(which means GOBAMA in Arabic)
OBAMA WON! OBAMA WON! And I found out a way (with crucial help from my mom) to vote! My absentee ballot didn’t arrive – because this is KURDISTAN and who here give a rat’s fart about the mail – and so I tried to print it out and fax it in. Well, I then learned that there are no fax machines in Kurdistan. They just aren’t used. So I tried to scan in my ballot and email it to the Lane County Elections Office. Yep, the domain name was invalid. I emailed it to my county commissioner. His domain name was invalid. I emailed my ballot to my mom. She emailed it to the Elections Office. Domain still invalid.
So she printed it out, walked to the Elections Office, and handed it in.
CHECK.
If I can vote from Kurdistan, then anyone can vote.
Everyone I’ve talked to here is content Obama won – not that they’re more than slightly satisfied, but they approve. As one teacher said today, it doesn’t matter who’s the president, the Americans will still be here taking our oil – doesn’t affect my day.
Yeah. Sorry about that. But my day just got MUCH better!
Dems have a majority in the Senate; Obama’s got 4 more years; and Maine, Maryland and Washington approved same-sex marriage. And Minnesota took a step toward approving it.
However, I can’t really go broadcasting the fact that I’m over the moon that referendum 74 passed. There’s not so much as a whisper of an LGBTQ community here, and people are extreeeeeemely hetero-normative. There are rigid gender roles and defiance of those roles is strictly punished.
It’s been a topsy-turvy week trying to get my ballot in and imbibing US political blogs during my breaks. Sorry I haven’t updated about my Eid trip. As an apology, I’m including some awesome photos:
In Mutual Weirdness 
Persistence does pay!