it feels as if I don't know any Arabic at all. Some of the Kurds speak Arabic and vice versa, it’s a very interesting mixture, but not everyone speaks both languages. Also there have been some historical clashes between the Arabs and Kurds, so its not like they are so close, but now with the war, there is a lot of internal migration to the north, because is a more stable area, an area that has not been touch by the war, and now is blossoming with development and outside investment. There is around 1 million Arabs and 4 million Kurdish in the Iraqi-Kurdistan, curiously, the same ratio of Palestinians to Israelis living inside Israel.

I’ve been reading a lot of UN reports about the situation in Iraq. There are about 1.5 million people that have been internally displaced and around 1.5-2 million widows. About 10% of households in Iraq are headed by female. 1 in 5 children are illiterate. There are a lot of issues of violence against women, including honor killings, trafficking and female genital mutilation, a practice that is prevalent in 74% according to a Human Rights Watch report that I read. This is a country that has been suffering the devastating effects of war and UN sanctions for the past three decades. The Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War followed by sanctions against that Saddam Hussein regime, then the US-led invasion, and as I read all these reports and the number of people, especially women and children that are the most vulnerable, I just ask myself WHY?????? Why our money has gone to support all these years of suffering, occupation, violence. Well, I know WHY!!! It is because of the greed of a few that want to control the energy resources of this part of the world. Because of that Iraqis are displaced, they cannot travel freely to other countries; they cannot visit other parts of the world, because their country s blacklisted, and they are seen as possible terrorists. I CAN, because I have the blessing of being born American with all the benefits and opportunities that the Empire brings. An Iraqi has the damnation of being born in a country of terror and war, and therefore s/he carries the mark wherever s/he goes.

My organization, the Women Empowerment Organization, has a couple of projects including awareness and empowerment of women and youth, we run a small business development center, to train young people to start their own businesses. We just have finish setting up a radio station and we have a hotline to serve women victims of violence, we are also planning literacy courses to target the widow women and to engage them in income generating projects to make them self sufficient and economically empowered. So here I start a new year with a new learning experience, lots of projects for the future and lots of hope for the people of Iraq.