Ad astra per astra

Well, I’ve decided to finish this blog rather than watch another terrible airplane movie (really, M. Night Shamalyan? The Last Airbender? Never believed he could do such a bad movie). While watching a movie helps distract me, a bit, from what I have seen in the last two weeks, I think it might be more therapeutic to put it down on paper, something I have been trying to avoid. So let me take you back to the events of Monday, August 30^th.

We drive back from Swat…it is a long drive, made enjoyable by the slightly misogynist jokes my incredibly awesome uncle kept texting me. For example:

“Two people were denied entry Hajj visas this year. One was Zardari, because officials worried that if he was there, they wouldn’t be able to figure out which devil to stone. The other was Altaf Hussain, because Hajj isn’t accepted via teleconference”. (Sorry, if you follow Pakistani politics, the joke is funny).

The driver wears shalwar-kurta, wears a white cap, and has a thick beard. I’m a bit surprised, then, when he puts in a CD playing a Celine Dion song (he explained to me that she was from my country). It was a bizarre experience driving past destroyed bridges, damaged roads, and broken villages to the lyrics of, “Near/Far/Wherever You Are/I believe that the heart does/Go On”. (I’m sorry, I have an unfortunate tendency to memorize a song the first time I listen to it). However, the driver one-ups himself when he reveals that the screen on the dashboard is also a DVD player. Five minutes later, I am praying very hard as the driver stares intently at the Indian dancing girls on the screen rather than on the oncoming traffic.

We finally reach Islamabad. I get dropped off at my mom’s cousin’s house, where I have dinner- a truly amazing family. The father knew a great deal about the situation in Swat, having worked there for the last 30 years, and is thus a very helpful person to talk to.

When I get back to Islamabad, I am incredibly relieved to reach the Elahi house. I sleep for a few hours, write the article that got published in the Winnipeg Free Post, and check to make sure that my flight to Karachi is on schedule.

Obviously, I’m skipping a few things, namely the incredible hospitality of the Elahi family, but by Wednesday I was at Islamabad airport flying to Karachi. My goal there was to meet with a team from Agha Khan Medical University, and then provide logistical support for one of their teams heading out into interior Sindh (see map).

I reach Karachi late at night, where my eternally awesome uncle picks me up and takes me home. I met my grandmother, than fall asleep.

I’ll skip a day to make things more interesting. 10:30 a.m, on Thursday, I am loading everyone’s bags into a non-descript white van at the Agha Khan Medical University. AKU (as I shall refer to it hence) is a truly picturesque university. It operates on a single theme (take note, new, horrible, post-modernesque buildings popping up around the U of A) that seems to be a take off the Alhambra (honestly, I just assumed that based on some of the architecture and the red stone). Regardless, it is a singularly nice building.

I was briefed, ten minutes before leaving, of my exact duties. I am to help run inventory and distribution at the medical centre at Railways Hospital in Sukkar, about 7 hours from Karachi. Sukkar is about a 7 hours drive from Karachi. The third largest city in Sindh, Sukkar was known as the City of Canals, with a unique Romanesque aqueduct to boot.

Well, canals don’t quite bode well, in terms of disaster relief, during a flood.

Our drive is an interesting one. I had previously thought that the situation in Swat was bad. However, as we drive along, I realized that the situation there didn’t even compare with what it was like in interior Sindh.

I talked with a person from the Government of Pakistan’s Ministry of Agriculture for one of my articles in Swat. He had told me that initially, when the floods began, they caused significant human casualties in the Swat region and in the KPK province because it was so sudden; flash flooding destroyed homes and killed almost 600-700 people immediately. However, the drainage system in Pakistan forced the water to head south, drowning Punjab and Sindh. In Sindh, the last is apparently incredibly flat, and thus the water just stays there like a livid pool of stagnant sludge. I haven’t double-checked this myself, but his argument did seem to be correct- even close to a month after the floods hit, there was, literally speaking from the Coleridge poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”.

I didn’t take many photos of the area, mainly because I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Taking photos of the Swat region, even though the area had been devastated by so much suffering through the earthquake, the war with the Taliban, and now the flood-  but the people of Swat were a testament to strength and determination as they forced themselves onto their two feet again. In Sindh, though, the story was different. It was a story of neglect; of unimaginable poverty, racism from everyone around them, and desperation.  Although I sometimes wished to capture an entire horizon filled with brown sludge, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was just something inside me that didn’t allow it. It would have been like filming a child dying (which I also saw in Railways Hospital)- it wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it ultimately seemed callous at least, and evil at worst.

Of course, the situation was compounded by the fact that the driver, due to popular demand of my fellow passengers, put on some of the most obscene songs I have ever heard. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I think that English was not the native language of the nurses and doctors who were with me. However, as the lyrics began to get unmentionable even as we drove past things that were unphotographitable (yes, I just made up that word), I had enough, and I turned to some of the nurses and told them that the song was incredibly obscene. They smiled the, “Oh, look at the Canadian trying to speak Urdu. It’s funny that he thinks the song is inappropriate” smile. I put my head on the window and tried to get some sleep.

We arrive in Khairpur. AKU had booked out an interesting hotel called “Sukoon” (apparently, all the hotels had been booked. One of the doctors I was talking to scornfully claimed that these disasters actually made local people happy because it became “high season” where journalists, NGOs, volunteers, brought their cash with them).

The hotel “manager”, was also the receptionist, clerk, cook, mechanic, and go-to-guy. He was the terror of some of the AKU staff, who hated him deeply. They had some convincing reasons: at night, he would bang on the doors of every room to make sure that they had the AC off when the power went out. Apparently, some of the AKU staff left their ACs on when the power went out, and thus the generator blew out. Thus, when the power would go out at Sukoon, there was no AC or fans. Or cold water.

Yes. It was very hot.

After we went to the Khairpur hospital, we drove on to Sukkur. Most of Sukkur hadn’t gone underwater, but as one of the largest centres, it had become a convergence point for survivors.

We drive past literal tent-cities. Thousands and thousands of tents. Tragically, many of them are from the 2005 earthquake. So many NGO camps are operating here that it is hard to keep track- yet, as I talk to people, it seems that many of them are missing the point. See, this is where the disconnect happens:

At any NGO:

1.      1.  NGO staff hears about flood.

2.       2. NGO staff hears that people are displaced.

3.       3. NGO raises money/gets grants.

4.       4. NGO sets up tent city

5.       5.NGO staff ensures that they do a precise head count/take emotional photographs so they can please their sponsors/donors

For Victims:

1.       1Victim loses home, livelihood (not that it was much to go on in the first place).

2.       2Victim and his/her family needs to survive, hears that they are handing out stuff in Sukkur. Migrates there.

3.       3Finds that there are many many tents. And lots of mineral water, which the victim has never used in their whole life- since taps are not exactly available, some of the mineral water will get used for washing yourself, washing clothes, etc.

4.       4One month later, need some sort of job/ source of income rather than waiting in line at an NGO camp. Also, will need better shelter than a tent. How can you have privacy in a tent when a tent there is defined as a stretch of canvas across four poles (N.B. I saw hundreds of empty tents just as we drove on the road, without me even looking). Time to abandon tent and look for better prospects.

5.       5No better prospect than tent. Desperation.

To me, Imran Khan had one of the better suggestions for how people who want to give aid can help. Find a village that has been affected, and then adopt it. Personally help fund its reconstruction- that way, people can get back to their lives rather than living in miserable conditions as IDPs. I don’t know if giving to Imran Khan’s organization would do that, but I do think his idea was a good one.

What can I really say about my work in Railways Hospital? It worked sort of like this:

1.      1.  Mustafa gets to work at around 9-ish

2.       2.Mustafa checks the inventory in the store room to make sure that there is enough meds/syringes/other supplies. Usually, the supplies we lack we can’t get in fast enough- like ORS, 10 cc syringes, Amoxil, Augmentin. On the other hand, there are like a thousand creams lying in the corner that I don’t think we used once.

3.       3.Mustafa sits at desk for a long time.

4.      4 Somebody comes in and asks for a medicine. Mustafa hurls things into the air, searches the boxes, and comes back with the meds and makes a note of who took it and how much they took.

5.       5Mustafa goes and sees if the nurses need help with anything

6.       6Mustafa sits and waits some more- talks with anyone who can spare a minute

7.       7Mustafa goes home and sleeps.

8.       8Mustafa wakes up, breaks fast, calls home, then sleeps some more.

That was pretty much my life for six days. Usually, I would gain insight either in Step 5 or at in between time. Perhaps I can put down a few of those incidents. It’s hard to write some of them- but I hope you can bear with me.

One nurse needs help making ORS in the ward. In Railway, diarrhea is a major problem, with malnourished kids losing their last bits of nutrition through diarrhea.

How can I describe the ward? Smoky room. Brown walls. Spit on the floor. Smells strongly of unwashed bodies, vomit, and excrement. Four kids and their mother to a bed- they are all so thin that it is not a tight fit. So hot. So hot. No AC- the one AC room we have is reserved for AKU staff and volunteers only.

I am emptying ORS sachets into an orange water cooler. A little kid, his mom cradling him in her arms, watches me. His wide eyes stare deep into mine, exposing me for what I am. A fraud. A cheap student who thinks to hope to make a difference. Someone no better than the very aid organizations he criticizes.

His mom calls me over and says something in a mixture of Sindhi and Urdu. She thinks I am a doctor, and wants me to remove the kid’s IV. I try to explain that I am not, and I call the nurse, who removes the tube-part-thing from the cannuale so his mother can take him to the bathroom. As the kid walks away, I feel a deep pit in my stomach.

The doctor who I am room-mating with has a friend from Sukkur who wants to visit him. He is some high ranking district judge. I try to straighten up the room before he comes- I want to see what a one-time Pakistani lawyer administering “law based on Shariah principles” is like.

The judge comes in, sees me, and does a double take. There is a look of deep fear on his face that almost makes me want to laugh- it’s a look I usually only get from the crazy racists (of which I have only met, and I am counting, three) in Canada. When the doctor roomie smiles and tells him that I am from Canada, the judge looks somewhat comforted, although he still thinks I’m going to assassinate him (oh, sorry, I should explain. I have a beard, apparently look “Pathan”, was staring intently at the door when he came inside meditating on the day’s events, and am wearing traditional shalwar kameez).

Once the judge has recovered his cool a bit, he begins to pontificate in Urdu, “Balance is very important. As a young person, you must know that people like me, who are your elders, once used to think like you, be very passionate, and believe in silly things like angels. The hair on my arm used to go up when I used to hear the national anthem. You should never think that violence is a good thing.”

At this point, the conversation has gotten so ridiculous that I actually begin to laugh. It reminded me, for some strange reason, of the absurd situation that occurs when Joker speaks to Batman at the end of the Killing Joke.

“Two inmates are breaking out of an insane asylum. Just as they are about to cross the wall, they realize they have no way of getting across. One of the inmates says, ‘Hey Jerry, I’ll shine this flashlight across and you can run across the beam to the other side!’ Jerry says, ‘Do I look crazy? You’ll turn it off when I’m halfway across!”

Batman bursts into laughter, and the comic comes to an abrupt close.

The last day I am in Sukkur. I am sitting with the other person in the warehouse, a phlebotomist named Fahad. A Minister has just come to the hospital bringing dresses for the little girls, suits for Eid. A horde of photographers follow him, snapping his photo.

A doctor comes into our room and asks, rather calmly, where we have our oxygen canister? We both search about for it for a minute or so; we finally find it, and at the doctor’s wish, we both carry it out of the warehouse towards the emergency room.

In the emergency room, a little girl is dying. Her face is skeletal- malnutrition and diarrhea, she needs air desperately. The nurses and doctors are pumping her chest, her tiny body reeling from the blows. I hear her taking a thin rasping breath as she struggles for air. Her mother, cradling her child in her arms, is crying to God for help. Her father, helpless, stands at the edge of the bed. I start crying even before I know it is all over, just as we get the oxygen mask on her.

They say men don’t cry. Well, that mother’s cry of pain could have split stone.

I am split in two. If only I had run faster with the oxygen tank. If only the oxygen tank had been in the emergency room, as it should always be. If only.

Now I am doing the “if” game- a crude, selfish activity if there has ever been one. A child’s death is a wrenching of the world- it is a destiny that we can work to alleviate, but ultimately, we all must go just like her. The question is, how we choose the manner of that last trip- and for children, the tragedy is that they haven’t had the opportunity yet to do so.

Beyond conceptions of right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there.-Rumi

FINITUS. 

"Meeting Gul"

An article of mine appeared today in The News International. Here it is (original title name was "Meeting Gul": http://www.thenews.com.pk/11-09-2010/opinion/4261.htm).

IT IS EID.

Mustafa

Mustafa's journal-September 5th

Once again, explaining things in flashback, allow me to fill you in on what happened on August 28th and 29th. I’ll be doing it by writing down my notes from my Moleskin diary:

• Drove past a bakery shop. Driver tells us that he makes sure to drive past this shop every week to give thinks that the Taliban have gone, as they used to put decapitated heads on poles here every week.

• Shelter does not appear to be a major problem here; as the community here is quite strong, and only 5-8% of houses were destroyed, displaced people are not currently having difficulty with finding accommodation with family and friends. However, when I was talking with people, many were worried about the upcoming winter, which gets quite cold in Swat- tents won’t cut it then, and something more lasting will be necessary.

• Spoke to one of the aid workers today who admired the principles of the Taliban, “They were not good people or bad people,” he explained to me, “they just had their own way of looking at things.” That I would hear moral relativism from a Taliban supporter kind of throws me off; but most of the people that I meet here thoroughly disagree with him and strongly dislike the Taliban. Many of them, though, think that the Taliban is being supported by the Americans (as the historical record does kind of back them up), and others think that the Taliban is being funded by (big surprise) India.

• Passed Maulana Fazlullah’s madrassah. Was bombed out.

• Had interviews with a bunch of the aid recipients. Here was what they felt they needed from foreign donors:
o Education
o Rebuilding of roads/bridges
o Poverty alleviation for people incapable of earning for themselves (ie, old people, widows, disabled, etc)
o They also said that hospitals need to be staffed by better people. One man, almost tearing up, told me that he once took his wife to get an ECG that she urgently needed, but when the gatekeeper saw that it was a woman, he just slammed the door in their faces. The irony was, for me at least, it was a story of patriarchy, but the pain belonged, at least in part, to the husband

• Passed by Excelsior College, which was being held by the Taliban. Now the Pakistani military runs it. Bullet holes riddle the walls.

• Many parts of Swat remain inaccessible, but could be accessed by boats and helicopters. Other parts, where there are sharp rocks in the river bed, the villages can only be accessed by helicopters.

• 2 little girls in blue. Their faces are stained with dust, but there is a brightness in their eyes that almost brings tears to mine.

• As our truck raced on a gravel road, I suddenly saw a little girl wearing a Hannah Montana T-shirt, and I cursed McWorld not for the first, and probably not for the last time.

• Heard the story of a Talib named Shermanat Sahb, who was a butcher by profession. He used to pay money to get the opportunity to kill people. Supposedly Shermanat killed 50 000 people- his depravity was legendary (obviously, the number seems way too high, but his exploits were things of legend). He also used to chop people’s legs and hands off for no apparent reason. Finally, a Captain of the Pakistani military caught him, tied him in a car, and, from what I understand, executed him.

• Also heard another story about the Taliban. When the Taliban ran Swat, a Pakistani DSP (District Superintendent of Police) was in Swat with his wife and son and was caught by some Talibs. They took him to a public square (which we drove past), and shot the DSP’s son in front of him. Then he beheaded the DSP in front of the wife. Apparently, the wife went insane and is still in an asylum somewhere in Swat.

• Passed a house in a riverbed where a man had been stranded. With the water raging around his house, the old man had stayed on his roof for four days without food or water, holding his copy of the Qur’an, praying. Finally, on the fifth day, he was rescued.

• Today we tried to get to Tirat- a city completely cut off from the outside world as the main bridge got destroyed. So we drove up another mountain to try to get to it- it was, I assure you, much like Muhammad Fatih’s attempt to pull his ships up the mountain in the conquest of Constantinople. The road, sometimes, was a mere strip of gravel, and on the other side was a sheer drop.

• As our truck (the one thing Toyota does not make exceptionally well) battles up the slope, a bunch of little kids hop into the back of the truck for the ride up. I keep checking, and by the time we are getting near to Tirat, there must be 15 kids in the back, some of whom are barely hanging on.

• We finally reach Tirat. The entire village seems to have come out to meet us- we are immediately surrounded by almost a hundred people. We go inside the main landowner’s villa. His guards, plain-clothes, but armed, led us to a veranda where the landowner sat. It was like kind of like meeting the Don from old Mafia movies. Although I understand little of the conversation that took place, as it was in Pushto, I gather that I am one of the first, if not the first, non-Pakistani (Ameer’s edit: expatriate) to see Tirat since the flood.

• Some of the elders we met with were unhappy with the WFP bureaucratic framework, arguing that by the time food would get distributed, they wouldn’t even benefit from it.

• It is a long drive back. On our way, a truck’s engine gives out on a bridge, thus making it impossible to get out of Mangora (unless we swam). We had to wait for almost an hour until they moved it. We eventually broke our fasts with some apples that had fallen on the ground that a young child was selling us.

Mustafa's journal-September 4th

I apologize for my delay in writing. Writing is like life; sometimes, it can be easy to let it slip by you without even noticing that you missed it. There’s always a good feeling you get when you put down words on an empty page, just like when you do a good deed; but for some reason, I find myself, personally, sometimes not doing either.

Anyhow, allow me to go back to the events of August 27. Writing this now feels like an age ago; however, I will try my best to do justice to what I saw and how I saw it.

To continue my analysis of real geographical areas based on pop-culture references and more obscure literary ones, I would say Swat is like the fairy grove from any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, plus the mountainous area where Tom Cruise lives in from The Last Samurai (actually, subconsciously, the image of the Last Samurai often flashed through my mind as I saw the brave locals of Swat climbing on mountains past bombed-out buildings, carrying huge loads on their backs. And while that may be highly Orientalist, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking it, thus proving that I continue to have a lot of work to do in purifying my inner lenses).

Swat is a massive valley through which the Swat river runs. Around the river, thousands of people make their homes built onto the mountain side. Stunningly beautiful, I wondered why the Hiltons and Sheratons hadn’t managed to turn this place into another commercial centre (see Banff).

As I drove around, thankfully, the situation was not as bad as I initially feared (this all changed when I visited interior Sindh, where the situation is probably worse than reported). Almost a month and a half after the floods, the situation is normalizing in Swat, relatively speaking.

We arrived at the Relief International distribution point in Mingora. The set up of the camp is rather interesting. A diagrammatic representation might be best to illustrate what it is like.

The token system is something I developed a love-hate relationship with. Actually, when I mean love-hate, I really just mean that while I can understand the rationale behind the system, I absolutely detested the way it worked, at least in Swat. The way it worked was that the WFP (World Food Programme) had to show that it was helping flood victims, and not just people who happen to be starving/lost their jobs because their livelihood was destroyed. Thus, they would only provide food to people who could prove their homes were partially and completely destroyed. Obviously, one can be a flood victim without losing their home; but grants are grants, and to get it Relief International had to cater to what some UN worker in Geneva thought was a great idea.

Of course, if you are hungry, you have to get food. So when UN affiliated NGOs distributed tokens to “official flood victims”, some flood victims managed to photocopy a few thousand more. So the NGOs, in order to ensure their grant money was being used properly, designed a new token that couldn’t be easily counterfeited. The irony is that, from what I saw, the only reason you would take a token was if you were hungry; the quality of the flour being distributed was not particularly good for resale, especially as thousands of free bags of flour were inundating the market. I couldn’t see how you could easily misuse a bag of biscuits, other than selling it off; but even then, what right does any NGO have to say to a clearly impoverished person that, “Actually, sir, this product is what you need, and we’ll do everything in our power to prevent you from selling our product to buying something you actually need.” Granted, the system obviously gets abused, but the whole system, at least to my mind, seems like an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

After the flour was distributed, we drove to the RI headquarters in Mangora, where I slept a bit, and then broke my fast with some fava beans. I then went to a hotel where I got a room that was great except for one problem. The window wouldn’t close. In spite of my best efforts (and allow me to assure you, I tried very hard) I couldn’t block out the noise of the street below. And that was my first day in Swat.

Article in Winnipeg Free Press

Dear all,

Here's an article of mine that was published in The Winnipeg Free Press on September 8. As a caveat, that was not the title I chose for the piece. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/no-love-for-yanks-taliban-in-swat-102436284.html

Now posting again, hopefully.

Sincerely,

Mustafa

The Dentist’s Downfall

There is a rather crude email joke that’s been circulating for the last couple of years. In the joke, there are two people talking. One says to the other, “Recently, in Muslim Land, 100 000 Muslims were killed, as well as one dentist.”

The other person, surprised, says, “Why the one dentist?”

The message here is that often, in the media’s quest to sensationalize the magnitude of a calamity, we as viewers lose sight of the individuals that are affected by that event. As human beings, we can’t deal with numbers that large-what does it mean to have millions of people affected by a flood? What does it mean to have a fourth of a country under water? We can’t wrap our minds around such numbers. It’s like asking someone to count all the hairs on someone’s head. In my more charitable moments, I think that the media tries to quote these statistics so that people can get an idea of the scope of a calamity. In my less charitable moments, however, I feel that this is just a way to stimulate an already desensitized viewership.

Now that Mustafa has gone to Pakistan, I’ve suddenly understood what it really means to feel for people affected by a disaster. “May God protect Mustafa from anything harmful, and bring him back to us safely,” is the prayer I made two nights ago, after taraweeh. Suddenly, I realized that there are millions of people who are staying in the same place, but are much less equipped to deal with the situation than Mustafa. Mustafa will leave; they will stay. Mustafa has food (of a sort!) and water; they have nothing. Mustafa has shelter; they remain exposed to the elements. I’m sure I knew this beforehand, but it really didn’t impact me until I had talked to Mustafa and heard what he had gone through, until I had heard about his fast with little water in forty-seven degrees Celsius, until I had heard about little children crying in hospitals, until I had heard his own voice describing things none of the things I had heard on the news had any impact on me.

So when we think about the people who are suffering, not just in Pakistan, but all around the world, it’s important that we remember that they are human beings just like us and think of them as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father. To paraphrase what Shaykh Hamza said in the lecture, Men and Women, the Prophet (SA) was someone who recognized people as sharing in a common humanity. When the Prophet (SA) compared the Muslim Ummah to a single body, then he (SA) said that if a single part of the body hurts, the whole body hurt. The emphasis was on the collective Ummah sharing in the pain of the individual.

In the Qur’an, the ayah in Surah Ma’idah also talks about how if someone kills one soul, it is as if he has killed all of mankind, and whoever saves one soul, it is as if he has saved all of mankind. By taking care of the individual, we are taking care of humanity; even more importantly, by paying attention to the individuals, we can preserve our own hope. This is not to say, of course, that we don’t need to do things in a systematic way that takes into consideration the scope of what is happening. Our motivation, however, has to remain with the mother who has given birth without any medical care, and with the baby who has just been born. That’s how we can remain hopeful even in the face of so much suffering-because, by the Grace of God, we can alleviate the pain of a few people, even if we cannot change the condition of everyone.

May God bring Mustafa back to us safely, and take care of the other Mustafa’s, the Ameer’s and all of the other human beings all over the world.
-Ameer Farooq

En Route

So, instead of doing a standard journal-esque entry, I thought I'd share my written notes of the journey there. All have been recorded in my Moleskin notebook (which is actually a very cool item. <nods his head to corporate sponsor>).

All of this is dated from August 27. Also, it might be helpful to refer to this map that I have artistically illustrated:

Hrrm. Remind me that I need some art work lessons when I return to Canada.

Ok, here are my notes:

- We drive past Taxila. Taxila, of course, was one of the most ancient and important archeological centres, possibly in the entire subcontinent. Some of the structures date back to the 6th century BCE. I remember, when I was 10 years old, begging my mom to take us to Taxila, only to hear from other family members about how the entire region was too dangerous. I smile wryly when I realize the irony of how much more dangerous it is 9 years onwards.

- As we pass through Hasan Abdal, Irfan Uncle points out a gurdwara on the top of one of the hills. Hasan Abdal was a place of great importance to many Sikhs. He states, smiling, that many Sikhs used to make pilgrimages to the area before it got dangerous here. Later on, after I did some more research, I found out that the temple is the Gurdwara Panja Sahib, where there is supposedly a rock with the handprint of the Guru Nanek imprinted on it.

- We zip past a sign on the highway. On the sign is written, "STAY ALERT STAY ALIVE". I imagine this to be useful advice for everyone in Pakistan.

- As we draw near to the Ghazi Barotha Dam at the Indus river, I ask Irfan bhai if dams could have helped to save people's lives. While he acknowledges that this might have helped people in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab, he doesn't think this would have helped in the northern province- I'm not sure if I understand the reasoning here, but it  deserves further exploration.

- As we drive over the bridge crossing the Indus river, I remember a section from Plutarch's Lives: "To exaggerate his reputation, Alexander left bridles and armor that were much bigger than normal, and huge altars to the gods.  On a flotilla of rafts and barges, Alexander's army floated down the Indus River...Alexander's voyage down the Indus took seven months...Out of the 120,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry that Alexander took with him into India, only one in four came back. The news about the difficulties he had in India, his brush with death, and the huge attrition of his army in the desert, all made the conquered nations think of revolution." I see Pakistani military vehicles rolling past us and worry just a little bit.

- As we drive through Swabi, I see that the landscape is getting more and more beautiful. It is so green that it actually hurts my eyes a bit.

- Malakand Agency- see people carrying tomatoes, which apparently is a specialty of the area.

- As we drive closer to the valley of Swat, we drive past the Winston Churchill Monument. The driver proudly announces it; apparently, Churchill stayed at that spot when he visited Pakistan before independence. I find it ironic that the driver's first real interraction with me, who hasn't really spoken much to me up to this point, is a result of Churchill's, and indeed the abiding colonial legacy.

- In front of the entrance to the valley of Swat, I see a sign that says, "These bad times will not last forever." And thus I enter the Swat valley.

Leaving Islamabad

August 27, 2010

(written retrospectively, so if there are problems with tenses, I apologize).

I am ready to go by 9:00 to Swat. My things (relatively few) are with me in my backup. In addition to my recently acquired cargo pants (courtesy of Mahfouz Uncle), I also have other supplies, which I shall list here:

1.      Laptop/camera/cell phone/cord.

2.      Two of Mahfooz Uncle’s T-shirts and a pair of his spandex pants.

3.      A sack of M&Ms (left from my purchase at the Duty Free at Doha)

4.      Some rupees, some American dollars hidden underneath the sole of my left shoe, and my wallet.

Why am I boring you with this exhaustive list? Well, it had some importance to the following events.

I was picked up promptly at 9:30 by the Relief International car. We drive through Islamabad rather silently. My brain is still slightly addled by lack of sleep and jet lag, reducing my already halting Urdu to a stupefying halt. The driver assumes that I am from England, and speaks to me in broken English. I respond in broken Urdu; to be fair, though, I was stumbling through my sentences in English as well.

Islamabad is a truly beautiful city. I haven’t been to India, so I can’t saw this for sure, but I would imagine that Islamabad is one of the most beautiful cities in the subcontinent. Surrounded by “lush green” mountains, Islamabad reminds me, to use my geeky references, of a cross between Rivendell from Lord of the Rings and Naboo from the Phantom Menace. (Btw, I am thinking of doing my Honors thesis in comparing various cities to fictional sites. So far, Dubai is down as a combination between Mordor and the TechNoir restaurant from the first Terminator movie, Cairo is Cairo from any movie, and Edmonton is one of those nameless towns that the heroes pass because they don’t think it’s important, but then afterwards realized that Edmonton as where they needed to be all along).

I guess, though, that Islamabad is like the eye at the center of a storm. Every so often, Islamabad realizes that around the city is a hurricane, and usually with fairly dire results. We drove past many checkpoints where the driver would gesticulate and say, “Suicide bomber”. At one checkstop, there appears to be a small cannon behind the sandbags. While I am used to the proliferation of weapons, seeing a piece like that it is a bit unnerving.

When I reached RI’s headquarters, I met with Mr. Syed Irfan Ali. Mr. Ali did his Masters in Forests/Agriculture Science and worked with the government for some time before switching into relief work. He is a fascinating fellow with a great backstory; native to Quetta, but growing up in Islamabad, he is fluent in English, Pashtu, and Urdu.

As we prepared to get in the car, he asks me if I have everything. Of course, not having realized the security situation in Swat, I have forgotten that I need my passport for the checkpoints.

We drive back to Margalla Hills and have to spend another 45 minutes trying to get my passport back. Eventually, though, we manage to head out from Islamabad at around 11:00. 

My POV from the back of the car on the streets of Mangora

Bullet hole in hotel window

A shootout happened in this complex between Pakistani and "Taliban" insurgents. Eventually, the Pakistani forces dropped a bomb on it from a helicopter.

Boy looks out into the sunset in Tirat

Collapsed bridge, now connected by gondola (ie, two-three slats of woods and wiring)

Destroyed house

Picture of the Swat valley

Home is where one starts from

So, as a quick update, here are the notable things that have happened in the last two days:
1. I was picked up, and had the honor of staying with the Elahi family. They have been so kind and generous that I am inclined to think I am at my own house.
2. I met with Relief International's project coordinator, who was super kind and  informative.
3. Mahbub Uncle took me to buy cargo pants.

Today, in about a half hour, I will be heading off to Swat Valley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swat,_Pakistan). Many of the people there have lost their homes not once, but twice; once during the 2006/7 Swat invasion, and now again during the floods. I will have internet at the guest house there, so I will try to keep you updated on what I see.

Blog Entry- August 26

We were all on the plane from Doha, slowly descending towards Islamabad. For whatever reason, it appears that foreigners and expats had seats towards the front of the plane.  The man beside me is a German Pakistani who had come back to visit his family in Gujrat. He immediately appears to be full of sarcastic humor, muttering darkly to himself about the Pakistanis on board.

Two or three journalists are on board- two from the States, and one from the UK (how do I know this? Sources cannot be revealed J). It is weird being on board with them; the mood in the plane is charged. You can feel the tension in the air as people worry about the future of Pakistan. But the journalists remain at a detached distance. One of them, I see, as I peek over the seats, is reading a Tom Clancy Splinter Cell novel. And we wonder why journalistic reporting can get a bit melodramatic.

A few seats in front of us, an Emirati sheikh is with his wife, and has clearly imbibed imperialist tendencies. While most of the flight crew speak Arabic and English fluently, he makes it a point to imperiously summon and then interrogate a Thai hostess about her place of origin. Unfortunately, neither his English nor her English were very good. This is one of the conversations I got to overhear.

ACT I, SCENE 1: THE PLANE.

EMIRATI SHEIKH, lounging backwards into chair: Are you from China?

HOSTESS: No…

EMIRATI SHEIKH: Are you from Japan?

MUSTAFA, in his chair, looks up from his laptop. This conversation has caught his attention, and he is now eavesdropping without reserve.

EMIRATI SHEIKH: Are you from India?

HOSTESS, embarrassed and starting to get a bit heated: No! Do I look like I’m from India?

EMIRATI SHEIKH, silent for a few moments. Then: I cannot guess where you are from.

HOSTESS: I’m from Thailand.

EMIRATI SHEIKH: Ohh, I see. Why can you not speak Arabic?

HOSTESS: Uhhh…

EMIRATI SHEIKH: Malish, Malish. The plane is landing, and the seat belt sign is now on. Fasten my daughter’s seat belt.

HOSTESS, clearly weirded out by the conversation and by the fact that he isn’t buckling his daughter’s seat belt, fastens seat belt, then walks away.

Suddenly, through the window, I can see the lights of Islamabad. Sunrise has almost begun; I quickly eat a handful of M&Ms (this, by the way, is a bad idea. It leaves a strange chocolaty taste in your mouth. I remember now why I don’t like chocolate. I also am not fond of dentists.).

The German Pakistani beside me is listening to (judging from the high pitched female voice emanating from his headsets) Urdu love songs. Every so often he shakes his head in wonder. The American journalist is still reading the Clancy novel. Every other passenger, myself included, is glued to the window. And the reason is whispered like a poison throughout the cabin, “Barish.”

Barish means rain. Rain. As we land smoothly on the runway, the pours heavily onto the tarmac. Huge puddles are forming in the indentations of the runway. The thought is in all of our heads- if there is this much rain pooling onto the roads of the well-built, well-groomed Benazir Bhutto International airport, what must the situation be like in villages already drowning from the floods? I hear an older lady behind me say a prayer. The German Pakistani uncle has now taken off his headsets, and is staring glumly through the window. Two seats away from me, totally oblivious, the UK journalist is filling out his immigration card, a slight frown on his face.

Motivated, I think, by the rain, we climb off the staircase from the plane into the pouring rain. A random Pakistani uncle holds the Emirati Sheikh’s bags as the Sheikh holds his daughter’s hand tightly. The German Pakistani man holds a large plastic bag for an elderly woman. As the rain pours down, I look around us, and realize that there is still mercy in the rain.

Islamabad airport has become an aid Ground-Zero zone. I hurry into the line marked for foreigners and diplomats. A large sign reads, “WELCOME GENEROUS DONORS”. Immigration literally takes a few minutes.

There is an elderly British woman standing beside me at the conveyor belt. I’m not sure what she is doing here; she looks too kind to be a journalist, too relaxed to be a businesswoman, and too self-conscious to hide that this is clearly her first time in Pakistan. The porter beside her has a slightly smug expression curling beneath his mustache as he packets away fresh UK pounds. I shake my head at him; he surreptitiously winks back and presses the money to his lips.

Fifteen minutes later, more luggage is still coming, but neither my luggage nor the elderly lady’s luggage has showed up yet. The lady’s hands are shaking a bit. I try to comfort her, shocking her with my English (I say shocked because her eyes bugged out slightly behind her horn-rimmed glasses), “Don’t worry ma’am. The luggage will come soon, God willing.”

She laughs nervously, “We need to pray hard for that, don’t we?”

As she finishes her sentence, she lets out a little yelp of excitement as her bag suddenly comes into view on the conveyor belt. The porter wades in and fishes it out for her. As they are about to leave, she suddenly turns around fully and very deliberately states, “Alhamdoo-lillah”.

“Hallelujah,” I say weakly back. She gives a cheery wave and vanishes with the porter. I turn back to the conveyor belt.

I start to feel increasingly worried. Why hasn’t my duffle bag come yet? As this thought flashes through my mind, a thick wad of blankets wrapped in ropes suddenly appear on the belt. Beside me, a man reaches over and grabs it, and then quickly opens it to check that his clothes are inside. I feel a bit queasy inside. While I worry about my bags, he doesn’t have a bag to worry about.

I suddenly laugh, almost aloud. I guess I realized something as I walked over to the Lost Baggage section and filled out a form: The less you have, the less you have to lose. There is a reason that people who realized their true Adamic potential, like Socrates, Galileo, and Malcolm X, died in relative poverty. The less you have, the less you have to lose.

Doha Airport

Dear all,

I am waiting at Doha airport- I will, God willing, be leaving to Islamabad soon. So. 

Doha airport is an interesting place. I have some initial points to make:

A) Doha airport, while thankfully much less Rolexy and Guccied and platinum than Dubai airport, didn't have Adhan for the evening prayer. That seemed a bit off.

B) Doha airport has free internet spots, allowing me to write this critique of Doha airport onto my blog. More airports should follow Doha's lead.

C) Doha airport has very hot water. I mean, scalding hot. I think I found the man shaving his face beside me found this out horribly when he put his hand into the water tap and screamed.

So. 

I broke my fast in the airport masjid. A few Bangladeshi brothers had brought dates. A Pakistani worker had brought bananas and apples. A Malaysian brother had brought water. An Egyptian uncle brought...I'm not exactly sure what it was. Something similar in appearance to a spinach pie. It was funny because all of the people were speaking Urdu to each other, but then speaking Arabic to me and the Egyptian man. And then the Egyptian uncle turns out to have better Urdu than mine. 

All right, I think I shall try to get some sleep before my next flight.

Sincerely,

Mustafa

In transito

August 24, 2010

-          9:29 PM Edmonton time

According to my in-flight map, we’re flying a little more than halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. On the map, there are spots highlighted- Maury Seachannel, Porcupine Bank, Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone. Unfortunately, these do not help me get my bearings.

Bearings. On a flight like this, you start to lose them. Around me, it is pitch dark, everyone is sleeping, yet I feel completely awake. I’m sure that has to do with the whole “it’s only 9 pm in Edmonton” complex, but it doesn’t help me feel any better.

In the same aisle as me is a pleasant gentleman from the UK. The seat between us, for whatever reason, is empty, so we decided early on in the flight to use it as communal ground. Take that Thomas Hobbes!

On the recommendation of a friend, I was reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Right off the bat, you realize what kind of a phenomenal generational shift we’ve gone through. Quinn, according to the back cover, was born in 1933. I challenge the Stephanie Meyer’s of today to write a philosophical treatise using age-old Socratic dialogue techniques. Actually, I sometimes felt that the Socratic dialogue, while initially brilliant, somewhat stiffened the conversation, but I thought the book, overall, was quite good. Unfortunately, for a book filled with syllogisms, Quinn makes some fairly serious logical leaps that are a bit off- more on that later, perhaps.

I hope that I end up doing good in Pakistan. I mean that in both senses of the word. I want to do “good” in the sense of helping others, but I also want to use this opportunity to peer into my own heart and make sure it is in the right place. After all, if my heart, and my actions, are not for the right reasons, then the whole venture is sort of pointless. I end up becoming a mere passerby, a person who peers over the shoulders of other people on the plane to see what movie they are watching, always checking for another opportunity to fulfill their every whim. I don’t want to be that person.

Please keep me in your thoughts and in your prayers.

And in our second half hour, we will be having a special guest in the form of Louis Riel!

P.S> I apologize if this is written in a slightly disjointed and Joyce-like prose (read: I don’t like James Joyce, or any of the stranger post-modern writers <Michael Ondaatje, I’m looking at you>). It has been a couple of weeks since I have put my pen to paper, so to speak, so I hope it gets a bit more organized as I continue writing!

Airport Blues

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink 
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d 
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those 
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when 
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; 

- "Ulysses", Lord Alfred Tennyson


As I departed through security after an ever familiar "random check", I couldn't help remembering those lines of poetry that my older brother, Ameer, once performed at the Kiwanis music festival. Even though I am leaving, I feel that I travel with my crew: my family and my friends. More importantly, I travel with their prayers.


Prayer is what we need right now. In Islamabad, I will be working with an NGO called Relief International (http://ri.org/). ln some ways, it feels kind of weird. I never expected to ever be working an organization affiliated with the UN (inasmuch as my dislike for aforesaid mulitlateral organization is somewhat clinical). 


I really hope it goes well; thus, your prayers are needed.


Hopefully, I will be updating this  blog on a regular basis with my writing, photos, and maybe videos (depending on upload speed).


"Indeed, God commands to justice and Ihsan"- my translation of a verse from the Qur'an

The Point

This blog is dedicated, hopefully, to recording my thoughts and experiences in my two and a half week venture into some of Pakistan's flooded regions.