My backpack no longer has twenty-three textbooks in it, but my heart is full.

When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. Acts 18:5-7

I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. -Toyohiko Kagawa

I believe the merciful God regards the lives and tempers of men more than their ideas. I believe He respects the goodness of the heart, rather than the clearness of the head. John Wesley

A few of us went to the Teachers’ Club last night to watch the France Belgium semi-final game. And pretty much I have managed to spend nearly a month in Erbil, considered one of the safest cities in the Middle East, home base of 6000 NGOs serving in the Middle East, without spying nary another Westerner outside of our clump of eight. Nine, if you count one-and-a-half-year-old Leo. But I did find a couple hundred of them bunched under the oleander bushes and misters of the Teachers’ Club, sipping beers and smoking hookah pipes.

A what a bunch they are, lean and dusty and bone-dead weary, speaking a jabber of languages, certainly not following the lunch-around-the-table rule at Rancho La Argentina, that you had to finish the sentence in the same language you started it in.

And they too are full of stories, of strapping smashed Syrian bodies onto burro backs and sending them up over the craggy mountains to distant operating rooms set up under flapping tents just over the Israeli border. Of bumping down dirt roads to interview villagers on the personal impact of water catchment basins installed two years ago. Or juggling the legal documentation for a camp of 12,000 internally displaced peoples not five miles from where we watch Belgium almost score, shot after shot. It’s not just Westerners serving. This afternoon I hung out with two young and lean Assyrian Catholic seminary graduates in their last year before ordination as priests. Sipping a little tea before they head back to Qaraqosh, where for more than two years, Isis jihadists tried to erase any evidence of Christianity from what used to be the largest Christian city in Iraq.

The nurses were happy to hear of our solution to the hot and cold water issue. If one turns off the hot water tank, since it is insulated and hidden somewhere in the bowels of the apartment near the squatty toilet, it will become coolish water, and the cold water stored in huge tanks on the roof is plenty burn-your-fingers hot. Now, because the fixtures were made in Turkey, for some reason red means cold, and blue means hot, so then your brain has to think the opposite of the opposite, and everything is normal.

680,000 Iraqis live in camps. 470,000 continue to live in critical shelter arrangements including unfinished or abandoned buildings, schools and religious buildings. And this is just Iraq, not Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Yemen. Turkey and Greece too.

Ah, the paperwork. A bulk of the weariness is from hunching over computer screens, scrolling through Excel files, cutting and pasting 4,800 cell phone numbers for the government official monitoring her project, and meeting for the ninth time with the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq to get everything in order for a one-year visa. 

Yesterday one of our team was doing a friendly chat with a new teacher during the 10:15 AM crackers and coffee break. She was from Mosel, and because she looks fourteen-year-old dripping wet even though she has a college degree in English office management, she was asked about her parents, had they returned to their home?

My parents were both killed.

More that 40,000 civilians were killed in the battle to retake Mosul from Isis, by both Iraqi ground forces as well as air strikes.

One of our teachers fought with the Peshmerga for six years.

And yesterday before I headed down the now familiar back streets of Ankawa, I finished reading through the massive six-week transdisciplinary units loaded up onto managebac, as unwieldy website as I have ever faced in all my years in the education world. And worked through three lesson plans each on the new, ahem, “simplified” lesson plan format I designed for them. And gave one last polishing to each of the formal assessments that I must review today and submit to the admin., struggling to fill them with helpful and specific feedback rather than just being a blah, blah, blah sheet, theoretically modeling what I have been teaching this month: formative and summative assessment.

Although, at the end of yesterday I modeled Ability to Reflect on Personal Teaching Practice, filling the board with all of our verbiage:  teaching to the main idea, scaffolding, project-based learning, differentiation, et al. before handing out sheets for each student to fill out: Two strengths, one area for growth, and the lady I just spent literally over an hour with her one-on-one going over her fourth grade Celebrations Around the World lesson plan, wrote down as her Area for Continued Growth, “Use more videos.” Oh well. The baton has been passed.

Because we have already planned our final group activity moment, the tag-you’re-it moment, passing-of-the-baton theoretically-celebratory moment, to a hopefully encouraged and empowered school community.

One last Lord’s Prayer as we stand in circle beginning class, hands lifted up.

One last stroll past the corner construction site, nodding to the sweaty men pouring cement.

One last trek through the air-conditioned guard station of MarQadarkh, “Hallo, Hallo, Hallo.”

I probably still have quite a few more eyes-shut mad dashes across Two Sides Avenue, trusting

​my life to ​

the rhythm of alert taxi cab drivers.

​And Laura and I are going to dinner one more time with Alan Wale Karim's family. And Wale will be there. Who can make this up?​

But Charity is already packing, giving me all of the exotic cooking spices for making biryani rice from her friend, thinking that I am much more likely to use them.

Laura just read a hilarious text from her husband, detailing the endless back-and-forth between the Apple Store and the AT&T representatives trying to fix his phone.

Home again, home again.

First world problems.

Another echoing of Samwise Gamgee’s closing words, “Well, I’m back.”

And may I go about doing good, up and down the equally pot-holed streets of Tucson, and not just settle back into a routine of going about.

Rasha told me today that she would never forget me. That I am more Iraqi than even she, because I understand Middle Eastern hospitality, welcoming others into my heart.

May it be so.