The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

had decorated our door half-heartedly with colored paper and red ribbon in a sort of abstract collage in Christmas col- ors. We still had some ribbon left and I gave it to Zahra. Later that day I went to look at Zahra’s door to see what she had done with the ribbon. She had cut out squares of green and white paper to create a pile of gifts on her door and used the ribbon to decorate them. The paper gifts lay underneath a Christmas tree crafted from plastic pine boughs — God knew where she had found them in Iraq, where pine trees didn’t exist. Red balls — real Christmas decorations — hung from the tree’s branches. All of us were taking a bit of a breather from work. The election the previous week had gone well, with no major security issues and a high voter turnout. We had worked around the clock in the weeks leading up to the election, tracking the delivery of bal- lots to polling stations, following the training of monitors, and getting updates from the local police on secu- rity plans. Now that the election was over and we had sent our last report up to Baghdad, we were all relaxing a bit. A national government had been elect- ed, and the situation in Iraq would improve. Back at my office, my office mates Bill and Parker were looking skeptically at our door. “This is pathetic. Where’s our Christmas spirit?” Parker criticized. His eyes darted around the room, looking for any- thing that could spruce up our door. “This door sucks. Zahra is putting us all to shame. And she’s not even Christian,” Bill said. Parker grabbed a stack of white paper coffee filters from our cabinet coffee station and started ruffling them up. They fluffed out into a sort of corsage, and he tacked it to the mid- dle of our door. It did look sort of festive, like a small pom- pom. “We need something else,” Bill said. “We need a Christ- mas tree or something.” “All we have is this potted palm,” I said. There was a three-foot-high droopy palm tree in our office. I suspected the palm looked sick because people kept emptying their coffee cups into its soil. “That’ll work.” Bill grabbed some paper stars and began taping them to the palm’s leaves. Parker grabbed a hideous plastic flower arrangement from the office, pulled some plas- tic roses out of it, and began stabbing the stems into the palm’s dirt like fertilizer sticks. The whole thing looked awful, but at least we had made an effort. The next day I went by Zahra’s office to go over the day’s scheduling. The door-judging would take place in three days, so everyone had pretty much finished with decorating. When I got to her door, I stopped to take in the scene. Zahra was carefully tacking up blinking colored lights to outline the Christmas tree on her door. Zahra had a degree in civil engi- neering, so I was not surprised to see that she had found a way to attach several extension cords to the lights and plug them in down the hallway. “Zahra, you’re going to win this contest anyway. You can take it easy now.” “Do you really think I could win?” Zahra asked. In her eyes, I saw her worry was genuine. I was taking it for granted that the best door would win. The way Zahra looked at it, the door judges were all American male con- tractors — and in her experience, win- ners of contests were the friends and relatives of the judges. No one ever won anything because they deserved to win. I could tell she wanted to believe the door-decorating contest would be a meritocracy. She just was not convinced. Friday and Saturday were days off for the Iraqi employees. For us Americans, work continued. Days blended into each other so much that I had started keeping track of what day it was by what was served in the dining facility. Friday was steak night. As tasty as the grilled beef was, I couldn’t help but think how good some baba ghanouj would be. After three months in Iraq, the only Middle Eastern food I had eaten were the dates and sweets Zahra brought in from the outside. She started feeding me bits of flaky, pistachio-filled baklava with pity in her eyes after our first lunch together in the dining facility. Sometime the food served in the dining hall, ham hocks that looked like leather dog toys, seemed more foreign to me than the rice pilaf and yogurt sauces I knew were being eaten by Iraqi families outside the compound walls. Some nights, I could swear I could smell roasted lamb wafting up over the walls. The Saturday before Christmas, a chilly day, began as always with the call to prayer. It came from a mosque locat- ed immediately outside our compound walls, a mosque I never saw once during my whole year in Iraq. But today, inside the compound walls, it was Christmas. The contrac- N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65 After three months in Iraq, the only Middle Eastern food I had eaten were the dates and sweets Zahra brought in from the outside.