Visiting the Team in Iraq

Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Episode 57

Learn more at www.ServantGroup.org/Iraq and email Hannah at hannah@servantgroup.org with questions, comments, or suggestions!

Here's a rough transcript!

Hannah: Welcome to Between Iraq and a Hard Place. I'm Hannah.

Colleen: And I'm Colleen. And we're here to tell you a little bit about life in Iraq.

Hannah: Woo hoo!

Colleen: Welcome back, Hannah.

Hannah: Thanks.

Colleen: You were gone a lot over the last few months.

Hannah: I was, not all of it relevant to this podcast, but some of it.

Colleen: But some of it was because you went to Iraq.

Hannah: I did.

Colleen: Which I will say is one of the most fun things to tell people randomly when they ask, Oh, how are your roommates? Oh, my roommate, Hannah, she's in Iraq. And they're like, What?!

Hannah: That's true. I went to a meeting of a different volunteer organization this week and people are like, We haven't seen you around. Where have you been? And I was like, Well, I was out of the country and they're like, Oh, where did you go? And I was like, I went to the Middle East. Oh, where in the Middle East? I went to Iraq, and they're all like, Oh, I have no follow up questions. Well, some of them had follow up questions, but.

Colleen: But yeah, it definitely is a little on the shocking end of things. Why, Hannah, would you ever go to such a country?

Hannah: I mean, aside from the previous, you know, 50-ish, how many episodes have we done?

Colleen: I don't remember.

Hannah: We're going to call it 50 because that feels right to me. This particular time it was to visit with our staff who are living in Iraq and, you know, some of the other folks that we work with in Iraq as well. So it wasn't just hanging out with Americans time. We also hung out with some British people and some Kurdish people.

Colleen: And some Kurdish people. Good, good.

Hannah: Yeah. And I think for both you and I, that was one of the things we really appreciated about Servant Group in our time living in Iraq was that, you know, the director at the time and someone else, at least one other person, usually came and visited us once or twice a year.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: And so it's kind of fun to get to be the person who does the visiting now. It feels powerful. I mean, it actually sometimes makes me really nervous to be like, okay, I got to, I got to be as good as Lisa was. It's a lot of pressure.

Colleen: Yeah. Yeah. I think it was key having people come and be able to see the changes that had happened over time and the ways we maybe grew as teachers or the ways our classes had grown or the changes in the schools, some of the changes that were good, in ways that we couldn't see because we're on the ground and like it happens incrementally. And then also just a better understanding of what day to day life looks like and the challenges of the things that happen on a day to day life, whether that's acquiring water or, you know, using the right amount of electricity to not flip your breaker or all of the other things that we run into that don't always get communicated in a weekly phone call because they're just the detritus of life.

Hannah: Yeah. I can remember on probably one of the first trips that Dave and Lisa made feeling like, Oh, they're going to come and like sit in my classroom and watch me teach and I've never taught before, and they're going to be like super critical and like, it's going to be terrible.

Colleen: The judgment is going to come.

Hannah: Yeah. And it was 100% the opposite of that. And it was kind of interesting on this trip, our newest staff member, I think, kind of felt the same way about us coming to visit. We got a lot of text messages and emails ahead of time of like, So what are you expecting to do? Like