Life in the desert.

I have now been in Al-Hillah Iraq for one and a half months and already it feels like a year and a half! As you gathered from my first Iraq post, my arrival was a bit like a trailer from a typical war movie. Settling into our new way of life here has taken some adjusting. Our factory and place of work, as well as our apartment is in a compound 70kms outside of Baghdad. Basically, we are in the middle of the desert surrounded by a trillion palm trees. There is very little greenery and not much beauty by way of scenery. At the moment it is winter here. Well, the locals say its winter, but we are experiencing temperatures of 22-24 degrees. Granted it is a little chilly at night and last week it actually rained for two days which put us all in a state of shock. We have been told to enjoy the low temperatures as we will be going into Summer in about 6 weeks and we can expect to reach temperatures as high as 55 degrees.

To our surprise our apartment is really gorgeous. It has two bedrooms with two bathrooms, brand new modern kitchen with dream appliances. Walking into our big entrance hall gives you a feeling of being in New York (sadly not the case, one glance out the window and we are quickly brought back to reality).

Here in Iraq, we work six days a week with Friday off. We are battling with this and constantly feel exhausted. With the amount of work, we are doing (believe me it is a load) one day is just not enough. Also explains the slowness in writing regular posts for my blog. Not enough hours in our days.

Besides the work load, communication is probably one of our biggest battles. We have quite a diverse number of nationalities working here, but the languages spoken are predominately, Arabic, Turkish and Hindi. English is not widely spoken; hence I have now started a tutoring program for English to try and get a better communication level for both Colin and myself. This communication barrier is both frustrating (a simple task is very time consuming in getting the task understood by all parties involved), but also truly hilarious too. There are times we both look at one another and throw our arms in the air and laugh, when what we asked for lands up being a complete surprise! We have also both started learning Turkish, slightly easier than Arabic to learn. We have both picked up a few Arabic words but it is a very difficult language. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that we will never be able to read and write it…. the letters make absolutely no sense to us (although they look very beautiful when written) and are read from right to let. The diaries we were given start with January at the back of the book. So, we are feeling a little backwards!

Security issues here in Iraq are also an ongoing concern. We are still trying to get used to the fact that we will occasionally hear blasts or when the Americans do anti-missile testing, we obviously want to crawl under the nearest piece of furniture, but the locals carry on like it’s nothing and don’t pay much attention to it unless an alert is sounded. On the 21st January however, a devastating twin suicide bombing in Baghdad’s busy market sent us into a spin. American news channels went nuts, many innocent civilians were killed and injured. I personally receive the security reports on a daily basis, and it is sometimes really hard to swallow when I am made aware of how many suicide vests, IED’s and bomb assembling equipment is seized and dismantled in a day or actually detonated, resulting in casualties, injuries and extensive building and infrastructure damage. As the presence of ISIS and Daash increases before the October elections here, security is heightened. Rockets have been dropped in Erbil and missiles launched at the US embassy in the Green Zone. We are therefore kept very protected and are only allowed to go twice a week into Baghdad and stay at the Babylon Hotel (the security there is very tight) in order to meet up with the security liaison (an ex British military personal) and do our shopping for items that we need in our apartment, but only in highly protected areas.

This brings me to the subject of shopping in Bagdad. From the external look of all the buildings and shops you cannot believe that there would be anything worth looking at inside. Upon walking through the front doors, we are transported into five-star luxury. All the shops, such as Lacoste, Starbucks, Samsung, Apple, Gucci just to name a few, are available in all the big shopping malls. We mostly do our every two-week shop at the Baghdad Mall, but unfortunately part of the mall was hit by a missile this past Monday night, so once again a change in shopping strategy is needed. I know this all sounds so frightening, but I assure you we are being looked after and all emergency plans are in place. Shopping for groceries on the other hand is not as easy. All the labels are in Arabic, a lot of the food is not recognizable to us and meat such as steak, is a real struggle to find (and of course there is no pork, we are not even allowed to mention the word pork or pig here!)

We are forbidden to take any photos of the military, so taking photos to show you at home is not an easy task as military presence is everywhere. Occasionally I sneak one in, but excuse the bad quality as I am doing it on the sly.

I promise to try my best to update my blog regularly, as work allows. Thinking of home and my loved ones there, makes my heart ache. Words cannot describe how much I love and miss you all.