By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published November 27, 2003
BAGHDAD - The other night, I was checking e-mail in the hotel's Internet cafe when a voice behind me asked: "When is Thanksgiving?"
I was briefly taken aback until I realized the speaker was a British reporter - why would he know the date of a uniquely American holiday? And I was further surprised when I realized I had to stop and think before saying: "This Thursday."
For foreign journalists in Baghdad, days tend to run together - a blur of interviews, traffic jams, equipment problems, power outages and endless searches for the one person in a city of 5-million who has the answer to whatever it is you're looking for. But the reporter's question threw me into a different state of mind. Thanksgiving was coming up, and how were photographer Kinfay Moroti and I going to celebrate?
We're staying in a small suite hotel where each unit has a kitchen. As my family can testify, I'm no great shakes as a cook but I figured we could put together a reasonable facsimile of a Thanksgiving dinner. The markets are full of fresh produce for salad and apples for pie. In lieu of cranberry sauce, we could mix a little sugar with tart red pomegranate seeds. We had brought Rusk toast from Kuwait that could be crumbled and cooked with herbs for the stuffing. And gravy would be easy to make from the turkey drippings.
"I could get into turkey," said Kinfay, usually a vegetarian.
But where would we get the turkey?
Ala, our translator, had the answer. On the way from one interview to another Monday, we stopped at the Al-Melhan souk in west Baghdad, the big outdoor market where Iraqis come from all over to buy their fresh meat and fish.
This is not a place for the faint-hearted or members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Sheep are sold live, then slaughtered and skinned on the spot. It's enough to make you swear off lamb forever.
Ala led us past big tubs full of gasping carp, rickety crates crammed with chickens and finally to a small pen carpeted with dirt, bird seed and downy white feathers. In the corner, three turkeys - two brown and one mosty white - strutted around.
How much? One turkey would be 24,000 dinars, about $12. If we took two, we'd get a 2,000 dinar discount. The price included execution.
"Like this," said Mohammed Gasim, a butcher, pulling a knife from his waistband and making a slitting motion across his throat.
These seemed to be the only turkeys in the market, and Jamela Gwmais, who sells chickens from a nearby stall, explained why. Most Iraqis can't afford to eat turkey because it costs six times as much as chicken. Thus turkey is considered a delicacy, either stuffed with rice and roasted in the oven, or cut into pieces and fried in oil.
"Some people collect the feathers and make pillows," she said.
I wondered about the beds at the hotel. Pushing that thought out of mind, I looked at the white turkey. It looked at me. "You're as out of place here as we are," it seemed to be saying.
In that instant, we bonded. If Ole Whitey and his pals ended up on somebody's dinner table Thursday, it wasn't going to be ours.
So we still had the dilemma of what to eat on Thanksgiving. This year, it coincides with Eid al-Fitr, the three-day Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims who have fasted all month from dawn to dark celebrate with lavish feasts.
At the start of Eid, we were invited to the home of an Iraqi family we met last spring. Kinfay and I agreed - this would be our Thanksgiving dinner even if it came a few days early and didn't look anything like the spread in a Publix ad.
The hostess pulled out all the stops. There were almost a dozen salads and dishes, including baba ghanouj, an eggplant dip and two types of hummus. We leaned back in our chairs, thoroughly sated, when she announced she would now be serving the main course.
Out came vegetables with potatoes. Enormous legs of lamb. (Lamb!) Baked chicken. A mountain of delicious yellow rice with raisins and pistachios. As happens all the time in Baghdad, the power went out so we dined by candlelight - red candles with little snowmen on them. Even if few people here celebrate it, the candles were a reminder that Christmas is just around the corner.
All in all, it was a wonderful evening. But as helicopters droned overhead, the thing to be truly thankful for was that we would soon be able to leave, unlike the millions of Iraqis still struggling to get by and the tens of thousands of soldiers never knowing when a rocket or car bomb might be aimed their way.
"Is this your first Thanksgiving away from home?" we asked one soldier, Sgt. Shawn Halo of Bradenton.
"No way," he replied with a sad, little laugh, "Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq - you name it."
