Getting Exercise in Iraq - Work it Out

Between Iraq and a Hard Place

Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Episode 46

Hannah and Colleen talk about how they found ways to exercise in Iraq and the cultural stereotypes that accompany men's and women's opportunities to exercise. Should you bring a Wii? Should you plan to run a marathon?

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Here's a rough transcript!

Hannah: Welcome to "Between Iraq and a Hard Place". I'm Hannah.

Colleen: And I'm Colleen.

Hannah: And we're going to tell you about our life in Iraq.

Colleen: It's going to be fun.

Colleen: What do you get the most Instagram ads for?

Hannah: Coffee, coffee things, coffee related things? I do follow like some Nashville coffee trail or something like that,

Colleen: OK? No, I never get ads for coffee.

Hannah: What do you get ads for?

Colleen: I mostly get ads for, like workout programs and like fitness.

Hannah: Interesting.

Colleen: Which is odd because I don't actually follow any Instagram accounts that have anything to do with fitness.

Hannah: Maybe they're like, hey, would you be interested in this? Maybe? I mean, you do post a lot of workout videos, though, right?

Colleen: I don't think I've ever posted anything having to do with working out, like my Instagram is all like rug weaving, watercolor painting, and flowers from our garden. It's a very girly and kind of mundane.

Hannah: Which which is is suitable for a Kurdish woman.

Colleen: Thanks.

Hannah: Good work, Colleen. You'll make someone a wonderful Kurdish wife someday.

Colleen: But exercise is something that maybe even more recently I've just been thinking a lot about because I keep getting all these advertisements for this method or that method or this yoga pilates dance program.

Hannah: Yeah, yeah. And it's a question we get a lot from people who are interested in moving to Iraq is like… In part, it's part of our application process, one of the questions is about an exercise routine, but a lot of people ask, like, can you exercise? Are there gyms? What do people do for exercise? And the answer is varied.

Colleen: I mean, and it's an important question because exercise is part of even your mental health and your physical health and your ability to cope with culture shock can often be affected by your physical activity, especially if that changes from your life in the US to your life in Iraq.

Hannah: I would say one way that that changed for me in Iraq, and I think we've talked about this a little bit before, is I walked a heck of a lot more in Iraq than I do in the US just because I walked to school and I walked to the grocery store. And because we didn't have a car, there were things that it was just like, well, it would be it would be dumb to pay a taxi to drive me three blocks from my house to the grocery store. But yeah, I know for other people it was like, I can't go run in the early mornings anymore or I have to join a gym or I could just…

Colleen: Right! So there are different ways of getting that exercises.

Hannah: You can't bring your body building set with you to Iraq!

Colleen: It doesn't fit in the 20 kilo luggage weight limit?

Hannah: It's Heavy! It's a little heavy.

Colleen: So yeah, there are different ways to get exercise and there are different ways that we worked to get exercise when we lived there and different ways our teammates worked to get exercise living there. I know, Hannah, for you, a big one was your Wii.

Hannah: Yeah, I did end up taking a Wii with me because I really like Wii Fit especially the boxing helps me get out my aggression. And I took that and a couple other workout games for the Wii because I'm a child who has to gamify my life or I don't do anything. But yeah, that was that was really good and it was fun. My roommates and I all used it.

Colleen: And it was also good because it fit in the cultural culturally appropriate exercise.

Hannah: Right, right. Because as a female, I should definitely not be exercising publicly. And so the fact that I was able to do that in my own home was brilliant.

Colleen: Yeah. And I think that was the route that I and my roommates usually took as well. We did different workout videos usually, probably not as regularly as we ought to have during different seasons. For a while, though, we did actually exercise in public.

Hannah: Scandal!

Colleen: I know. Shocking. There was a park nearby where women, both expat and local, would get up and run or walk at five o'clock in the morning. And it was like kind of this unspoken, like it was pretty much only women then. It wasn't until, like, seven that the men come or something. There were a few men there, but it felt appropriate because we were in a large enough kind of group of women and there were some intense female runners out. It also helped that it was that early in the morning because it was only 90 degrees.

Hannah: So it's cool. The cool of the day.

Colleen: Instead of, you know, hotter.

Hannah: We did some exercising in parks, mostly walking or running, but in Dohuk. Like it was weird to see anyone, male or female outside exercising.

Colleen: Right. Oh, yeah. We here in the US, we see runners and walkers walk by our house any time of day, multiple times a day.

Hannah: People do like yoga in the park and stuff like that.

Colleen: None of that happened in Iraq.

Hannah: For sure, no.

Colleen: In fact, that was one way people could tell people that were foreigners or maybe were military or somebody who wasn't actually from there or trying to fit in there because, yeah, there was this one guy we saw once with a buzz haircut and sunglasses and wearing shorts and running in a neighborhood. And we're all like, who is he? Where is he from? What is he doing? The kids thought that he was part of the CIA.

Hannah: Oh, yeah. Well, why not. One of my very last years there, I remember going to visiting in Erbil, which is a bigger city and a lot more expats and seeing an expat woman running through a neighborhood in leggings and like a long sleeve exercise shirt and her hair up in a ponytail and sunglasses on and just like being like…. "You can't do that. You can't do that here!" And like half the people were like, "what is happening?" And the other half were like, "oh, she does this all the time". So, I mean, still definitely an oddity.

Colleen: I mean, maybe she trained her neighborhood to be OK with it.

Hannah: Maybe.

Colleen: They just thought of her as the crazy woman, right?

Hannah: Yeah. Men talk about being fit, a lot. And I go into the gym and, like, working out and how much working out they did and like the size of their muscles, like to a point that it was disturbing to me, probably because the men in my life in the US aren't gym bros.

Colleen: Yeah, it's definitely got a strong body builder vibe to it, not fitness per say.

Hannah: Right.

Colleen: But bulk

Hannah: Yes.

Colleen: And the images in the gyms, at least the couple that I have ever visited briefly looked fake, like I'm pretty sure someone did some sort of photo manipulation on that image because I don't know that human like and maybe some of them were even real. But like, humans should not look like that.

Colleen: It's very judgmental.

Colleen: I'm sorry. It's just but ewww.

Hannah: Yeah. And even the guys who weren't going to the gym and getting built, they all like played soccer or some other sport, sometimes basketball. But it's really common to be like, Hey! All of us are going to go to the soccer field and play for an hour and a half or whatever. So there is kind of this expectation that men exercise and exercise fairly publicly in the sense of soccer and sports happen very publicly. Where women, no surprise, are not expected to… not to NOT be fit. Like there's definitely an expectation of body image for Kurdish women. But they're just supposed to be that way by sitting at home meekly, I guess.

Colleen: Cooking?

Hannah: Cooking.

Colleen: Carrying children?

Hannah: Yeah, maybe.

Colleen: Yeah, because the experiences that I and some of my friends had in gyms on women's days or women's hours or the times set aside for women to come to the gym, involved a lot of drinking tea. And when especially my friend was there working out and actually pushing herself and working hard and sweating, all the ladies would be like, Oh, don't make yourself tired. You're making yourself tired. And she's like, But that's kind of the point. Her favorite I remember her talking about, they had one of those like waistband vibrating…

Hannah: Yeah, the big belt thing that like shimmies you back and forth?

Colleen: Yeah, as a way to like, you know, get your fat off your midsection.

Hannah: Shake off the fat.

Colleen: Yeah, that was the most popular thing that she ever saw used there. And she would be, you know, running on a treadmill or something. And that was the only other one.

Hannah: Yeah. And I remember doing soccer clinics for girls, which we did in a rented field fairly publicly. But we also did it early in the morning and having girls the next day at school or a couple of days later at school being like, My legs are broken.

Colleen: Yes!

Hannah: Everything hurts! And it's just like, yeah, you used your muscles in a different way for an extended period of time and now your muscles hurt.

Colleen: Like we ran through that when we started basketball practice. And having the girls. Yeah. Like run even the length of the court and back at first was just like, What are you making us do?! And we're like, now do it again. And they're like, noooo!

Hannah: Yeah. Or even buying. I remember trying to buy indoor soccer shoes for that training and having to go in the men's section to buy shoes because they don't even sell women's, they didn't at that time sell women's sports equipment and that is changing.

Colleen: I mean, I know of like a boxing kickboxing place in Suly now that has women who both take classes and teach.

Hannah: Nice! I always wanted to kickboxing class.

Colleen: Again. That aggression again, I'm starting to feel a little nervous here, Hannah. As we sit here in this small room.

Hannah: Very close. It would be hard to get a good punch. OK, so you're safe.

Colleen: Safe.

Hannah: For now.

John: Hey there. This is John Nelson, the director of Servant Group International. I just wanted to encourage you to consider going to Iraq as a teacher. If you do, I can guarantee that at least one life will be changed.

Hannah: So there's definitely that idea of like women shouldn't wear themselves out for exercise, which is based on a lot of cultural myths and separate, even separate times for women to do things. I know swimming pools started to become more and more common the longer that I was there. And I know several moms who wanted to take their kids to the pool or even like I absolutely love to swim and would happily have gone to swim laps as my exercise if I could find a decent pool. I'm a little skeptical of the cleanliness of pools…

Colleen: Anywhere.

Hannah: Anywhere… yes, but especially there. But they only have like certain hours one day a week where the women are allowed to be in the pool. And even then, like the women don't get in in bathing suits, they're usually in maybe capris at the shortest and a tee shirt. But those who are scarved continue to be scarved or fully hijabbed, either one. So there's a lot of fabric in the pool. And again, it's not like we're in here to like exercise, although some of them might do like water aerobics kind of things. But ain't nobody swimming laps or like they're not there for exercise. They're there to splash about in the pool. What you mean. It's fine. It's an experience.

Colleen: Yeah. When I went swimming with the kids and we would often split guys and girls into different parts of either a river or or lake or and yeah, we pretty much all did. I even bought like a swim shirt kind of thing. And it's all a lot more covered up, which, you know, less cancer, maybe.

Hannah: I don't think I ever saw anyone swim in open water.

Colleen: Yeah, most people don't. But we would find kind of secluded areas that were pretty and clean and I jumped off a waterfall and that kind of stuff.

Hannah: And I mean, it's mostly dry deserty area. So the need to learn to swim maybe is not as high as like Florida. Yeah, swimming, not super common and very, very segregated like men can swim in pools all week. And women, it's like Friday afternoons for two hours.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: And then they empty the pool and clean it, which they haven't done all the rest of the week, so…

Colleen: I don't really want to think about that.

Hannah: This is why I never went in a pool.

Colleen: Yeah. Neither did I. You know, the other kind of public place that I would see men sometimes working out, although and sometimes women, younger women or kids playing on were the strange workout equipment in parks that are along the side of the path. And it's like children's versions of weightlifting machines that you find in a gym.

Hannah: Like the NordicTrack thing.

Colleen: Yeah…

Hannah: Elipticles?

Colleen: Yeah. There's one where you, like, stick your legs in it and you lift and there's one you can pull down from above your head. But there's no changing of weights. I think it's all hydraulic. So it's like resistance. But they're painted in bright yellow and red and it's like like a children's playground. But it's like workout stuff that's like set into the concrete.

Hannah: And they're only like instructions for use.

Colleen: No. Instructions, signage? Hannah, what do you expect? You're supposed to look at the thing and know exactly what you're supposed to do with it.

Hannah: Yikes.

Colleen: When they first put those into one of the parks that I live near, we were all like, What???. And occasionally I did see someone working out on them, but most of the time they were a jungle gym.

Hannah: Right. For fun.

Colleen: For fun, which is fine if they want to things for fun. It just it was one of those incongruities, those things that you run across that you don't expect.

Hannah: Right. Like, here's some exercise equipment. Good luck.

Colleen: Good luck.

Hannah: Don't ever use it in public.

Colleen: Yeah, but it's in public.

Hannah: Yeah. I feel like most most of the parks that I went to had a like a winding sidewalk, paved path, that the older Kurdish men would walk around very slowly while counting their prayer beads and chatting about the week's news and maybe occasionally a younger guy would be running, jogging, running on. I don't think I ever saw exercise equipment in a park. I don't hang out in parks.

Colleen: So maybe there's just more of a fitness vibe in Suly. Yeah, maybe that's why I get those Instagram ads, because I lived there and obviously have more of the fitness vibe there.

Hannah: They are like the the West Coast of Kurdistan.

Colleen: Yeah, except in the East.

Hannah: We have we talked about me having a way. I had other roommates that had like resistance bands that they would bring and do training with that. You can get exercise equipment in the bazaar. There's like a special section of the bazaar and it's in it's within the men's section of the bazaar.

Colleen: That's probably why I never saw it.

Hannah: So you have to get a man to get it for you, but you can get like a treadmill or an elliptical machine or weights. And I did see a treadmill.

Colleen: I think I may have had a treadmill for a while.

Hannah: Yeah, we had an elliptical in the house I lived in that we never used.

Colleen: I think we got some from the US, though.

Hannah: Probably

Colleen: Because that was one year there were a couple of ellipticals that got sent over, I think for the families that were there.

Hannah: Yeah. And I think people figure it out. There have been some things like Erbil did a marathon. It's done that for a couple of years. That is both men and women. And I think we've talked about this before. But the women aren't allowed to run the full marathon.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: Because they don't want them to tire themselves.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: There's also some hiking groups that get together and lead long or short hikes in the mountainous areas. Again, both of those things, I think, really organized by expats, the expat community.

Colleen: Originally. But I think some of them now aren't,

Hannah: Right. Yeah, I think some of them have been taken over by Kurds who are like, yeah, this is great, let's keep doing it. There are ways to get exercise.

Colleen: You just have to be a little more creative and willing to either find a way to do it like within your home.

Hannah: Right.

Colleen: Or other enclosed space as a female or within a sport as a male.

Hannah: And I would say walking is an acceptable form of exercise.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: Like purposefully walking for exercise is the thing that women do, but it's the more strenuous, like running, jumping jacks…

Colleen: I don't think I ever saw women exercise by walking. I saw women socialize, walking or go places like for a purpose, like they're always running to the corner store or whatever, out to switch the power back on at the power pole. But I don't think I ever saw women like, that you could tell at least, were walking for exercise.

Hannah: And and maybe perhaps that is the point, is that when they are walking for exercise, you can't really tell.

Colleen: They make it look like they're walking to the corner store or to visit their neighbors or.

Hannah: Yeah, I know there were a couple of groups that would get together and walk and meet. Perhaps they were mostly socializing. I never really went with them because I didn't like getting up that early in the morning.

Colleen: But see, that's the best time to walk in Iraq.

Hannah: I know. I like to sleep too much. I feel like. This particular episode is revealing a lot of things about us. Perhaps it'll get edited out and perhaps not.

Colleen: HAha! That's OK!

Hannah: It remains to be seen.

Colleen: Depends on how much the listeners really want to hear about our personal lives.

Hannah: I guess. Yeah. So maybe send us your exercise routines because we need help. Or links to good inside exercise. No machinery. Is it called machinery?

Colleen: I don't know what you're talking about, but sure, yes?

Hannah: You know…ex… equipment, that's the word I was looking for!! No or little equipment required workouts, we probably could use them.

Colleen: Yeah, send us your exercise recommendations. Let us know what your exercise routine is and how you think you could adapt that to Iraq if you had to.

Hannah: Oh, yeah!!!

Colleen: We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Servant Group International on Facebook or Instagram, and you should check out our blog and complete transcripts over at servantgroup.org.

Hannah: And it's really helpful for us if you share our podcast or leave a review on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on. It helps us know that people are listening and you can let us know what you want to hear next.

Both: Thanks for listening.

Colleen: We also enjoyed picking up the logs.

Hannah: That's true. We had tree fall in our backyard, which is very steep. So our landlord came and cut it up. And for exercise, we've been stacking the logs for firewood and hauling them up to the top of the hill…well, the middle of the hill. Which is enough.

Colleen: Like weight, incline… distance. It's got it all.

Hannah: Good times.