Ugh...Training

It’s been an exhausting past couple of days here in Sulamaniyah, and in theory – things should be calming down. However, I leave for R&R one week from tomorrow, so there is now so much to do and so many distractions. On Wednesday I held a training for the reporters from each of the three offices. Never having held any sort of training before, the idea of sitting with 3 conservative Arab men for 8 hours trying to convince them that I knew what I was talking about filled me with a certain level of dread. Originally the training was supposed to be conducted by both myself and Gigi (thus begins my use of pseudonyms), but insecurity lead to the cancellation of our first attempt, and with her being out of Iraq until the end of October, it made the most sense to hold it before I left on R&R.

Naturally I was preparing everything at the last minute, mainly because I couldn’t focus on which topics would be best to cover, and with my boss on an island off the coast of Madagascar, there wasn’t really anyone to ask. Despite my attempt at a good night’s sleep the night before the training, there was little I could do about the THREE power outages that occurred. Normally, power outages should not be a big deal if one is sleeping, but power outages in the office are accompanied by the extremely loud and constant beeping of the voltage regulator in the office downstairs. For some reason, everyone else here manages to sleep through it, but I wake up instantly. Fortunately the guard was alert that night and managed to turn the generator on before I got so frustrated I had to blindly make my way downstairs and outside to wake him up in order to turn it on.

I think for the most part the training went well, although there might have been some communication issues related to their more limited English and my inability to say anything in Arabic other than, “thank you,” “no problem,” “what’s up,” and “stapler.” My reporting trainees proved to be talkative enough though, and soon 5 PM came before I knew it and I had managed to get them to do the hard part of the upcoming monthly report in advance. While I can't say I particularly ENJOYED the experience, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting

On Thursday, I attended another training given by another co-worker and today I got up at 5 AM to watch the US Presidential debates. The BBC was kind enough to play it in its entirety, but I must say – their post-debate wrap-up with a former Bush speechwriter and a former Clinton aide was a bit like asking the candidates themselves how they felt they fared against one another. Despite the lack of independent punditry, I’m glad I actually managed to catch it, because I guess Iraq went back to Standard Time this morning, but no one is really sure. The debate still started 8 hours ahead of the East Coast, so I don’t get it. The staff from the south say it did, but then someone heard that it actually is supposed to change on Sunday. Other staff from Suli seem to concur that the time shifted today though, so we’re going with it.