Sophie and I went with Awara for the blood drawing and completely freaked ourselves out. Something about tourniquets makes me uncomfortable though.
More importantly, I visited Halabja (about 2 hours away) today. On March 16, 1988, which was towards the end of the Iraq-Iran war, Saddam Hussein and his forces attacked the village of Halabja. At 4pm planes started flying overhead and started at 5 hour decimation of the area. So let's make this clear, Saddam Hussein is bombing his own country.
" Survivors said the gas at first scented with the smell of sweet apples; they said people died in a number of ways, suggesting a combination of toxic chemicals (some of the victims "just dropped dead" while others "died of laughing"; while still others took a few minutes to die, first "burning and blistering" or coughing up green vomit). It is believed that Iraqi forces used multiple chemical agents during the attack, including mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX; some sources have also pointed to the blood agenthydrogen cyanide (most of the wounded taken to hospitals in the Iranian capital Tehran were suffering from mustard gas exposure)." At this point in time the United States was a fan of Saddam and sold him some of these chemicals knowing full well what they were going to be used for.
Today we just visited a memorial museum and because of the ridiculous heat we postponed visiting the gravesite until later in the summer. At the museum there was a photograph of bodies piled up in a pick up truck. As the truck drove off bodies fell on to the street because it was too full. There were 25 people in that truck bed and it turned out 3 of those people were still alive. One of the men who was still alive had been passed out in the back of that truck for 3 days.
He was one of the people showing us around the museum today. How do you show the awe and respect you feel to someone who has been through so much?
After the museum we headed in a different direction towards a waterfall/picnic destination.
We drove up into the mountains for our lovely afternoon picnic. With all the streams running to and fro some of the area reminded me on Schlitterbahn. It wasn't long before Esther and I had the theme song stuck in our heads. After a playing around in the water a bit and eating a delicious lunch we started the trek further up the mountain to the waterfall. Recently some American tourists went hiking around the waterfall, wandered in Iran and got themselves arrested. Because of this we got to have a cop escort us on our hike.
(This is Micah shooting our cop in the face with his water gun.)
Also on our hike we were able to see Iran given that it was only around 3km up an over a mountain. But don't worry, we had no intentions of trying to climb over it.
So this blog post is taking forever to sort out and put together so for now it's going to end. Xua Hafiz!
So this blog post is taking forever to sort out and put together so for now it's going to end. Xua Hafiz!
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