Struggling in Syria

I'm sorry not to have been blogging of late. Damascus is always a little overwhelming when one returns. The smog, the shawarma, and the slow moving machinery of the Syrian state takes its toll. A friend told me I'm starting to look a little gaunt, in an edgy writerly sort of way, she quickly added.

But so far I've been overwhelmed with hospitality. First by the Iranian embassy, which invited my friend Andrew, the American editor of Syria Today magazine, to dinner in celebration of the the 28th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, which falls on February 11th. It was such a surprisingly friendly evening, considering our two countries are on a collision course, possibly towards war, that I'll be writing a Time.com story as soon as possible. The embassy staff also seems to have invited us to Iran, though I'm not sure how sincere the offer was, considering it's very difficult for American journalists to get visas to Iran.

Then today, the head of the foreign media department at the Ministry of Information -- by whose grace I am able to report and write stories in this country -- invited me to go bird hunting with in northeast Syria someday in the near future when we can both take the day off. Not sure when that's going to be, because when he heard that I was teaching Western-style journalism to the staff of my friend Andrew's magazine, which is privately-owned, he asked me to come train the reporters at the state-run newspaper, Syria Times. I kindly refused the offer to sign a contract (it would be a more than a wee conflict of interest to be taking money from a country that I'm covering) but it could be interesting to give them a free lecture or two (and be more fodder for the blog.)

But the most meaningful invitation of all came yesterday evening, when I had dinner at the newly-rented home of a family of Iraqi friends who'd fled a death threat in Baghdad three weeks ago and are now a handfull of about a million Iraqi refugees who've escaped the violence of their country and are living in Syria. Again, I'll be writing more for you about that huge problem. But in the meantime I'm trying to figure out ways to help them. Syria is so overwhelmed with Iraqi refugees (one hears the Iraqi accent constantly in Damascus these days) that the government appears to be passing laws to make it more difficult to stay here longer than two weeks. One loophole in the laws is that children in attending school are allowed to stay along with their parents. But because Syrian public schools seem not to be letting many Iraqi kids enroll mid-year, I'm going to try to enroll my friend's teenage sister-in-law into a private school. I'm hoping that that my presence will help convince the administrators that she's a special, smart kid and they should bend the rules. We'll see if it works.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus