By the time City Hall tour coordinator August Sallas got the six Iraqi law professors–five Arabs from Baghdad and Basra and a Kurd from Sulaimaniyah–to the empty City Council chambers and settled them into the seats of Ed Burke, William Beavers, and other aldermen, they were worn out. They were slumping, squirming, and leaning forward with their heads on their hands, trying to digest Sallas’s civics lesson. For two weeks this month, as part of a DePaul law school program paid for by the United States Agency for International Development, the Iraqis had been traipsing in and out of the Club Quarters hotel on Adams with a translator to visit law offices, courtrooms, police labs, the American Bar Association, and the state’s attorney’s office, observing how we practice law here so that they could go back and figure out how to teach law in the new Iraq.
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Sallas had already taken them to a Board of Elections office to see what a ward map and a poll sheet looked like. And he’d shown them pictures of all the women who had ever been elected to the City Council–from Anna Langford to Emma Mitts–and told them that since 1837 there have been 45 mayors, including one woman. One professor asked what year the woman was elected and if it was before or after Harold Washington.
As the Iraqis fidgeted, Sallas pointed out various notable spots around the City Council chambers–Bernard Stone’s seat, the public seating area, the spot where the police and firemen sit when they’re going to get awards for valor, the railing where the TV cameras set up, and the chairs where the newspaper reporters take notes.
“Why are there no Muslims?”
When he told them that Streets and San picks up the garbage every week, the Iraqis were impressed–and asked Sallas to repeat it twice to make sure they didn’t misunderstand. “Weekly? Weekly?”
Then they went up to the fifth floor for a visit to the mayor’s office. But the cop who guards the office said the mayor was unavailable, and that even his press conference area was off-limits for the tour. They could, however, stay in the outer office and look at pictures of all the previous mayors.
As they walked to the elevator Sallas told them about the Freedom of Information Act and the Open Meetings Act, and then he introduced them to attorney Frank Avila Jr., the son of a commissioner for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, who was waiting for the elevator. “I’m a first lieutenant in the army reserves,” Avila told them. “I want to go to Iraq.”
