The Lady at the Airport

I mentioned in my last post that I spent quite a while chatting up a lovely Kurdish woman at the Dubai airport. She is a perfect example of the openness and friendliness that I have found many Kurds to share.
Arriving at the airport much too early for my flight out, the counter wasn’t yet open for check-in. I wandered over to the sitting area and grabbed a seat. I could see I wasn’t the only one who’d arrived early, as several families and a lone woman were sitting, looking fairly bored in the early morning hours.
To my right was a family of three children, two niqqabi women, and presumably a husband (he turned up later). On my left was a solo woman traveler, looking tired and carting around an overflowing trolley. My guess was that she was returning home and was loaded down with gifts for everyone in her immediate and extended families, a common practice in the Middle East.
When she saw me eyeing her overloaded cart, she smiled and asked which flight I was on. When we discovered that we were on the same flight, we settled in for the long wait and companionably discussed where we were from, where we were coming from and going to, and comparing the flights that got us to Dubai.
It turns out that she is a Kurdish native and has been living in New Zealand for the last twenty years. A large portion of the Iraqi Kurdish population lives outside of Kurdistan as many people fled during the genocide during Saddam’s days of power. Since he has been removed from office, some Kurds have started returning to their homeland, but many still live abroad. There is a plethora of reasons why they are still abroad, though the most common seem to be because they have made new homes in their adopted countries, because business keeps them from moving back, or for some, because the memories are too painful. It turns out that Bessan* is still in New Zealand because of her husband’s job.

However, she visits as often as she can. She and her husband have two children already grown (and two more at home), and her eldest elected to move back to the home he was born in but was too small to remember when they left. Now Bessan has an excellent excuse to visit, and is hoping for the day when he and his wife have their first child, her first grandchild.
Though she comes when she can, it has been several years since she last saw Erbil. I was describing some of the changes that took place last year, and she was amazed and interested to hear how her home city had grown. Living in New Zealand makes a trip to Iraq no easy feat. First she has to jump down to Australia, then endure the fifteen hour plane ride to Dubai, and arriving at three in the morning means waiting around the airport for eight hours for the charter to Iraq. By the time I caught up with her, she hadn’t slept for two days but had a smile on her face and more energy than I could muster. It could be that she was excited to see her family, but I think it was the nature that seems so common to the Kurdish people- always ready with a smile, friendly at the drop of a hat and hospitable to a fault.
By the time we had checked in, wandered through immigration and duty free and sat down at the gate, she had already invited me to her son’s house for tea. And to come stay with her in New Zealand on my next vacation from school. Now, when traveling, it’s common to get invitations to visit people in their home countries, but neither party actually expects the offer to be taken up. If it is, great, and the visitor has a place to stay. But if you don’t ever hear from them again, that’s all right, too. This casual attitude is not common with the Kurdish people, and I certainly didn’t feel it with her. I could feel an underlying sincerity in her words that are missing from most invitations, and so now I feel the need to make an extra effort to visit her in New Zealand. Oh darn.
On the surface, our conversation and time together could seem like any transit relationship, people I refer to as “plane friends”. But with Bessan, as with most Kurds I know, there was an undercurrent of depth. Our conversation may or may not turn out to be more than a way to while away the hours until our flight left. But at the very least, it was a few hours spent making a heartfelt connection.

*Name has been changed.