Baylor Alumni Association

A high school teacher travels to Iraq to provide a new view of democracy to young men and women.
By Lisa Asher

Phyllis Richards Parker '70 is not a missionary. Nor is she a diplomat or an aid worker. She is, in fact, a world history teacher at Rockbridge County High School in Lexington, Virginia. So how, exactly, did she find herself spending last summer in Iraq, designing and organizing a program to teach democracy to young adults?

"I did have other plans for the summer," says Parker, who still looks back on her eight weeks in the Middle East with a mixture of pride and incredulity.

Through "people who knew people," Parker says, she found out about a proposed pilot program in Iraq that needed someone to lead one-week camps that would help young people understand how they might operate in and contribute to a democratic form of government. Most of the changes made in Iraq in the last decade have been through a top-down approach, Parker says, so the idea of instructing young adults directly was an innovative one.

Parker (pictured, left, in Kurdish garb with an Arab friend, Aseel) put in an application for the coordinator post, but when she didn't hear back, she made other plans. On the last day of final exams in June, she got the call that told her she was needed—immediately. "I had a week to think about, well, if you were going to try to teach democracy, what would you do?" she says.

Thus began Parker's impromptu adventure that would take her to northern Iraq, where she struggled not only with language and cultural barriers, but also with the question of whether or not democracy could—or even should—ever work in Iraq.

BAYLOR LINE: Explain where this idea of "democracy camps" originated.

PHYLLIS PARKER: The Congress and the president figure out what foreign policies to pursue, and USAID, which is the development arm of the State Department, funds the programs. Sometimes they do it directly, but a lot of times they hire it out so they don't have a cadre of school teachers sitting around waiting for a job. If they want to use a school teacher, they pay for it through Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs. One of the NGOs is called ACDI/VOCA, an international NGO that is in many countries, including Iraq. I think they had a conversation with some of the people on the ground there, who were all saying, "How can we help support democracy in this country when there are a lot of things going against it?" So they came up with the idea of trying to do this with young people.

BAYLOR LINE: What in your background made you want to take on such a daunting and potentially dangerous position?

PARKER: I got my BA from Baylor in English and art, and then I got my master's in public affairs from the LBJ School at the University of Texas. My focus there was dual—one on foreign policy and one on educational policy. I actually wrote a book about American foreign policy in Brazil in the early 1960s. So I have this kind of many-sided interest. I worked in local government in Missouri, I worked in state government in Texas, and I also worked for Congresswoman Barbara Jordan in Washington, D.C. I've done a lot of traveling, including educational trips to different places in Asia and an award through the U.S. State Department to go to Russia. I've also traveled personally with my husband, David '66, who had a couple of Fulbrights—one to Brazil and one to Chile. I really love that sort of thing, and I also really, really love to give back.

BAYLOR LINE: How did you prepare in the week before you left the United States?

PARKER: I read the Iraqi constitution, which didn't tell me a whole lot. Then I found a document that talked about why they chose this word over that word, and I began to understand some of the convoluted ideas. I just started talking with colleagues and getting ideas. I was really kind of in the dark, but I created a curriculum that started from anarchy and led to democracy. I asked myself, "How do you vote, how do you know what it is you want, how do you determine what the problems are, and then how do you create solutions?"

I didn't make up anything, but I used a lot of ideas of things I had done in class. I adapted the game Prisoners Dilemma, which is used to help CEOs be better negotiators. When you're negotiating, it isn't always best to take it all. It's sometimes better to share the wealth because then people are more likely to come back and work with you. You have to learn how to build trust, and that's a really shaky commodity in a place like Iraq. We talked a lot about trust; we talked a lot about role models; we talked about anarchy.

BAYLOR LINE: Where were you in Iraq?

PARKER: The camps were held at a resort in northern Iraq, and my office was in a city called Kirkuk in north central Iraq. It's part of what might be called Kurdistan. I lived in a compound, a very small city block with these converted mansion-type houses that we lived in. Iraqis would come in and work there and then leave. There were a few of us that lived there all the time. I never travelled anywhere except by armored car. We wore body armor, and I had a flak jacket. On the weekends, I went to a place called Erbil, where I could walk outside my compound with just a walkie-talkie and a cell phone so you could tell people where you were. If I went into town in Erbil, I was with a guard.

BAYLOR LINE: Except for the guards, you were basically on your own?

PARKER: That's correct. There was a woman connected with the NGO who was over me, and she was wonderful. It's hard to land in a country on the ground and then figure out, for instance, how to get a diverse group to come to a camp. And she really knew a lot of people, and it had been one of her ideas to have this camp. She was over a lot of other things—agricultural projects and some city projects. My project was just one small thing.

BAYLOR LINE: What was involved in setting up the two different camps?

PARKER: I had a week to get the materials that I had created translated, and then I trained about forty leaders of the boys camp, and later I trained forty leaders of the girls camp. We had a variety of leaders—Kurds and Turks and Arabs. I really wanted them to be established teachers because, frankly, if you've taught high school, you've seen a lot, and you kind of roll with the punches. So I asked for teachers, and that's not what I got. But what I got was wonderful.

They have community action groups, called CAGs—everything's got an acronym—and they are groups that work within the various communities, rural all the way up to cities. The trainers we got are kind of community-organizer people. They were the ones who ended up teaching the curriculum that I created. I led the training sessions in a very small room, and the air conditioning went out when it was 110 degrees. It was unbelievable, and they were so wonderful. The electricity goes off all the time, constantly, and nobody even blinks.

BAYLOR LINE: How did you recruit and organize the Iraqi students?

PARKER: The one thing that I really wanted was diversity. In Iraq, you have these different religions—Islam, Christianity, Yazidism. And within each of those, you have a variety of divisions. Islam is broken into Sunni, Shia, and Sufis. Then there were also ethnic groups—Turkmans and Arabs and Kurds, and those all break down into what kind of Kurd you are. You live in a neighborhood where everybody's just like you. So if you live in a Sunni neighborhood, you go to a Sunni school, you go to a Sunni mosque, and there's a Sunni market you go to. You don't know anybody else, and you don't trust anybody else.

What I wanted was for the 120 students in each camp to live together and mix, but that was shot down. Officials said if you want this to be successful, you cannot just start them out that way. So I agreed that they could live with their friends in these various villas, but what I did was I created fake provinces—Province A, Province B, Province C, and Province D. They would have to start mixing and working together.

BAYLOR LINE: Despite your desire for diversity, you weren't allowed to have combined male and female camps?

PARKER: No, they don't mix them there. But when the women were separate from the men, there was a freedom among them. They were more open. At first, I was afraid we weren't going to have any girls. But when the boys came back from their camp, the word got out that this was pretty cool. The boy students were from eighteen years old to anywhere in their twenties. Many of them had been to university and were already out. In the girls camp, the age range was from fourteen to about twenty-two. And the girls camp was much more complicated because some of the girls needed to have chaperones, so we had to allow for brothers or mothers or government workers to come.

BAYLOR LINE: How did you teach the concept of democracy in just a week?

PARKER: We did a lot of team-building games (like the one pictured here in the boys camp). Some of them were kind of goofy, like the three-legged race and relay races. Or we put a rug on the floor, and we had all the problems on one side of the rug and all the good things on the other side of the rug. And we put six people on the rug, and they had to turn it over without getting off the rug, and it took teamwork and strategy. We did a lot of nonsense kind of stuff, which is not the way they're accustomed to learning. In Iraq, a teacher walks into a room and you stand up, and then you sit down and you take notes. And then you memorize those notes and give them back. So they weren't used to this hands-on, give-and-take kind of learning. They were giving and taking with a Yazidi from a Christian, or a Kurd from a Turkman.

Another game we played was with a series of four cards for food, water, clothing, and shelter. I told them I was going to distribute the cards, and each province had to get all four. And then I threw the cards up in the air, and of course it was just bedlam. Some people got them all, and some people didn't get any. And I said, so that is what you call anarchy. And I asked them if it was fair. Well, no it wasn't. And then I asked, "What is really good about a dictatorship?" And they've been trained, so they said a dictatorship is not good. And I put my finger to the head of one of the kids and said, "No, think about it. What is it about a dictatorship that makes it work really well? It's really efficient. If you've got a gun to somebody's head, you can decide what you want done and get it done today. It's not nice, but it's efficient." Then I asked, "What is bad about a democracy? It's so much trouble. It's so much work. You have to listen to people. You have to take other people's ideas into account. You have to vote." We had each fake province come up with a governor, and then we came up with a governor for the whole camp. We had transparent elections; it was really fun. We had speeches, and they made banners, and they did politicking, which they were not used to.

They worked in these fake provinces, and at the end of the week they interviewed each other about their real provinces. "What's it like in Nineva, for example?" And everybody from Nineva would say, "This is what the biggest problem is, or this is what my dreams are that would help my family, or this is what would really help my neighborhood." And then they would come up with an action plan. Some of the kids actually went back to their neighborhoods and talked about what they had learned. One girl said it was the greatest week of her life.

BAYLOR LINE: So while the camps were successful, do you feel like they were…

PARKER: A drop in the ocean? Yeah, I have no illusions about that. I know that I touched lives, and I know that the camps were a success. It was so exciting to watch the growth in these young people and to watch the excitement. I believed in them. But did it change Iraq? No. It was a very positive thing, and I hope they go on and do more things like that. What the kids said is they wish they would do things like this for the whole country. It would be very complicated to do that. The first week I was there, there was this huge explosion in Kirkuk. It was in a market where some of the people who worked in my compound went or their families went during the week. One person saw these horrible things, like a woman who exploded, just terrible things. And these people get up and go to work the next day. And they are trying to create a peaceful fabric, and they really believe in democracy. They believe in listening.

I'm not sure, on first blush, that Iraq should be a country, per se. It's too late to decide that, I guess, but it's a complicated piece of geography. I really, really believe in democracy. But voting and all that sort of stuff—if you can't let your kid walk outside the house to go to school for fear he's going to get picked off, you'll take an authoritarian government that will at least keep you safe on the streets. Did I change Iraq? Heck, no. I changed something for some people. And maybe I helped give them a vision of what might be.

Lisa Asher '89, MA '99, is associate editor of the Baylor Line.

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