Bus from Baghdad
Duhok Zoo. September 2018
[from FB post: September 7, 2018]
The Bus to Normal
People come to Duhok from all over Iraq to feel "normal" just for a weekend.
Just think about that for awhile....
I also took the bus to Normal once - Normal, Illinois and I had a good chuckle about it. Then I remembered all the buses coming to Duhok, a small city in Iraq almost to the border with Turkey. Those were also buses to normal.
Duhok had two small malls - people were sick of them. The city had a terrible zoo whose animals looked like they were on the brink of death - it was depressing. There were restaurants and cafes in the city - residents were bored with them. In fact, the biggest complaint from my Duhoki friends was how dull the city was and that places across the border in Turkey or even the regional capital Erbil were just so much better. Their complaints resonated with me, especially for the young people.
Duhok, however, was in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. The rest of the country did not have anything close to normal life. The whole nation had basically ceased to function after the wars, the ouster of Saddam, and ISIS. People, however, still lived there and craved a normality. The very things the residents of Duhok were sick of, people from Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra were willing to ride buses to - sometimes for nearly an entire day. They didn't mind enduring painfully long security checks at the regional border to experience "boring normal" once again. I saw this phenomenon weekend after weekend in Duhok - busloads of Iraqi Arabs, mostly families or groups of young people coming to Duhok to be "normal". It felt ironic that the Kurds, who used to live in the butt end, least developed part of Iraq, now lived in the best part. No matter what the history, I felt depressed seeing a family with kids at the shitty Duhok Zoo trying to glom onto a few hours of normalcy. It was just so very very sad.
My takeaway on the experience was that perhaps all of us should appreciate more the things we take for granted and are even heartily bored with. Any time there is a conflict in the world, those are the first that get disrupted and disappear and the very things people "miss" the most as soon as they are taken away. I now try to appreciate the venues I am "sick to death of", because given the choice of those places or nothing, no one would choose the latter.