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of where to carry or hide his money. Some hid it in their homes, some
buried it in the garden, etc. Now they had a convenient place in which to
deposit or withdraw their money and it was completely safe. The inter-
est paid on the savings was of little importance to them. Indeed, I was
told that some of the Muslim employees would not accept interest, feel-
ing that it was against the Koran instruction against usury. Seeing this
plan in operation was an important lesson to me. One must be careful to
understand the context in which people in another culture live. What we
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The old British general manager at IPC had seen an employee need that
would be readily appreciated by them, yet whose administrative cost to
the company was minimal. Wise man!

On Friday, the Muslim Holy Day, the Public Relations Manager,
an Iraqi who had been educated in England and graduated from Sand-
hurst, asked what our group would like to do for the day. I suggested that
we would like to see the country to the north of Kirkuk. They took us
on a drive. We came to Erbil, which is a little town built on the ruins of
previous towns beneath it. There was a broad plain stretching out from
the foothills. It was here that a great battle had been fought hundreds
of years ago between what we now call Sunni and Shia Muslims. We
are told that the Shias were led by Hussein, who was a grandson of the
prophet Muhammed. The Shias were defeated and this led to the feeling
among Sunnis that Shias were inherently inferior. Shias, in turn, on a
certain holy day will lash themselves with chains as a form of penance
for not having successfully defended Hussein and his cause. We drove
through increasingly mountainous country to a valley with a waterfall at
one end. We were now up close to the area where Iran, Iraq, Turkey and
the then Soviet Union come close together.

The oil discovery at Kirkuk had been easy. From time imme-
morial, natural gas had been escaping from the rocky ground there and
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and Abednego had been thrust. Iraq Petroleum Company had drilled
near the gas seep and struck oil.

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