Another Day in the Countryside

Last week i was visiting the countryside in Anbar, the birthplace of my father and grandfathers. It was my first time there since March 2005. I was invited to my cousin's wedding who he's 19 years old only. Many reasons forced me not go there to the countryside earlier and the most important reason that the whole Anbar governorate was dominated by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist armed groups who terrorized the local citizens there and excuted many of them. My other cousin told me that it was a knightmare for him when a bunch of gunmen attacked him in the middle of the road and forced him to stop and get out of his car. They took him blindfolded to their headquarter and began to interrogate him in a voilent way. He still has faint remarks of bruises and contusions. They were checking if he was a member of the Iraqi police or working as a spy for the Americans. After 5 hours of merciless interrogation, they released him and blindfolded him again and drove him to nowhere, where he freed himself and got back home dead exhausted and horrified.

Another reason I don't like to go there; most of Iraqi villages are pretty sexists. I find that very depressing. I detest sexism! *sighs*

Anyway, I had fun there in "Jezeera" village. I swam down the river although it was a bit windy. I also milked a cow by myself only and without any help from any other person. In fact, it was my 3rd time to milk a cow. The early two tries were done by an assistance of my aunt. :P

I had taken couple of photos and I'd like to show you some of them,

Here's my cow after doing the milking process! I let a cousin to shoot a vid but I forgot to take it later. :(

My uncle's garden! Here where I spent my days in that village. Too bad they didn't let us to play football. :((

Lovely nature, isn't it?!

Green Green Green! Green is the colour!


An ewe and her little baby sheep! Her other Little baby is shown below.

The little lamb to my father: "What the hell are you doing?!".

Notice that the black n white appears above is the twin of this black white-headed babysheep below. Weird!

My father is trying to fool the little lamb.

A view on the river Euphrates. Here where I usually swim whenever I visit the country.

You can see here, the GSM base-station tower (aka base-station antenna) that porvides coverage of mobile communication services for this rural area!
I forgot to mention that I was busy helping my other cousin, Omar, in his new house construction works. Here are some photos....


Here's Omar and he's pushing a cart full of debris. Thanks god, the weather was nice that day! We didn't get exhausted much at that sunny day.

Ok, guys! Let's take a break! Their house from inside! Except the one in the stripy green shirt on the left who is my brother. All of the rest are my cousins but from different uncles and aunts all from my father's side. They are 4 uncles and 3 aunties.

Kids! Those two little goblins didn't let us work in peace. They drove us mad and they didn't care about us whenever we yelled at them. At the contrary, they get more evil! My cousin, Omar, was spending the day chasing them. That was hilarious indeed.

Finally, I want to close this posting with this cute little girl pic, Dima! One of my cousin's daughter. Cute, isn't she?!