![]() ![]() Kurdistan, Iraq, Sep 2018 © Charlene WinfredĪnd other little similarities jolted. My favourite fruit shop to photograph in Sulaymaniyah. ![]() ![]() *literally: to “go back to the village,” your home, your roots. It was also the city where I stayed for those 4 weeks. It wasn’t just the passing places though. The lean-tos, food stalls, and bustle…this is what the rest stops on the roads in Kurdistan felt a lot like. That journey inevitably wound through aforementioned trunk roads, and you’d stop at roadside vendors for makan and kopi**, and buy tidbits for the rellies. First we’d go by bus (big up the Singapore-Malacca Express!) then later on, car. It was incredibly reminiscent of the towns I remember from the 80s, when my parents and I would balek kampong* to visit family in Malacca. The Malaysia of my youth, before the North-South highway bisecting the peninsula was completed, and we made our way to Malacca and Kuala Lumpur along the windy old trunk roads, just another in a long line of cars trailing some timber lorry snail-pacing it under the weight of stacked logs. Those reminded me of a different part of the world. Kurdistan, Iraq Oct 2018 © Charlene Winfred All of those news stories? I would hear some of those stories in the 4 weeks I was there, and some I wouldn’t understand because no matter how much I’d read, I’d never lived through anything similar. The trauma of war is still fresh for many, with 2 out of almost 6 million displaced Iraqis still having no home to return to, because everything they would have had to return to, was razed by the recent war with ISIS, to say nothing of millions of others affected by the decades of war this country has been through. Not all the roads in Iraq are as beautiful as the miles I’d travelled in those few weeks. My reality of course, was not everyone’s reality. More than anything, it was that brand of light, cutting around the mountains in the dry, dry air. But there I was weeks later, driving down a length of beautiful blacktop, in a Korean sports utility with my Canadian friend at the wheel, thinking “man, this looks like New Mexico.” Or bits of West Texas I’d been through. Even after willingly buying my ticket, getting on the plane, and arriving in Iraq for a month’s work with Preemptive Love. All I knew about it was what I read on the news, which was inevitably bad: bombs and bullets, violence, tragedy, destruction. Iraq was never on my radar as a travel destination. Kurdistan, Iraq, October 2018 © Charlene Winfred ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |