Graduation Day!

The last couple of weeks have been some of the busiest of my life. We've been working 12 hour days helping our students finish their final video projects and preparing our final web product, The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan.

I have much to share with you but for right now I just had to show you all our latest video, representing the culmination of our project here in Iraqi Kurdistan. Our mentor Grant Slater produced it and it's pretty much one of the best things ever.

Enjoy!

WTF Iraq: Pizza chef with a license to kill

Seen at a local pizza place:



"This pizza chef has a license to kill."

This Pudgy pizza chef is debonair, clever and heartlessly cruel in a kinda sexy way. While that may make for a dashing date, I won't be trying whatever he's dishing out any time soon.

Blind and love to read? No problem here.

A while back, one of my students, Dilpak, mentioned that her brother is doing something pretty awesome in local journalism - his paper has created the first braille newspaper in all of Iraq. According to Dilpak, each paper comes with a two sheet insert with the highlights of the day's news punched out in braille so blind people in the area can read it.

Last week, Dilpak brought in a couple of copies and I'm kind of obsessed with them. Here's what they look like.





These also make me wonder how non-western languages are translated into braille. As I understand it, Braille isn't phonetic. It directly converts letters from a given language into a series of dots. So who decides how to convert non-standardized languages like Kurdish into braille and what dialect do they use? I did a little Googling and didn't find a real answer. In fact, I found remarkably little information on how Braille alphabets are formed across languages. If you have any ideas or expertise on the subject, I'd love to hear it.

Visa: The final installment

It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from the visa office, but I did want to give a short epilogue to our epic quest for a Kurdistan visa.

Final visit to the visa office: 1.5 hrs, Four three-month visas APPROVED!

After waiting an hour in the reception of the director’s office in the hopes that he would sign some magic paper to help us along, we shuffled into the hallways dripping with sweat and hating our lives. We got a magic paper but it was still at least 100 degrees inside the building and we had four or five more offices to go to.

Just as we thought we were going to melt into the floor before our visas would ever be approved, one of our students appeared out of nowhere. As it turns out, he spends a lot of time in the immigration office helping foreign students get their visas. He took our paperwork and dashed away. We ran to keep up with him as he hurried from office to office, repeating, “just one moment! Just one moment!”
A half hour later, he handed us our stamped visas with a sly smile. Visas for everyone!

A day in the country

This weekend I had the privilege of going on a real Iraqi picnic. When I first got here, I was surprised to see families and friends parking on the highway just outside the city, spreading blankets on the shoulder of the road and firing up their grills for a good old fashioned barbeque.

It’s so dry and hot here that any patch of grass or open land is fair game for a little mini retreat for a couple or family – I’ve seen them camped out on the grassy medians in the middle of wide boulevards, on flowery parking lot dividers at the mall, and on hillsides off busy streets.

So I was pretty excited when my student, Sahar, invited me on a field trip with her sister out to Shaqlawa, a town about an hour and a half away that is a popular vacation spot, especially for Southern Iraqis.

We checked out the other picnic spots on the way, where people park their cars after nightfall and small bonfires burn deep into the evening.







Then we entered Shaqlawa, a cozy little town that seemed a world away from the heat and dryness of Erbil. The mountains make the region noticeably cooler than Erbil and the deep red dirt is often spotted with tiny white flowers. It’s a world of soft rolling hills, trees (it’s been so long since I’ve seen lots of trees!) and a main street with dozens of candy shops, spice and fabric shops with their wares draped over the doorways and tumbling into the streets.

We planned to return after nightfall, when Sahar promised me the town would be bumping. We headed out to a graveyard and ancient church where Sahar swore she had heard voices screaming at night that stood at the front of a natural cave. We climbed up the hillside to the mouth of the cave, where people light red candles and wedge them into the rock face in the hopes that their wishes would come true.




Unfortunately we learned that the candles were available back down at the bottom of the hill so we saved our wishes for next time and headed down again for our picnic.




Finally we headed back in to Shaqlawa, and Sahar was right, the sleepy town’s main street was packed with people, sitting at neon-drenched restaurants, bouncing in huge trampoline beds, shopping for hats and trinkets and dancing in the streets with each other. Even at 11 at night, the streets were full, mostly of tourists who had come up from Baghdad and surrounding areas to escape the heat and intensity of the city.

Happy Fourth of July!

Yesterday our motley group of American housemates celebrated our nation's independence at a fancy hotel somewhere in the outskirts of Erbil, Iraq.

We'd been looking forward to the party for weeks, or at least I had. The flyer our housemate Darshak showed me had a picture of a big straw hat like the kind they wear in New Hampshire parades, details written in red, white and blue, fireworks promised and most importantly, the words "AMERICAN BARBECUE!"

Even though I knew I wouldn't even smell a pork rib within 50 miles of the event, I kept my hopes high.

We piled into a taxi and headed out toward the hotel, which was way, way outside of town. Security was tight and once we got to the hotel on top of a huge hill in the middle of nowhere we realized that the barren hillside was in fact peppered with personal security dudes, armored land cruisers and the occasional serious looking man in fatigues. The army guys looked at us a little funny when the five of us spilled out of the cab in front of the lobby.

[Jon taking a snap of those armored cars in front of the lobby]

The party was, like any Fourth of July celebration, in the backyard. I'm not sure where they found this, but Friends of Kurdistan had a 5-story-tall flag strung up from the hotel's roof.

There were hundreds of American contractors, dignitaries and families milling about and I can assure you that the small talk was just as awkward as it is back in the States. But some things just weren't the same. There was an egg toss and tug-o-war, which was great:



But somehow there was still too much absent from this party. Like music, or loud rowdy people drinking copiously (though somehow I have a feeling that had to do a lot more with the overpriced cash bar).

But worst of all? NO BARBECUE. Not a single marinated hock of beef. Nothing that even resembled American barbecue. There were lamb hamburgers, but no cheese. There were hot dogs, but no ketchup or mustard. And there were absolutely no hamburger or hotdog buns of any kind.

God bless America and their six-packs of fluffy hot dog buns.

So I'll admit that the whole thing was a little weird. They set off the fireworks a little early and I can safely say that in any country there are always a few random fireworks that go off at the end after the finale is over. Then afterward, everyone filed out and went home. It was a work night in Iraq.

I wish I had some great insight between Iraq and the United States, some great wisdom to share about spending our independence day in a place that we "set free," about what that means really. About the words America uses in places like Iraq, like freedom and democracy. What that means to us and to Iraq as nations. But no one got drunk enough to have that conversation at the party last night. Maybe we can start that discussion here. Anyone have that conversation at a rager last night? I'd love to hear what you were thinking as the fireworks blasted.

This Is Iraq

I'm excited to share with you all the first video The Tiziano Project has produced in Iraqi Kurdistan. Produced by fellow mentor Grant Slater, this is one badass explanation of why we've come to this region now.

This Is Iraq | The Tiziano Project from The Tiziano Project on Vimeo.

Classes start, our dog is found, a darn good day!

Classes officially started today at The Tiziano Project. We got to meet our first group of students, a talented mix of aspiring photographers, videographers and journalists who are sure to knock our socks off with their work during the next two months.

I led a couple of lessons today about how to create a timeline on Dipity and how to start a blog on Tumblr. If you're interested in trying out some of the lessons yourself, check out our Tiziano Project Classroom, which has our full curriculum for the workshop, free tutorials for Dipity and Tumblr and will be regularly updated with all the things we teach during our workshop. Part of the nonprofit's goal is to be collaborative with other people and organizations who are teaching new media journalism, so feel free to use these tutorials to teach yourself or others how to get off the ground as a new media journalist.

Also, about 48 hours ago our housemates lost the house's beloved English Spaniel, Sam. Sam is a former bomb-sniffing dog that is just about the cutest thing you'll ever meet and has a whole house full of burly men melting whenever he trots by.

We were so worried! each of us went out in shifts calling his name all around our neighborhood, worried that the poor puppy wouldn't last long in the more than 100 degree heat of the past two days.

But much to our delight we got a call this afternoon that Sam was alive and well and we got to pick him up this afternoon. He even got a little chubby from all the food his temporary caretakers fed him.

Welcome back Sam!

Neighborhood Fun Park

A couple of snaps from the local amusement park, just a few blocks from our house. Complete with bumper cars, a 3-D movie hall, and the most iffy ferris wheel I've ever seen. My favorite part? The bird sculptures all over the park.