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Smells of Baghdad

October 22, 2006 5:26 PM

We have an issue with the laundry.

The clothes are taken from the ABC compound to a laundry outside, and usually returned within two or three days. Problem is, recently they have been coming back all smelling of gasoline.

Now yes, it is true, oil is the major resource in Iraq, but there is something vaguely unsettling about walking around in an already dangerous country wearing clothes that are a potential fire hazard. I talked to the bureau manager who shook his head sadly.

"Oh, they are not doing that again, are they?" he said with a tired sigh.

Apparently there is an oil-based cleaning agent that is normally used to remove spots in the dry-cleaning process. For some reason this is cheaper than washing powder, and so the laundry has a habit of dumping it into the washing machine to produce whiter-than-white clothes that all smell of a pit stop at a Formula One race.

Then there is the distinctive smell of electrical circuits burning. This is a common background odor in the bureau. We have five generators of different sizes as well as a tangle of wires from the unreliable city power lines, and somehow we keep most of our machines running - most of the time.

But the voltage fluctuations from our multiple sources of power are as erratic as the Richter scale on the San Andreas fault-line, and so we regularly go through the three stages of electrical dysfunction – melt down, smoke out, and, in the recent case of the old air-conditioner above my desk, flame-out. That last conflagration required a fire extinguisher – the mess on my notebooks was, well, nasty.

Earlier this week I was on the treadmill when I got the tell-tale smell of burning wires. I turned off the machine, and we later found the wires in the socket had melted completely. So much for training for the Baghdad marathon.

Heaters, kettles, electric fans, refrigerators – all have had their periodic melt-downs, with varying degrees of collateral damage. In the U.S., any of these incidents would be cause for an emergency visit by the electrician, but with all the car bombs and shootings here it is hard to make our local electrician feel any urgency about a 3 pin plug that is creating a few sparks.

There are good smells too – the pungent citrus scent from the tea they make out of dried lemons - numi basra. The lemons are actually black and brittle, but they maintain the lemon essence. The local thyme, different from the varieties that I am familiar with, that Fred the engineer buys to put in stews. The red-petalled night jasmine that has just started to bloom on the wall outside the bureau.

And then there is the cheap perfume smell that I now get off all my shirts and towels as they come back from the laundry. Underneath it I can still pick up traces of gasoline, so I suspect they have just decided to spray the laundry of the awkward, complaining foreigner with the most meretricious perfume available to keep him quiet. Problem now is not only am I still a walking fire hazard, I smell like I just stepped out of a bordello.

October 22, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: YS | Nov 16, 2006 4:14:45 PM

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