We begin.

“What are you trying to prove this time?” my father asked me, via skype, a couple of weeks before I returned to Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan. It was a good question and one that was not entirely without merit.

There comes a certain point, say, when you have finished all the schooling you think you need to do (two degrees are enough), and you’ve tried and failed to find employment in your own country on at least two occasions (both post-Master’s, which seems fairly ironic, and a little bit unfair), and you’re an internship expert because you’ve done so many, when you start to wonder if the path you set out on years ago, the path you were so sure was the way forward, is maybe not your path at all.

But I didn’t come to Kurdistan this time to prove anything to anyone else or myself. I came back because I was sure this was the place I was supposed to be. And I hadn’t felt that way about any place in a very long time. Every choice I’ve made in the last six or eight years has been because I came across an opportunity I did not expect and that I couldn’t pass up. Nothing was as satisfying as buying a return ticket from Sulaymaniyah to Winnipeg earlier this year. I wasn’t starting from scratch again, I had a place, and it was here, in Suli.

The strange thing about making the shift from living in post-conflict zones to living in, technically, a conflict zone is how once you’re there, conflict still doesn’t quite seem like a tangible thing. Yesterday I watched the full minute of footage from inside Canada’s Parliament, of the shots that rang out again and again and again as the camera only jumped once. When I hear gunfire in Suli, I listen with a sort of detached assumption that someone is celebrating something (it’s a thing you do when you’re excited here). But for that minute as I watched YouTube in the dark, I was overcome by a deep sense of dread and nausea. It’s not supposed to happen, there.

Our expectations of what to be afraid of and of what to let go change when we live in unfamiliar places. But these places, no matter how unfamiliar, are no less ‘real’. It’s easy to feel like it’s not your real place or your real world, that you can remain untouched by the dangers or violence that touch that place. Or that your actions in that place won’t have an effect on the people who surround you there.

I still want Suli to be my place, but it’s different now then before, before when there was stability and a salary and a job. Now there are different stories to be told, and I hope that I can keep at it long enough to tell the ones I want to.

James, what’s the biggest misconception about where you are, now?