Rooftop View, Duhok. February 2020
Zawa Mountain from my rooftop, Duhok. February 2020.
[from FB post: February 11, 2020]
Three inches of snow late yesterday afternoon in a place with no snow removal and no salt to put on the roads. Add to that, people who don't know how to drive in the snow...at all. Today, the roads are a sheet of ice after below freezing temperatures which might persist for a day or two. No work today. (also no water cuz all the pipes froze). --- excerpt from My Glamorous Life Abroad
Riding home with Asadul
One of my culture shocks coming back to live in the USA after seven years in the Middle East was the obsession with the weather. When the news was on, it was updated or commented on every 15 minutes or so. Never mind that we really can't CHANGE the weather, but at least we will be prepared for it! In Iraq, they had weather forecasts that no one paid much attention to. One cold day in February, the students said blandly, it is gonna snow later today. Well, snow it did. So much so that by the afternoon everyone was scurrying home with classes cancelled. I lived in the same building as my colleague Asadul Haq and we shared a taxi.
When I first met Asadul he was staunchly from Canada (since he had been hired as a Canadian), but given I barely understood him through his thick Bengali accent, he wasn't foolin' this boy! ha! After he settled in, his national allegiance went back to Bangladesh and we rarely heard about Canada again. I am not sure Asadul really ever understood where he was at any given time. He once asked me if we were anywhere near the sea and I just said "not really" and wondered how anyone could take a job and never once look at a map before going. Another time he told me that he thought learning Arabic might be useful while we lived in Duhok. Well, we were in Iraq - the man might have been onto something. His students did not understand him at all and he copied his teaching slides directly from the internet (his students knew which sites) and read them in a monotone. As long as he conducted his classes and the students got A's and B's there were few complaints. How the man got a PhD remains a mysterious subject. He also co-authored a few peer-reviewed papers in good journals. You just gotta love academia.
Asadul and I vainly tried to contact our normal taxi drivers, but they were all stuck in the snow in Duhok downtown. We were lucky to find ANYONE who was willing to attempt the drive. Keep in mind - 3 inches of snow, no sand, no grit, no snow tires, no experience driving in snow and a hilly terrain - a 15 min drive normally turned into a two hour adventure. We got about halfway and become enmired at a traffic light with little hope of escape. Asadul, a few years my senior, was not handling it well. "Mattu, Mattu, what will we do?" I called Khedir, my supervisor because he had a 4WD SUV and lived near the place we were stuck. He agreed to attempt to rescue us - mostly to show off his new SUV in the snow. After an hour, he said he was hopelessly stuck in traffic. By that time our taxi driver had had enough and got us extricated from the jam and we were winding our way on alleys and side streets toward our home. The last obstacle was crossing the Duhok River - a long way down, a bridge, and a long, steep way up. It was not going to happen. From the top of the hill we saw cars skidding and sliding all over the place. I had enough. We had been in the car for nearly 2 hours. I got out and hoofed it - it was only 15 minutes on foot from there. Asadul refused - I told him fine, since there were no other options, he could just sit there and wait. I was in work shoes without much tread, so I also slipped and slided all the way, but I made it. Asadul gave up on sitting in the cab with his arms folded and somehow made it, too about 30 minutes after me. I sincerely wonder how that man has made it through life sometimes.
For someone from "Canada" Asadul sure knew little about dealing with snow. As for me, after living in DC during freak snow storms, I was familiar with the whole "I have no idea how to drive in the snow" phenomenon. It is funny to look back on it now because two weeks after the storm, the university closed down for COVID and the snowstorm was all but forgotten. In fact, it was my old neighbor in Duhok who sent me a photo of us in the snow that reminded me of one of my last memories of the university and Duhok before we entered those bizarre months of rolling lockdowns at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.