I want to visit the States one day and see the life all of my cousins are leading that I hear about so much. That won’t happen for a long time, maybe not until I am married, and I am not marrying one of those guys who left here when he was a teenager and has been living an American life ever since. I’ve seen their arrogance and I’ve heard stories.

That’s all still some time away, though. I still have to finish high school, and then, if my parents will allow me, I want to go to college and become a teacher like Miss Maryam, who teaches English and Classical Arabic. She never married and is very giggly, so they call her a girl for both those reasons.

Life here follows the weather. In late fall and winter, the cold floors are like ice in the morning. The covers are as heavy as lead. Darkness sits and then the muezzin calls and then it’s time, but there’s nowhere to go to get warm. At school only the teachers and their favorites hover around the kerosene heater, and they scold you if you come close or even if you wear gloves in class. We have constant runny noses and the cold makes you play as hard as you can to stay warm. Keep running so you never get cold. Ours is a cold house with one room like a sauna; the portable heater is going, and everyone is quiet, exhausted from the cold, then the heat. Food smells of itself and you cannot escape.

When the rain comes, it turns everything to mud and makes the cold worse because it’s wet and never dries. Our windows fog, food smells damp, and light turns an ugly yellow, making it impossible to sew or read. Water is everywhere and mud is everywhere else.

Television in our house is like a loud monkey: it never shuts up when it’s awake, and it always holds everyone’s attention no matter how silly its behavior. Sometimes I watch it while I study, especially the music videos, but my mother tells me to stop because I often get distracted and get up to dance with the song.

Almost everyone has a television, even if they only own two dresses and one bag of rice, a television and a VCR to watch weddings over and over and over. Girls like to watch themselves and see how pretty they looked; men like to see that too if the women let them. Almost everyone has relatives in the States or in the Gulf and it lets us have a chance to watch those faraway sons, cousins, brothers, sisters, neighbors.