CARPE MEDIA

Ayub with the Kalashnikov. (Photo: Sebastian Meyer)

The following text and photos are excerpted from an email from my old Milton buddy Sebastian Meyer, a photojournalist currently on assignment in Iraq. We’ll be posting his dispatches as we receive them. —EWS

(…and for gawshsakes, Seb, be careful!)

There have been quite a few requests over the past two weeks for stories and pictures from Kurdistan, so now that I’m back in Erbil—clean and with access to the Internet—here are a few select stories and impressions, along with a few photos. (NB: All the photos that I’m on commission for I can’t send, so unfortunately we’ll have to make do with these.)

As some of you know, my first week in Erbil was, well, a little disappointing. Ayub, our field producer, calls it the “Most Boring City in Iraq,” which I’m sure some of you are glad to hear. I wasn’t.

However, last week we got underway and all the worries of Erbil fell away as we drove out of the city. See attached image of the Kurdish mountains to get an idea of what things can look like around here.

(Photo: Sebastian Meyer)

All of last week we concentrated on documenting a village called Kolajo in the Germian region. Unfortunately, those are the photos I can’t send due to the image embargo, but I’ll send others as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’ve attached some pics of me on a donkey to keep you all happy.

Donkey love.

After finishing up a pretty tiring week, I went back to Halabja with Ayub, who is probably one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met. He was born and raised in Halabja, the town which gave Chemical Ali his name. By the age of 18, he’d taught himself to speak English by listening to the BBC World Service. At 19, he smuggled himself to Greece, where he was caught, imprisoned and sent back to Iraq, where he was thrown in jail again. He then taught himself Turkish and smuggled himself into Turkey, where he lived for a while as a refugee.

Ayub returned to Iraq when the Americans invaded and became a fixer for the New York Times and the BBC, which led to him getting a scholarship to Columbia Journalism School, where he graduated at the top of his class. After graduation, he went to work for Human Rights Watch and Public Radio International, then got a professorship at Swarthmore. You can get a good idea of his extraordinary life from this article, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

(By the way, he’s only a year older than me: 29.)

Now, when I first met Ayub, I thought he was kind of quiet and boring. How wrong I was! Never, ever be misled by how gentle and polite the Kurds are. Within half an hour of arriving in his hometown, Ayub had found us a Kalashnikov to go play with. (Seeing as my parents are on this list, I”ll pretend I didn’t touch the thing… but we all know that’s not true.)

Now onto the subject of food. Oh, Kurdish food! It’s like being constantly drunk on the streets of London. I had to get up at 6 am this morning to get back from Halabja to Erbil, and at 8 am the car stopped for breakfast. We all filed out and there I was, expecting the yogurt and bread I’d been having all week. Big mistake.

In Kurdistan, meat is king—it makes your most red-blooded American look like a Socialist vegetarian. Breakfast menu: One cup of over-sugared Ceylon tea, followed by 6 pieces of freshly grilled lamb on a kebab rod with raw pepper and onions. To wash it down? Another cup of hot tea-flavored sugar water.

I should also mention that in Sulaimaniya it is considered more cultured and fashionable to eat processed food than it is to eat local food. So for dinner a few nights ago, I had “pizza,” which consisted of Naan bread with melted cheese, canned mushrooms and chicken shawarma. I took this option over Kantaqi [Fried Chicken]. Breakfast the next morning was a can of—and I’m not making this up—Australian Processed Cheddar Cheese: a can the size of a large tuna can full of hard processed cheese. You have to open both sides of the can to get the stuff out. Spread it on a bread roll and wash it down with… you guessed it, sweet tea-flavored water.

There have been a few other classic moments, including stumbling across an English book called Street Talk 2: Slang Used in American TV Shows (Plus Lingo Used by Teens, Rappers & Surfers!) Ten points to anyone who can find Street Talk 1.

I’ll have more stories and photos soon.

Love,

Sebastian

P.S.: Keep an eye out for the next email installment, when I’ll be sporting my brand-new Kurdish moustache! The beard here has been getting me in trouble at checkpoints; the military thinks I’m a Chechen fighter who’s come to join Al-Qaeda.