Home

The other day Ali, Z (my friend) and I were out celebrating my 24th birthday (I know my god THAT OLD :) ) and we were talking about home and were you think that is, and she said "sometimes I see home in the faces of some people here"; all three of us are not from this city and this place is really hard to get used to, regardless the facts that people here are very nice and hospitable and living here is easy and decent to a certain extent, well it is in the Iraqi sense, but I have not met one person who said " Oh I love this city", everyone is complaining and are searching other options. My friend is originally Iraqi and us Iraqis have this thing about our country no matter how far we go we always wish we can go back and in most cases we do come back, in fact my ex-boss once told me that he's never met people as passionate about their home towns as Baghdadis! now this is the man who has lived in at least five different places during his life so he must know what he's talking about, we love the everything hazardous, bad services, dusty, dirty, crowded, beautifully disastrous Baghdad, my friend have decided to move back to Iraq thinking wouldn't be great to actually give back to her own people rather than other? If she asked me before making this decision I would have said no it wouldn't and you shouldn't come back maybe because I have lived here my whole life and I can predict how things would turn out, all I can say is things didn't end very pretty for her and she most likely will be leaving the country very soon, the funny thing is knowing her she might come back if the opportunity presented itself. Bottom line is we never have enough of this place.

We all know the very famous saying " Home is where the heart is", I know where my heart is and it is in the very right place and I'm as happy as anyone can be, but I don't feel like I belong here, although my husband and I have everything we want at this stage of our lives but deep inside it feels like a temporary stage, a transitional period of our lives.

In Eat Pray Love, Lez's  friend tells her that in order to feel like you belong somewhere you need to have the same word as the place your at and that every city has it's word, Ali and I have agreed that Erbil will either have STUPIDITY or BORDOM and we’re neither stupid nor boring so maybe that's why we don't feel like we belong here! The question that I wish I can find the answer to is home a state of mind? or is it a place? If it's a place then we need to find our word and match it to a city, find out if it's easy to go to, if they give visas to Iraqis, apply for one and get over there as soon as possible odds are it is far away and we need to get a visa and that it's either extremely hard or impossible to go there so the easier solution is to either stop being so fussy about things or simply become stupid or boring and enjoy the wonders of the one and only Erbil after all it is the next Dubai!

Until we find out if Homeland is willing to accept us as refugees, think about this, what is your word?