Peru man to head to Iraq, to teach

POTSDAM — James P. Owens has never gotten used to talking on a cell phone, but he loves Skype.

He plans to use the free program that allows international calls over the Internet to keep in touch with his wife, friends and family while he's teaching in Iraq this fall.

"We thought about how we're going to make the calls, and two and two came together," Mr. Owens said.

The 55-year-old Peru resident has accepted a position teaching at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. He will be there for at least a year, while he works on his dissertation for his doctorate in math from Clarkson University.

Sulaimani is in the northern, Kurdish, part of Iraq. Though Mr. Owens has never been to Sulaimani, the area is familiar territory for him.

He was in an Air Force unit during the first Gulf War in 1991 that was stationed in southern Turkey to provide engineering support to Kurdish refugee camps. That Turkish town, Yuksekova, is about 150 miles away from the university.

While there, he said, he hopes to meet up with some of the people who were in the refugee camps he worked on during the war.

"It's very close, and I'm planning to ask around for people who were in those camps or the kids of people who were there," he said.

Mr. Owens, who earned his master's degree in computer science from Clarkson in 2008, has taught in high schools and colleges since 1995. He got out of the Air Force in 1993.

Teaching in community colleges has helped to prepare him for the position in Iraq because it involves working with lower-income students, he said.

But other aspects of the job have required special preparation. Language programs in both Arabic and Kurdish and books about teaching in the region are among the "homework" Mr. Owens has assigned himself.

Mr. Owens will be in Sulaimani in September. Though it is a one-year contract, he said, he hopes to renew it and stay on longer than 12 months to help rebuild the country.

"The opportunity to participate in that is just mind-boggling," he said. "I was a vehement opponent of the Iraq war in 2002. It made my blood boil. That's resulted in untold misery and it's great to be able to put my money where my mouth is."