Letter from Iraq

This newsletter would not be complete if I didn't mention Election Day. I considered it a privilege to be here to see the Kurds, some dressed in their best traditional Kurdish clothing, usually worn at weddings, celebrating in the streets after casting their votes. And days later when the results were announced celebratory gunfire could be heard.

Another big challenge for me has been sorting out and adhering to what is culturally appropriate behavior for me as a single woman ... Once, when I turned down an invitation to a dinner because my Kurdish woman friend could not go too, and I could not go with only men especially at night and without an appropriate escort home, one of the men replied "but you are free!" for which I thought -- I am not free unless my woman friend next to me is free as well. To be above reproach and to preserve my reputation in the neighborhood I needed to say no. The same goes for talking to men. This is one of the hardest things -- to not be able to say hello or strike up a conversation with a man unless I have a valid reason for doing so (i.e. he's a shopkeeper I deal with, a neighbor, a brother of a friend). Sometimes men on the street will say "hello" to me in English, again thinking it's OK because I am foreign, but I have had to learn to ignore them and keep walking because a proper Kurdish girl or woman would never respond to such a thing.