From an Imam from Radio:

1. Don´t hire attractive women as your cleaner in your house, because then the man of the house will have sex with her. You should hire old women only or very unattractive women. Or just ask yourself why cannot your wife clean and make food? What is she good for?

2. Don´t watch movies, even war movies have love stories in them and that will make your wife want to have sex with others.

3. If the husband asks for sex then the wife must obey him, otherwise the angels would condemn her. (I am asking myself, do angels watch everyone having sex? I didn’t knew that.) If she is on the camel she has to come down, if she is working she has to leave and give pleasure to her husband

4. People shouldn’t talk bad about wanting to marry a second wife. It´s Gods will for men to marry a second wife. The women are ignorant and too emotional, the man wants to marry a second women because of sex, he doesn’t to unfaithful and his needs are important so instead of being unfaithful, he can get himself a second wife. Like the prophet that married his second wife but always respected his first.

5. If a man knows his wife is unfaithful and doesn’t “do anything about it” he will not be let in paradise.

6. A man should have sex with his wife at least 4 times a week otherwise is wife will be unfaithful.

I am not against any religion but damn it we should have much much more arts, music and sports in Kurdish school. I don’t know how much it has changed but the standards of arts, music and sports in school is not the best. It’s a major part of a child’s social communication building, part of exploring his or her creativity.

It’s not just me, not because I am from this city, many Americans, Europeans, Lebanese has made this city their permanent home. An American teacher got a job at a school here in Hawler, later she decided to quit her job and start a new job as a manager for a popular restaurant.

The city is growing and evolving for every day, things are being done in a right way more often than before. It feels like that way. If we select the correct path from the beginning we cannot fail in the future.

What matters is that Kurds take on as much as seats on the Iraqi Parliament so we have a voice.Voting is very important.

I find it a bit troubling, the way we do business here in Kurdistan. Too much talk and so little action. Major companies that make millions of dollars per month has little interest in buying commercial or branding or marketing. No matter how much we explain the importance of branding for any major company I find myself looking a bit silly. As long as they make the millions roll in they have no ambition to find out more about marketing.

The are a few major companies that actually know more about marketing, PR and branding then any other company, one of them is Asia Cell, the rival mobile telecom company that has recently launched a major campaign to promote their “Youth Line”. You can also find them on the Internet (Google, Youtube, Facebook etc).

This is how our most common conversation goes with general directors or owners

Me: So, what is your company marketing strategy?

Owner: What do you mean by marketing?

Me: Well, if you have a product and you want to introduce it to your target group then you need a strategy for marketing your product, right?

Owner: What is target group?

Me: Well, your product is good but you cannot sell it to everyone and every where? Right? So you have to find a group, and target that group to get he best return on investment.

Owner: What is best return on investment?

Me: Well, let us say you have a 10 000 USD budget for introducing your product to a specific group of people that we call the target group and ..{taking a deep breath}… just forget about it .. do you want to buy some TV ads or not?

Well thats about it. Buy or not to buy. It’s frustrating and sometimes I feel powerless to convince these newly millionaires and “biznisman” to think marketing.

Some examples of metaphors I have had

1. Jalal is a mechanic, he is trying to explain to me how he sees marrige and life.

Life is like car, it gets broken, we fix it, sometimes we get a bump there, sometimes we need to change the air filter…

2. Dana is IT engineer and he gives his take on God

God is like a CPU, he is the main and most important of the motherboard, he deals with these zeros and ones. We are all in one big hard-drive Amer.The RAM is there for us, if we are good, we can get better performance and get more RAM so we don’t get OS crash….

For business it gets even more ridiculous. I am a man of common sense and logic. If we don’t discuss the real issue, digits, reports and prospects then we are in big trouble.

Today I heard yet an other wired story. A friend of my father, told him that he had a longtime kidny problem. He was told by friends about this “peywai lezer” translation, laserman, that he could cure sick people only by looking at them. There is a catch, he dose not cure diabetics and he costs about 4 dollars also you need 4 visits to get the full treatment.

What strikes me most, is that the man is an building engineer. His friend with him also went to Laserman to cure his back pain.

This hustler uses also religion for his source of “power”. If religion is labeled on this obviously hustle, it’s generally accepted. His power comes from his goodness and his strong faith hence people standing in line to meet him.

Call med crazy but I am guessing that he watched Superman, saw Superman blowing things up with laser from his eyes so he looked at his wife and said

- Women, I just got a great idea.

This is how it went

Unkown: I am getting fat, I eat soo much today. You know, I have eaten 3 times today alone!

Me: My friend, you should eat less then.

Unkown: But I love food. (He didn’t look overweight, just slightly a bigger belly).

Me: But you should take care of yourself.

Unkown: I know, but I am getting fat, I am fat, I love food.

It was so wired to be approached by a total stranger, that just eat food, went to mosque, came out, saw me and just started to talk about a some worthy personal issue. I guess it’s a cultural thing here, it’s common when we talk about an issue someone passing by, gives a quick comment or just stops to hear our discussion.

Wired or charming, it’s up to you to decide!