Fifth Blog.  May 4, 2012.

Friday, May 4, 2012.  I send this message on a clear day that follows a day that was cloudy, then thundery, and then rainy.  It was not pleasant to be outside.  May 3 was a holiday for the university, so I spent the day here at the apartment.  Given the weather, I was grateful not be to trying to travel, but the region seriously needs rain.  So I am glad for those who will benefit from the rain long after I am gone.

In this blog message, I will attempt to give you a sense of some of the changes that I have experienced in my 2 ½ years of being in Sulaimani.  (I know that I have not been here continuously, but you know what I mean:  what changes have I experienced since first seeing this place in September of 2009?)  Coming from a part of the US where growth is slow to non-existent, I find these changes are quite remarkable.  I do not exaggerate when I say that billions of dollars are being invested here in infrastructure and buildings.  In virtually all aspects of life, it seems to me that improvements are everywhere.  This is true except in one area:  there are more cars on the road, thus causing significant traffic jams on the main street through the city and on the ring road around the city (called the 60 Meter Road because it is 60 meters wide).  Truly, traffic is a problem.  Not only is the population growing from within, but also more Arabs from Baghdad are moving north for the greater security and safety of this region.  With more people coming, traffic will only get worse.  The part of the city I live in used to be open countryside.  Now it is full and the expansion to the west continues.
 
But traffic not withstanding, here are some areas of improvement.  I will let words describe the changes in some cases, and I will let photos do it in other cases.  (A reminder:  if you click on a photo you can enlarge it and see much better detail.)  

Before:  the power would go down multiple times every evening.  Lots of people had generators to power their houses or in some cases, there were large generators that provided power to whole neighborhoods.  In our walking about the city, Carolyn and I would frequently pass one or more generators pouring diesel fumes and soot into the atmosphere.  As bad, it was not uncommon that the area around the generator was saturated with diesel fuel that had been allowed to spill.  My first photo is of one such very smoky generator.  Now:  the electrical grid provides power more or less continuously.  I think that power here in my apartment has been down only 3 or 4 times since February.  This seems to be true in lots of the city, as I rarely hear generators in operation any more.   I’m not sure how to insert a picture of the power grid; I just know that it works. 

Before:   many of the median strips on multi-lane roads were empty or they had trash in them.  Now:  this city has cleaned them up, planted literally thousands of trees, and they have installed drip irrigation systems to keep them alive.  The effort has transformed the major highway into the city from the airport.  It looks like a world class highway, with attractive lighting and planted medians.  Likewise, streets in this neighborhood have changed.  Photos 2 and 3 illustrate that change.
  

Before:  it seemed that many of the un-built areas of city were just left to gather trash.  Now, some of them have been turned into small city parks where you can see children playing.  Photos 3 and 4 illustrate one such area that I walk along as I go to the center of the city.  When Carolyn and I walked along the street in ‘09-10, the land was just trashy.  In the fall/winter  of ’10-‘11 it was being graded.  By the spring of ’12, a proper park was there. 

Before:  getting across Salim Street, the major east-west street in the city was a challenge.  There were a couple of places where speed bumps had been installed and it was easier to cross in those areas because cars would have to slow to a near stop at the bumps.  Now:  they have built some very nice elevated pedestrian walkways.  See photo 5.  (If only the escalators worked, though.)  The speed bumps have been removed so traffic moves more efficiently.  To control speed, police are now using radar.  Is this progress? 

Since the fall of 2009 several large new buildings have gone in.  In some cases, these buildings  represent new retail stores and indoor recreation areas for children.  Others include places to sell high end automobiles.  I have no idea what goes on in the office towers.   Someone has money, lots of it.   See photos 6 and 7. 

The apartment complex where I live, called Pac City, is a work in progress. When we lived here in 2009, there were only 5 apartment towers.  Now there are 11 and more are in the process of being put up.  The entry way into the complex was simple:  a two lane road with a small armed guard shack at the top of the hill.  Along the way in, we passed a junky looking dry cleaner and an equally junky small store.  The junky stuff has now all been torn down to make way for an attractive, if somewhat over decorated, double archway, double driveway and enlarged guard house.  See photo 8 for photo of the installation of the paving bricks and 9 and 10 for after-shots of the driveway in.

House under construction:  the next four photos I present to you were taken over the period from ’09-10 to the spring of this year.  Something like this kind of building is taking place in dozens of places in town as people build new houses.  What attracted my eye the first time I saw this house was how the cement contractors had built an elaborate set of molds to pour a single piece circular concrete staircase on the outside of the house. It was just ingenious.  During the construction process, it is almost impossible envision what a house will look like once it is finished, but in this case I could track the progress over a couple of years since I walked by the house on my walks into the center of the city.  The first photo is of the circular stair case after it had been poured but was still being supported by the molds; then the next three show the house to completion.  It is very attractive, much more so than I could have imagined when it first started up.  I can only hope that the occupants are enjoying their new home.  (These slides also show the extent to which buildings are made of poured concrete and concrete blocks; no wood is used in the structure of a house.  I can only imagine what a Sulaimani builder would think of the houses in our area that are made almost entirely of 2 by 4 and 2 by 6 boards.  I suspect they do not have to worry about termites.)  See photos 13, 14, 15, and 16. 

In our first year here, I made a comment in class one time about my frustration over the number of times that power went down the evening before the day of class.  One of the students commented, in a most kindly way, to the effect that electrical power was much better at that time than it had been only a few years before when they had power only 4 to 5 hours per day.  For them, having power for 23 ½ hours per day was just great.  Another student said something like, “you have to understand that we have been through the Anfal campaign (Saddam’s effort to wipe out Kurds), and a civil war.”  It was a humbling moment, as I understood the value judgment I brought to my comment.  I cite this example as I conclude these observations.  I have to be pleased for local people that these material comforts are coming to this region after years of deprivation.  Any deeper philosophical questions about whether people here will be happier when this is done will have to wait until they have enjoyed what we in the US have enjoyed for many years. 

Thanks for reading this longer-than-normal post.  If you have any questions feel free to write to me at carl.caldwell@auis.edu.iq.