Day 3

We started the day at the Ministry of Education and then went to Raparin University. Afterwards we went to a boys' high school where we had a Q&A session with students of that school and a nearby girls' school. The students were all very intelligent and engaged. I was most impressed by the amount of work they seem to put into studying. Many of them spend their summers preparing academically for the next year or studying language. Many of the students had very good English and, in addition to Kurdish, spoke one or two other languages such as Arabic, Persian, Korean, or German. After the boys' school we went to the girls' where they had prepared a very nice fesival for us. All the girls wore traditional Kurdish clothing and they had a mock wedding celebration complete with food and dancing. I was really struck again with the amount of time and effort put into everything.

The last stop of the day before dinner was the sports complex. There are several branches of the complex located throuighout the city and the one we visited had volleyball courts and soccer fields. Another of the complexes has training facilities for martial arts and weightlifting. All of the facilities are free to use. Fletcher and I jumped in on a practice game of volleyball that was underway with what we were told is the second best womens' team in Iraq. Women and girls have only been allowed to come and use the sports complex for the last few years but have developed strong, competitive weightlifting, volleyball, and basketball teams in that time. As of now, all the teams, both mens's and womens,' are only able to play in Iraq but there is a desire to play with teams from the region as well. A scheduled men's soccer game with Iranian Kurds was recently prevented by the Iranian government.

In our stops this morning we were asked again and again what we, as Americans, can do to help. I am beginning to see some of the problems that can arise when NGO's simply come to a place and start dumping funds and resources into a place. There seems to be an attitude among some people that we are just here to "fix" things.

Day 2

Today we came to Ranya and were welcomed by a large crowd of people. Everyone was very friendly. We did a round of ceremonial "official business." A park was dedicated to the Duluth-Rania Friendship Exchange, formal greetings between the citizens of Rania and our group were exchanged along with a letter from Mayor Ness of Duluth, a press conference was held. The amount of work put into everything really brought home the importance of this exchange but I noticed both at the press conference and the formal welocoming ceremony from Mayor Ali of Rania that there is a very definite push on this end to bring this to a level beyond cultural exchange. There were several questions about how Duluth might be able to help Rania in tangible ways.

The park is very nice and the entrance is adorned with two large emblems, one for Duluth and one for the city of Rania.

In the midst of all of the ceremonies we were invited to Mayor Ali's home for lunch. The amount of food was overwhelming. We were served traditional Kurdish food and everything was amazing.

One thing I have noticed is the relatively small role women seem to play in any official capacity. Our meetings today were all with groups of men with one or two women present.

We ate dinner at Hiwa's house and again everything was amazing. After dinner he and his sons performed several Kurdish songs for us.

We arrived early this morning after hours of flying and a ten-hour layover in Amman. We were met at the airport and driven into Sulaymaniyah. After a couple hours rest we went to a building that used to be one of Saddam's prisons but has now been converted into a museum. The large building was stormed in the 1991 Kurdish uprising and the exterior is pock-marked with bullet holes. The museum itself serves as a memorial to the thousands of Kurds who were imprisoned, tortured, and ethnically cleansed under Saddam's regime. In a dark basement, photos from the worst of the gas attacks adornd the concrete walls. A long passageway has been tiled with a kind of patternless mosaic of broken mirror shards that reaches from floor to cieling. Every shard of glass represents one of the 182,000 Kurds that was systematically murdered under the old regime. The cieling is lit with 5,000 small lights, one for each of the villages destroyed. The passageway itself goes on for a very long time, giving a clear visual represntation of the sheer number people killed.

After the museum, we were taken to Halabjah, one of the towns that was attacked with poison gas. There is a large memorial there with with the names of all 5,000 of the dead carved into a wall. There are also over a hundred photos of the aftermath of the attack. Much of what is there defies description but one of the things that I was very moved by was the extremely high porportion of women and young children killed in the attack. It was clearly an act of terror carried out bythe state and perpetrated against its own citizens. The decision by an Iraqi court to label Saddam's campaign against the Kurds a genocide is well-founded.

Spring Delegation In Final Preperations

"It's now or never... " Reverberates the can do attitude of 3 individuals as they finalize their plans and discuss how to deal with riots, uprisings and the impending hot summer of Kurdistan. As they appear to be optimistic, the tickets are already bought and the calendar is set. The mood is eager in Raina, as they have been waiting to dedicate a new park In the Honor of this ongoing friendship exchange project. There is a fundraising letter with the group's bios; flying around cyber space and in allot of people's email in-boxes. if you 'd like to contribute your time, funds, or words of encouragement please let us know.