(electronic pop music)
- Hey everyone.
I'm Adam Lucente, and I am an english language teacher
in Irbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
I teach for Amideast which is an American NGO.
And the name is kind of a conglomeration of the words
American and Middle East.
What is the Kurdistan region of Iraq or the KRI
as the cool kids call it.
It's basically an autonomous part of Iraq.
It's the only such autonomous region in the country.
And it's predominately Kurdish people and Kurdish speaking.
The government here, the autonomous government known as
the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, controls
many of its own borders, has its own military called the
Peshmerga which means those who face death, and it has
its own prime minister and parliament.
However, it is still part of Iraq and it's under
Iraqi sovereignty, it uses the Iraqi dinar like the
rest of the country, and it also uses the US dollar
like the rest of the country as well.
We'll talk more about the currency later.
Kurdish is the main language, as I said, however Arabic
is also spoken especially people from other parts of Iraq
outside of the Kurdish region who come to live here.
And English, there's a lot of demand for English, it's
increasing, you'll find young people who speak it,
but not a ton of people in general will speak good English.
And now let's talk a bit about rent
and take a look at my room.
(traffic noises)
Alright, so as you can see from the pics
I am in the Ankawa neighborhood.
It's technically outside of Irbil,
but Irbil is just a short walk away.
It's a predominantly Assyrian Christian neighborhood.
A lot of them fled north of Mosul
when ISIS came and came to here.
They speak Aramaic, which is what Jesus spoke
but that's similar to Arabic and so it's mostly kind of
the main language in this neighborhood is Arabic.
I speak Arabic, I don't speak Kurdish very well,
so that's the main reason I chose to live here.
A lot of westerners and teachers will live here.
It's a bit culturally easier,
the dress is a little more relaxed,
there's lots of bars and liquor stores.
The US Consulate is just a short walk away.
A lot of other consulates are here too and also there's
many ATMs, you know dry cleaning, soap, for things like
this a lot of westerners choose to live here.
(wind and traffic)
Alright, I'm back from classes,
and I wanted to talk for a minute about the students
in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
I find them very motivated, there's a huge desire
to learn English here, one to get out of the country,
but also to develop themselves professionally
within the country.
There's a lot of development money coming into Iraq
for reconstruction because of all the war
and this leads to some interesting projects.
For example, right now I'm working with a group of
students who came from Mosul.
They left in 2014 when ISIS came to power
and now they're mostly living in displaced people's
camps north of Irbil.
They're very motivated, they've had some terrible
experiences, they've had some interesting experiences
and in general, I find the students here to be very diverse
not just linguistically, but culturally, thought wise,
how they view things, how they view all that's happened
in the country, but in general the thing uniting
all my students is they're very, very motivated
to learn English and that's a good environment to work in.
(synth-pop music)