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US Scholar: Kurdistan's Salahuddin
University was a disappointment "It's the Baathist
system,"
21.3.2008
By Borzou Daragahi in Erbil, Kurdistan region
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March 21, 2008
Kurdistan region 'Iraq'
You know the story. A Middle Eastern man marries an
American woman. They have a daughter, the marriage
falls apart and he swipes the kid and takes her back
to the old country.
But scholar Denise Natali, 44, adds a new twist to
the story. She married a man from the Middle East.
They moved to Paris, but it's she who brought her
7-year-old daughter to the region,www.ekurd.net
to pursue a job at the
newly founded University of Kurdistan-Hawler in the
northern Iraqi city of Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdistan's
capital.
Her husband, a successful Paris restaurateur and an
ethnic Kurd from Turkey, is packing up his business
and following his wife back to the Middle East,
albeit skeptically. |
Scholar Denise Natali took her seven-year-old
daughter from Paris to Iraqi Kurdistan to pursue a
teaching gig. Credit: Borzou Daragahi |
The pair pulled their daughter Haileen out of her
Paris Montessori school and placed her in a
Lebanese-run private school just set up here.
"My friends say coming here is professional
suicide," Natali says of her decision to spend time
teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan. "They say, 'You need to
come back to the U.S. and teach at a real
university.' But I think this is a research gold
mine."
Natali is a chatty New Jersey native who received
advanced degrees in social sciences from Columbia
University and the University of Pennsylvania. She
began traveling to the Kurdish region soon after the
1991 Gulf War,www.ekurd.net
first as an employee of
the U.S. government and later as an academic
researcher.
She moved here for real in 2005, teaching at the
Salahuddin University, which she found to be a
disappointment. "It's the Baathist system," she said
of the school. "It's a security platform for the
Kurdish political parties. It's a place for
socializing and a place to meet potential spouses."
When University of Kurdistan-Hawler opened in 2006,
with classes taught in English, she jumped at the
chance. "Here we're teaching the students to think
critically," she says.
Even though she's brought her daughter and dragged
her husband here, she says Iraqi Kurdistan is still
too unstable to build a life or make long-term
plans.
"We're not taking money from Paris and investing it
here," she says. "Are you kidding?"
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