Hectic day

Yesterday middle in the ongoing work something new showed up. We had to travel immediately to another city for wome work. You have to be flexible and handle to work with many things obviously here. Well said and done we had a hectic day, like usual. We inspected the new premises for one of "the projects". Seemed great! We also parallell interviewed potential staff that has to be organized as fast as possible.

In the chaos we managed all this. A friend talked once about a project leader education focusing towards chaos (project) leading. It came in my mind today.


This is the premises for what i described above. It is under work and will be finished in 2-3 weeks.

A picture from last week:

Have a Kirkuk Pepsi (Written with arabic letters).

Action

Yesterday I was working on fixing the main transmitter in Kirkuk with the new oscilloscope. It showed out to be a worthy instrument. In the middle of everything I got a phone call. I had to finish my ongoing work as fast as possible and leave before sunset. It was urgent work in Hewler. The big projects I have mentioned briefly before had to be specified NOW so that I can travel in short time to Dubai or where ever to buy all the equipments.

Now sitting at office again 22.30 Hewler time and it is time to go home soon.

Travel Station

Yesterday I traveled to Slemani to pick up an oscilloscope. It is a necessary measurements instrument that I have been without for a time.

There are two garages in Kirkuk where you travel from, either by bus or taxi. One is for travels to Slemani and the other for travel to Hewler, the later is in Rahimawa quarter. I melt in among the citizens pretty good as long as I do not talk. So I went to the Slemani garage to take a cab.

You have to be careful and be ware for the signs, risk for abductions are very high. What the signs are you will learn with time and hopefully not too late. I sat down in the backseat of a cab to Slemani. The guy beside me had a Kalashnikov on the floor. I also saw that he was wearing “klash” which is Kurdish folklore shoes. I was feeling pretty safe then because he were probably Peshmerga in civil clothes, along with his colleagues. They went off at a Peshmerga headquarter when we were close to Slemani.

Last time I traveled from Kirkuk I traveled from Rahimawa station. There were no cabs so we had to wait for a half hour but at last we got one. One week ago on the 17:th February the Rahimawa travel station were blown up by terrorists. Approximated 12 persons were killed in the blast and 86 persons were injured. We passed by the Rahimawa travel center and it was not much left of it. It was a Kurdish area that in many peoples mind was the last place for a terrorist bomb.

Rahimawa travel station a week after the explosion. On the corner there was a building that is now totally gone. This was the crowdy central and there were cars and busses all around the street. It is now desert empty lik many other parts of the city.


In Slemani I met up with some colleagues for some late evening work. I traveled back to Kirkuk the day after early in the morning and the colleagues were going to another place.


This is the monument in honour of "Mama Risha". He was a legendary Peshmerga originating from Kirkuk.


This blog should have been posted yesterday but was delayed because of terrible internet in this area.

Orange sellout

This day was an ordinary offiice day. In the afternoon we traveled to Kirkuk.
There were two accidents on the way. First a truck had rammed a pickup. Everybody were busy picking up oranges. They also seem to miss the front tires, maybe they are in the pickup.






Later on we confronted an American road block. Always when the Americans are on the road it is blocked for all traffic. You have to stay one hundred meters behind them or even more far away, or it can go like this if not worse.









A half car can be seen on this picture. It was smashed accidently obviously and Iraqi Kurdish security forces are there along with the Americans that smashed the car. It seems like they want to justify the accident.

Later on we stayed at a popular restaurant road restaurant to rest and eat on our way. Just as we sat down to eat 50-60 man Kurdish security force entered the restaurant with a staff from some department. We did not get much rest but a pretty good security and great food.

Baba Gurgur in daylight

In Kirkuk there are security forces patrolling all the streets and carefully inspecting the streets and anything that can be an object of terrorism. The streets are less crowded and you do not see many parked cars because it is illegal beside in special garages. You wish that this had been done before the last 2 weeks 26 bombs, where as 6 bombs during the last days.

Qaladize trip

This morning was one of those pretty early ones. I woke up around 6 o clock, to begin our trip to Qaladize. We are going there to establish a culture centre with a mobile cinema and a library. This is the last in a series of travels before the decision.

The nature is beautiful on the way to there, as in many other parts on Kurdistan. Here are some nice views for you.

Rayne is the city you pass on the way. The name of the mountain in the background is "Kewa Rash", Black Mountain.

This is "Darband" which means and aims at the mountain pass between Ranye and Qaladize. In the background you see a small part of tremendous Qendil. I will publish pictures when i travel through the mountain there next time.

During an earlier travel in 2006 it was storm and the bridge between Ranye and Qaladize collapsed. An old man drowned when he fell in the water and was flushed away by the massive water flow. We got stuck at the wrong side of the bridge. The Peshmergas had total control of the situation and immediately several trucks, excavators and some sort of emergency manpower fixed a temporarily transition.

The people were though not patient though so some got the chance to cross before the work began. and before more of the bridge was flushed away.

This is outside Qaladize with Qendil in the background. Qaladize is surrounded with incredible mountains all around. One time we were sitting in a cafeteria eating breakfast, tea and yogurt. A older Kurdish man was sitting there also. He was upset and was swearing to the government. Suddenly he took out a bit of Kurdish cheese out of his pocket in his Kurdish sharwal [pants]. He said we have made it our self. We had of course no choice other that enjoying it. It was very tasty actually.

On the way back the trial was on radio. It is a big collective event here in Iraq. Everybody follow it either in TV or in radio translated by Radio Nawa in Kurdistan. They described the scenarios in Nugret Sheman in the Arabic parts of Iraq, the mass killing of Kurds, during the trial against chemical Ali. Eye witnesses described in detail these scenarios; how people were thrown out from the forts in the area. It was all Kurds since they had Kurdish cloths. It was women, men and children. They were wounded from torture or had shot wounds. They described in detail how hungry children walked around confusingly and laid down because they had been starved. After some time they were dead and after some day dogs started to eat on the bodies. Hundreds of people were killed in this area each day. They also described photo and video evidence from the excavations.

CBS 60 minutes - Kurdistan strives for autonomy

An interesting report was sent on CBS 60 minutes – Kurdistan strives for autonomy.

A fact is stated again, no American soldier has yet died in Kurdistan and the reporter is walking freely in Hawler and is feeling pretty secure. They also mention that Kurdistan has a 170 000 men Peshmerga army...

CBS 60 minutes - Kurdistan strives for autonomy

The secure situation is a fact. We had a Swedish colleague here until some days ago that worked here. He was moving around by him self without any problem and also talked a little bit Kurdish. That was necessary since the English language is not the second language yet in practice.

Hawler walk

It is time for some office work again at the "capital". This time i am working with the specification of the projects that i mentioned in my first blog post. It is going to be nice to see this in reality.

As usual there is a lot of drama at the office, especially in this part of world. I am good at keeping away from it, at least for this time. Later in the afternoon i had to run some errands in down town. You always see something special where ever you go here.

Run Forest run...

This young man was helping his mother and his smaller sisters to take some supply home.

Super fish that can be ordered barbecued. Really nice!

Well we ended up in a well known antique shop at the "Education road". I have walked pass this store lot of times when visiting the neighbour music equipment shop.

To the left you can see the antique radio and studio equipment section that caught my attention.

The store assistant show off with a British Sterling sub machine gun here. The weapon was the only objects he had any information about.

Back to work!

Long trip

I have been far away from internet for a couple of days so I have not been able to update the blog. It is often I travel to work and get isolated totally from the outside world because of different reasons. Mostly it is because of bad internet.

Some news from last time is that i have moved to an apartment. It is rare that people live in apartment in this country. Today I supervised an English course at the university. The topic of the lesson was house and home. It showed out that nobody lived in apartment and it was only one guy who had visited an apartment so he could tell everybody else how it was, in English of course. This was however an advance in the beginner course in English that started 1,5 months ago and obviously had resulted in that the students could understand and talk in English.

Summarize from this trip:
The second radio station has now a functioning computer system. Test broadcasts has started with a temporarily staff that has been gone through the basic level education. They have produced a set of jingles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle) and can handle the complete studio and broadcast system. There is 2-3 hours of mains electricity in this city but 14 hours of broadcasting each day is fulfilled. However there are some justifications needed to be done for a satisfying electricity system.

The staff from the radio station visited the first radio station as a part of the education and for establishing a network and cooperation between the two radio stations. The meeting was successful and a set of jingles for both of the radio stations and a live radio quiz program, which is very popular, were produced.

There are many cooperation problems here because of the mentality of the people here, which is fully understandable after what they have been through. This is one of many problems that have to be solved for success in work here.

But here we go again with a new series of pictures from my trip since last time:

This picture is however from two weeks ago from the Shaqlawa area. The transportation was problematic because there is nothing called winter tires for cars.

This is Shaqlawa town. It is famous for being a touristy city. I bought delicate dried fruits and ate the best barbecued liver ever here.

This is Sefin mountain also in the Shaqlawa area.

This job was also done amongst others:

No I did not accidentally kill someone. And if I did I would not post it here. This will be the earth system for the radio mast and the electricity in the radio station.

The source?

This is Baba Gurgur. The fire is called the "Eternal fire" and has been there since time immemorial and it is still there today.




This mosque and the church are situated side by side with a street in between. The people in this city are living in peace, at least in this ethnic part of the city. In the heaven above the mosque there is a reminders of the actual situation here.

Waterfall

These pictures are from two last travels to Choman which is a very beautiful city in Kurdistan. We installed a mobile cinema there.





This mellow waterfall turned into a monstrous one with only a couple of days rain. There will never be any problem with water in Kurdistan. That is for sure.

Later in the day i will travel to some more sensitive areas to install the computer system in one of the radio stations.

First post

Today was a historical day! It was decided to approve a huge project in the aspect of knowledge infrastructure project for strengthening the civil society. My part of this will be technichal in aspects of media and technology where electronics is a main subject. I will tell you more about this later on.

I am still working at the office. And it seems like it has resulted in progress. Some planning has also been laid down for the coming future.

Later in the day I have supervised a part of a ongoing language project. The language project it self is in the starting phase. Its main purpose is to have the English language as the second language in Kurdistan.

Nice to have you here