The short story I chose to read this week is “Saving Mesopotamia” by Alexandra Lucas Coelho. Originally written in Portuguese, this short story is a detailed account of Alexandra’s experiences as part of an archeologist team in northern Iraq in May 2015 to salvage the Mesopotamian artifacts from its potential destruction by the Islamic State (ISIS). This was a dangerous expedition because the site is close to the front line of ISIS, however, in order to protect the artifacts from turning into rubbles like the ancient ruins of Palmyra, this was also a necessary expedition.
Alexandra starts her story by introducing the readers to her some of her fellow teammates, Max Mallowan, Ricardo Carbral, Ana Margarida Vaz, João Barreira and André Tomé by describing to readers their struggles of carrying many surveying instruments from Lisbon to Istanbul then to Sulaymaniyah. She later describes her meeting with peshmerga Commander Ato Zibary to gives readers some backstory of in instability of the city of Mosul due to the military tensions between ISIS and Kurdistan. After the meeting, she met some female peshmergas, Kani, Sahar, Shilan and Aiwan and learned about their misfortunes. When she returned to her base, she meets the rest of her team, Awaz Shadan and Zana Abdulkarim, two Kurdish archaeologists, Steve Renette the Belgian Project Manager and Giulia Gallio, an Italian anthropologist. This team goes on to explore the artifacts of Mesopotamia and meet more people along the way.
The table above shows the relationship between all the characters present in the short story. Because sometimes there is not direct evidence that shows the relationship between people, I made reasonable assumptions. For instance, although it was only mentioned that Alexandra was introduced to Awaz Shadan, it can be reasonably assumed that, because they are working in the same team, the rest of the team members also know Awaz Shadan.
This network graph represents the relationships between the characters. I think this is a rather interesting and accurate depiction of relationship between the characters. Not only does it show the different independent connections that Alexandra, the narrator, has, it also shows the close interactions between the people in the same circle. We can clearly see who is in the same group and who is not. For instance, looking at the cluster of interconnected nodes depicting her team, we can tell that they work closely together. Next time, if I redo this graph, I would also note the frequency of the interactions between the characters and it might result in a more interesting graph.