The Start of an Academic Year in Kurdistan

The Start of an Academic Year in Kurdistan, 

Students hanging out in the college yard before class starts

As you walk through the bazaars and along the streets here in Kurdistan, you will see parents with their kids, busy buying school supplies, sewing school uniforms, and getting ready to have whatever it takes for a successful academic year. College students are also busy buying new clothes, thinking of how they should dress and what to expect out of their courses this year. As for myself, I am a lecturer and being brought up in America, other things are of bigger concern to me. I am worried more about the expectations students have of me. I am worried about the first day. What should I expect? I called every friend I have to explain my worries about the first day of teaching. Will they understand my English, I asked? Will we have a nice professor-student relationship? Will they respect my class rules and regulations?

Afternoon traffic in the Duhok city

The first thing I put together was my course syllabus. “Please try to make it as simple as possible for students to understand, as we are all new to this whole syllabus idea,” says the department head. I was too thrilled that he at least let me hand the students a copy of the syllabus. They usually don't hand free copies of anything to students due to the financial issues that all colleges face here in Kurdistan.

I am teaching second year pharmacy students and from what I understand, their English is very limited. This fact has worried me a lot, considering that my Kurdish is not so good and I don't speak Arabic. My class is rather diverse; Kurds (Bahdinans and Suranis), Arabs from other parts of Iraq, Caledonians, Yazidi, etc. If I try to explain a matter in Kurdish, the Arab students will have a hard time understanding because they don't understand Kurdish (or English, for that matter).

For the first day of class, I wore a suit. “Helene is going to a job interview,” I heard my flat-mate say with a sarcastic tone. “No! I am not going to a job interview,” I snapped back, “you simply don’t understand. This is my very first day of teaching and it is here in Kurdistan. I want to be at my best.”

I walked into the class 30 minutes early with 15 copies of the course syllabi (though I asked for 30 copies). “Please have every two student share a copy of a syllabus, as we can't afford to make 30 copies for you.” I was also under the impression that only 10-15 students were going to show up out of 29 students (the number of students that I was told I would have). “In Kurdistan, students don't take the first two weeks of classes seriously, hence you will have a low attendance rate,” I was told.

I passed the attendance sheet and realized I had 24 students show up, all dressed and ready for the course to begin. They communicated in Kurdish and English with me and my replies were in English.

I handed out the course syllabi and explained that I didn't have enough copies, hence I expected every two students share a copy. Then I introduced myself and we went over the course syllabus. While walking around to explain the course rules and regulations, I was surprised to see how focused the students were and how they were underlining the points I emphasized.

I explained the point of having a syllabus and how important it is to follow it. I explained the importance of attendance and class participation. Of course, students are always curious to know what exams are going to be like. I explained that nothing would be memory-based in my class. My questions would be all patient case-, application-, and thinking-based. I also stated that when explaining anything in my class, I would try to relate it to their interaction with their patient as if they were a pharmacist.

In Kurdistan, and through so many interactions I have had with professors, students, patients and individuals that I have randomly met, I’ve learned that the curriculum here in the region is not student/patient centered. Professors teach the course based on their specialty, not what is the most applicable to the subject, which is pharmacy, in our case. For example, I was told that a professor fought to have two semesters of physical pharmacy instead of one because he is a physical pharmacist. How relevant is physical pharmacy to pharmacy? I am afraid to say, not so much.

I decided to dedicate the first class to talking about pharmaceutical care and what it means to be a pharmacist. How can you deliver the best service possible to the patient and how can this course, physical pharmacy, be utilized to deliver the best service possible to the patient? Our top priority, as pharmacists, is the patient. I ended the class with some points that the students would need to succeed in their profession of pharmacy. One of the vital factors was keeping up-to-date. I asked my students, “Do you understand what it means to keep up to date?” They did, but I was told that keeping up-to-date is a challenge in Kurdistan, considering that the college does not subscribe to any pharmaceutical journals, nor do we have access to any pharmacy-related databases.

I asked for students’ email addresses to send them some websites that are relevant to pharmacy. Out of the 29 students I have, only 7 of them have access to email. We are talking about second-year pharmacy students, the top students in the region, who don't utilize the internet or have an email account, and they are 20-23 years of age. If the pharmacy students aren't utilizing the Internet, what are all the other students in the other fields doing? Opening an email account turned into a homework assignment due by the next class. Since I mandated opening an email account, I expect the number of students with emails to increase.

This is the second week since classes have resumed, students still don't have textbooks and some of them have approached me about how worried they are.

In the middle of a lecture, we lost power and had to wait for the power to come back. They told me, “Doctora, dont worry, this usually happens. We always lose power but it comes back.” After class was over, a number of students approached me, asking about the role of the FDA and how drugs are discovered. Soon, I realized that these students have not had any introduction to drugs and drug discovery.

There are many other shortcomings here that I can mention, but all I can say is that I am a proud lecturer of 29 brilliant students who are disadvantaged….disadvantaged because they are eager to learn, but we don't have the facilities that could give them what they deserve to learn. Kurdistan is going through a drastic change in all aspects of society. The colleges of pharmacy are no exception. The colleges of pharmacy are now endorsing an American system, without having the suitable facilities to make this change possible. We, as a society, fail to plan before we endorse a system. This, itself, can damage the lives of many citizens and students. My students are overwhelmed; so am I. I try to fill them in, but there is only so much I can provide them with. Our students don't even know how to use the network service and we expect them to master in an American pharmacy curriculum like American students.

Change is a challenge, but not impossible. I am here because I know I'll face many challenges. This is my sixth week in Kurdistan. I had a bloody start with the administration and every concern I had was met by an even bigger problem. I must admit that as soon as I saw my students, all the problems I faced from the administration were put behind me. My students are the reason that I am here. It is like a mother going through the pain of labor and forgetting the pain she went through as soon as the baby is placed in her arms. I love Kurdistan and I love my students. And here, I’ll say it, if I don't handle the mindset of my people, who will?

This is *NOT* the other Iraq, this is Kurdistan
This is the beautiful and colorful city of Duhok