We are doing OK here. We are now moved into our new apartment. The girls are staying with us for the moment. It is cold tonight. We are going to have to find a way to keep ourselves warmer. I am almost afraid to come out from under the blankets at night. We act like refugees hid in our rooms with our doors closed barring any of the heat that emanates from our space heaters. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be warm again. I am sure I will long for these days when the summer heat comes.
The dude has a huge antenna on our rooftop now for internet service. He said it was working, but I still seem to be the only one sending email. I was sick for the past 2 1/2 days. I had the flu. Yet even with the flu I went to all the government agencies, moved into our apartment, arranged for three contracts to be investigated, bought furniture/appliances/bedding for the apartment, and outpaced out interpreter who complains allot about us working him to hard. At first I thought this may have something to do with a cultural difference and that we were expecting too much from him. I have been assured that is not the case. He is just lazy and I am stupid for doing so much. You would think people would learn to live in the happy medium.
We are living right behind a very nice restaurant. It is so cheap to eat there, and the food seems to agree with all of us. We may not do that much cooking on our own after all. Fortune seems to have blessed us. We have found a great older man who seems to have some sort of ties all around the city. The girls joke and call him the godfather, but I am not sure they are to far off. The good part is we have furnished out entire apartment through this guy for around $2,000. We then found an equally awesome guy for appliances. We have been blessed. We are not completely done with putting things in our apartment but we have outfitted in nice for around $3,500.00.
On the scholastic side of things, we just heard that The Girls are going to be hired by Salahadin. This was good news to them. We will see how this goes. Dr. Dawood was taken us to the site where he is first putting the American Development Center. They need $12,000 to complete building our offices and to furnish them. Then we need to fill the other two rooms with a language learning lab and a distance learning lab. They are building a huge monstrosity up on the hill that they call the Cultural Center. Dr. Dawood would like to dedicate one wing of this building to the Americans. He wants us to come up with ideas on what to put in there. I think he wants us to find ways to fund this as well.
The dude has his hands full right now just figuring out his place here again. He has had all of his projects put on hold or completely stopped. I think he has been worrying a lot about getting an internet single set up that he can use, and getting us out of the hotel into our apartment. I cannot wait on him to get things done as tomorrow is the weekend and we are planning on being on the road on Sunday morning.
Dohuk is a very interesting town. I can see myself living here for a long time. I see some land inside of the new university that is selling for $60,000 per lot. Just four years ago it was $1,000 to $5,000 per lot. Just past the new university there is land selling for the old prices. I may take some of my money from the house sale and invest it in property. The dude wants me to develop it in an American way and build American style homes one it. I think he is right, and that would get us more money in gross, but I am wondering if our time would not be better spent elsewhere and just take the profit on the land once the price goes up. We would just need to hold the land for a couple of years at the most, and then we would be able to sell it at a premium. It is not my desire to live in that area anyway.
I know you are looking for farm land, and I am not sure how that is going. I have not talked to anyone on that specifically, but James has mentioned it. I think you are only allowed to build one home on that land, and there are other restrictions as well.
One of the things that the dude and I are really looking into here is setting up a recycling/garbage collection center. I have been talking with the EPA about helping me find out more about setting up a waste collection facility. I am looking into environmentally friendly waste incinerators and recyclables processing. I want to see what all of the options are and then draw up a plan to present to the governor. When we see how much he will help we can start to negotiate with NGO’s and other funding agencies along with private investors to make this idea a reality. I think I would like to work with this system more then anything else. We can start small in Dohuk just collecting recyclables and shipping them to Turkey or China and grow into running all of the sanitation effort in the peaceful parts of Iraq. Who knows how far we can expand this
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