A thousand words

Grateful for Grace

2011-12-21T12:00:00.000Z

I started writing out a list of the things for which I'm grateful, and found myself lingering on Grace.

Grace is something I want to ponder more and more. I am continuously at the receiving end of it. I may be (or feel) unlovable, but I experience grace over and over and over. Grace feels a little like a pity party - what we extend to people we can't love but who we know could use some loving - but I am grateful for grace nonetheless. I bask in it.

I feel it being lopped into my lap from all ends. Well, almost all ends. Maybe it's more accurate to say that the experiences of grace fill my heart all the more because they stand in such stark contrast against the withholding of grace. Some people have indeed been inspiring me by their grace lately, and some of them are the people from whom I may have least expected it. But they just do it. It's as simple as that. And it's beautiful.

My definition of grace this week is as follows: grace is allowing another person their space, but doing so in community. Maybe that's not the best definition ever, I mean it obviously isn't the most brilliant definition ever. But that's the grace I need these days: I need to be given my space but know that people are still nearby.

Grace is the person who sits next to you on the sofa helplessly watching you cry. They don't get up, they don't tell you to stop, they don't try to sneak in a hug because that's-what-cool-friends-do. They just sit there and nod, pray or wait until you're ready to talk. Grace is watching you spin and spin and spin yourself dizzy until you collapse, perhaps doing a little spinning along just for the fun of it, or perhaps just smiling. But they don't egg you on to spin harder, they don't try to stop you, and they don't calling in a crowd of others to watch you make a fool of yourself. When you collapse, Grace is standing there ready to help you back up, or is sitting on that sofa making sure there is space for you to sit, inviting you to take a breather if you want.

As the recipient of grace, perhaps I am being terribly selfish and self-centered, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm becoming more and more grateful for the experiences of grace in my life. I'm going to cry and I'm going to spin - that's just the phase of life that I'm at right now. And those people who accept that about me, without trying to try to make it more intense and without trying to make it stop, I'm so grateful for them. Those people who walk away have every right to walk away - no one wants to be around a weepy spinner - but those people who stick it out are emulating the character of God. I hope to learn from them, return the favour someday, or perhaps pay it forward to someone else.

Merry Christmas, dear Emily and everyone else who is part of the Imperfect Prose community. Loving the grace I feel amongst you!

the first twitch of the itch

2011-12-19T10:00:00.005Z

Yesterday I was catching up on the news, as I tend to do over the weekends - how people stay on top of the news everyday is beyond me! I need to schedule time on the weekends to catch up.

Anyway, being December, there were a lot... A LOT... of "year in review" kinds of articles out there. Here is how I read them:

One year anniversary of Arab Spring... already? It's been a year? I was there for part of that.
A new country was born this year... I was sitting around with the Northern Sudanese fretting in resignation about the referendum.
Famine in Somalia... yeah, this has been intense indeed for my colleagues.
Flooding in Thailand... I wonder if I'd be there today if I were still in the Asia programme.
Syria's ongoing struggle beginning to be dubbed a 'civil war'... Oh how I wish I could have seen my friends in Syria one last time before going back wasn't an option anymore.
End of the war in Iraq... a million memories of my work with Iraqi refugees flooded back to me.

And so on and so forth.

As I read, it slowly dawned on me that world events will likely cease to be as personally relevant to me as I begin to settle into my more geographically defined life. My friendships with Egyptians, Timorese, Sudanese, and Syrians will always be there, but they will fade a little bit in my consciousness. I won't read the news with as much personal investment as I have for the last several years.

And so I felt the first twitch of the itch. I don't want to give that up. Yes, I do want to give up the instability, rootlessness and emotional fall-out. But I don't want to give up the sense that I am somehow connected, albeit in a distant manner, from the challenges facing humankind around the world. Reading the news and receiving the odd email from a friend out there isn't going to feel as intimate to me as being there myself. I'm escaping and they can't escape.

I know it's different on too many levels to compare, and I think my reaction is part-guilt, part-adventurer and only part-solidarity. For all three of these motivations, there's something very tantalising about re-subjecting myself to the whims of a major international relief agency. I'm not going to do it, but I've got to brace myself against the itch which is unlikely to calm over the course of the coming months.

There are things I can't bring myself to write

2011-12-17T23:11:00.001Z

Are there things that you're too ashamed to admit to, even to yourself, even in your deepest heart?

I think I have a lot of those. They're not even dark secrets or horridly embarrassing things; they're just things that I don't feel comfortable admitting. Sometimes, I write them down and then I look back at the paragraph I just wrote and feel like someone else wrote it; it just doesn't look right. But usually, I can't even bring myself to write them in a private journal or say out loud to an empty room.

These things generally have to do with my deepest desires and fears. I think I'm unwilling to put them into words because I'm such an analytical person, and so I know that I'm not really sure I want or fear those things and that my heart can be so easily affected by external circumstances, as I explored in my previous post. So they stay unformulated. And so they are not realised. I don't face the fear, I don't pursue the desires.

I wonder if I should change that. I think I probably should change that.

But it's not happening today. Maybe I could bring myself to do it, but not on this blog because this is that moment at which I realise that I do, indeed, care about what other people think. I don't want you to know my deepest desires and fears. I'm not sure why, but I think it's because I fear your reaction. I don't quite know why I should fear your reaction, but I do.

Life is flying by too quickly.

2011-12-14T14:32:00.000Z

Way too quickly.

I feel like I should have had certain goals for my youth which I have not yet achieved, and really, I'm not sure I want to have achieved them yet. I am perfectly fine with living my life.

But I'm at this age where, on average once a week or once a fortnight, I learn of another friend who has met the love of her life, or proposed to his girlfriend, or is pregnant with their first child, or something equally moving-on-ish.

I don't want to begrudge them their joy, but I am not moving on and I miss them.

Do I wish I'd met the love of my life and set a date for wedding bells? Do I yearn to hold my own baby in my arms? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but I almost inevitably feel some degree of peace and confidence that those things are not for today. But every time I get news of a friend hitting these life changes, all of a sudden I feel that longing, even while I know that it's not for the right reasons.

This week, there was one day where I felt perfectly content with taking transition slowly, and figuring out, one day at a time, what I was to do, so much so that I didn't want to talk to anyone at all. Then the next day, I received one of these bits of news and my entire emotional state was reversed. I imagine I should land somewhere in between: never complacent but always content.

It's funny, really, because I think I have a reputation as a person who moves fast, who jumps into change and transition quickly. To some extent I agree: once I've made up my mind about something I don't see the point in faffing around in preparation. So yes, it's true, that I put an offer on the 6th house I viewed, only a day after I'd started viewing properties. It's true that more times than my loved ones care to count, I've called up a brother or an uncle or a parents and said I'd be moving back from Timbuktu and arriving in two days' time, could I please crash at their place for a coule of days/weeks.

But these are the little things. And my loved ones also know that I've been studying listings and even had an estate agent on the hunt for my perfect flat, for several years already. They know that I was applying for jobs for two years before accepting the job which had me floating around the world as if I was driving from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Staten Island every day. It takes me a while to be ready for the change, but once I'm ready I'm ready.

One thing I know is that life is about the journey. I've learned several languages, obtained several academic qualifications, and done pretty well at work. These were the doors that opened for me, and so I walked through them. I don't regret them. What I do regret is that life would...not...stop long enough for me to enjoy those experiences and still have time for living the rest of life. I struggle with the fact that now that I'm back on solid ground for a while, the people I used to jaunt and scavenge and dream with, now have spouses and children and homes of their own. They are still my friends and I dearly love them, but their lives have moved on and mine has not. Yes, I suppose it's true that I walked away for a while, but while I was gone, that relational-hole in their lives has been filled up by others and there's not the same kind of space there once was for me. (Perhaps as a parallel, I could say that I haven't filled my hole, I just threw a lid over it.)

The other day, a friend was commenting about how women need to be careful because our childbearing years don't last forever. Sadly, this is true, but it honestly doesn't bother me so much for the sake of myself, as it does for the sake of the fact that if I do someday have kids, they'll be so much younger than my best friends' kids and than their cousins. I know I can't ask everyone else to stop living while I savour today's adventure, but sometimes I really, really wish I could.

Living with Uncertainty

2011-12-07T22:10:00.001Z

You're standing in a doorway. Not a doorway to a house, but a doorway to a train, or a motorhome, or maybe even the hatch to a big boat.

You have just arrived at your destination, and by all accounts it is an amazing place. But you've never been here before. So you're standing at the doorway, waiting for the train to stop at the platform, for the motorhome to pull into the driveway, for the boat to dock, because the moment you feel the motion under you stop, you are going to jump out and explore this new land!

The train stops. The motorhome turns its engine off. The boat anchors. You're now free to open the door and so you eagerly reach for the button, or the handle, or the lever. The door opens. The rays of sun hit your eyes, the chill of the cold fresh air attacks the nerves on your cheek. It's glorious.

But once the door is open, you don't run down the stairs or bound onto the platform as you'd imagined you would. You stand there, enjoying the rays of sun and the fresh air on your cheeks. You breathe deeply and sigh.

After a couple of minutes standing like that, the other passengers start to nudge you. They saw you anxiously waiting to land, pushing up against the door with urgency and anticipation, and now that you're here, you're not getting out. You turn around and SHHH them, telling them to enjoy the moment.

But then you start to wonder, Why haven't you gotten out? Why haven't you started to explore this new land that you've so anxiously awaited?

So you turn around and look into your little motorhome, or train car, or boat hold. You look at the things you know and are oh-so-tired of seeing: the same drab walls, the same smudged chairs, the same piece of paper eternally stuck under the leg of that same table with the same set of scratches. The artwork looks so familiar you could probably create it yourself, and the fact that the edge of that frame is chipped has never irritated you more than it does today. You are ready, oh so ready, for this new land!

Now the others in your group are rushing past you and disembarking. They've given up on giving you the coveted first-one-off status. Soon they will have left you on-board, all by yourself. You should get off.

What keeps you on this boat/train/motorhome? Are you (a) scared of what's out there? Are you (b) more in love with your drab familiar surroundings than you thought? Or are you (c) dreading the moment when the unknown mystery becomes, itself, familiar? (Or are you (d) thinking this is a silly illustration because you've already got off the boat like a normal person?!)

I suspect for me it's a little bit of all three, but I think option C is a huge part of it. I love the mystery. I like asking the questions. I love learning and I love the answers, but I probably love the unknown even more. This makes the days spent in transit to a new destination a fun adventure, and makes the arrival somewhat painful. I'm still going to walk down those stairs into the new world, but if I take slow steps then the unknown will last a little bit longer.

Be patient, or Just get on with it?

2011-12-06T15:40:00.001Z

It's been a very, very long time since my life has resembled anything which I might consider 'normal'. And, of course, since 'normal' is such an elusive concept, I should probably think about how I define that. I think the way I define it is in terms of role models: 'normal' means that I can look to someone else's example and feel like their reality bears enough in common with mine, that I can learn from them. There are a great many people I admire in this world, for sure, but I don't see them as role models, because I feel like their world is too different from mine to bear any fair comparison. Is this wrong? Perhaps. But I can't help but feel that most of the advice I receive is based on assumptions thadon't apply to me. For example, most of the people I admire are married with children, and got married at a much younger age than I certainly will; so it feels like the wisdom they share from their experience of relationships or friendships is based on a reality which revolves a lot more around family than my life can. That's just an example, and perhaps it's a terrible useless cliché and I should think of a more valid example. Anyway, maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like that.

At the same time, I do know people whose life has a lot in common with mine, for sure! But I have a hard time respecting their decisions. Many of them have a fundamentally different set of values from me, and others seem to have become embittered in a way that I desperately try to avoid being (the jury's still out regarding my success in avoiding bitterness. but I want to try, anyway).

So all that is to say in a roundabout way, that I'm really struggling with how much of my life I shoul djust accept. And how much of it I need to resist. When I feel so tired, so emotionally worn-out, should I indulge that and rest up? Or should I struggle against it and just keep trudging forward? Since I've spent most of my life trudging, I'm inclined to err on the side of indulging now. But I really wish I had the answer. I really wish I had a good sense of whether I should watch a film while eating dinner, then do some light tidying up tonight. Or if I should try to reply to emails, find friends on skype and write an article? I don't know.And I don't know who can tell me.

So inevitably, I will likely spend the next five hours alternating between the two. Watch half a film with dinner. Then start some work but not finish. Then sit and stare at the wall while I listen to Christmas music. Then pull out the revision I'm working on and re-re-re-revise the first page while not sticking it out long enough to revise the subsequent 5 pages. Then watch 10 more minutes of the film before thinking I should check if so-and-so is online, then reply to some emails but not the important ones. And thus the evening will end. I'll get some stuff done. I'll feel a little rested. But would it not be better to choose a path and commit to it?

Is this procrastination? I don't think so, because I kind of think the resting option might be the right option. I've read books and I've sat through many sessions of receiving good advice, but none has yet felt like it matched the situation. I'm open to more advice but not sure if I'll feel I can follow it??

Contradictory symptoms

2011-12-01T21:37:00.001Z

I'm lonely and I'm tired.

And that about sums it up.

Especially because to resolve the one seems to be a big step backwards toward resolving the other. Lonely --> go out and try to bond people --> exhausted. Tired --> rest and sleep --> no human interaction.

Tired is a much easier problem to address, so I will probably continue - as I have for a while - to put more energy into resolving that one. (Did I say put 'energy' into resolving tiredness? Yeah, I guess I did.)

Actually, I suspect I'm feeling the loneliness a little bit more acutely this week because maybe I'm a tad less tired than I've been for a while. Up til the last week or two, I was so tired that I only really thought about addressing that. Now I'm tired but not so tired that I can't feel my loneliness.

Soon I'll be rested enough to start addressing the loneliness. I'm going to have to put all these new skills I'm learning about loving and being loved into practice! Am I ready? Do I know what I need to know? Is my heart ready for the risks? Do I have enough wisdom to figure out what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing?

I do hope so. I sincerely hope that a year from now I am not writing about being lonely and tired. May I have different problems in a year.

And, since during the last year, one place where I have decidedly not felt lonely has been Imperfect Prose, it seems appropriate that today be the day when I am finally, after a 4+ month silence, linking up once again with Emily's lovely community.

Unlovable

2011-11-29T10:20:00.001Z

Every so often I go through a day or two of feeling unlovable. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that every so often I realise just how much I feel unlovable.

If you're reading this and you're someone I know, chances are that at one point or another I have wondered why you can't love me. (Unless you're my parents... my parents have never given me reason to doubt their love for me... but I have a feeling that has more to do with them than it does with me.) But anyone else, why can't you love me?

Now, at this point, I feel fairly confident that you are having one of two reactions. Either you are mentally listing off the reasons why you can't love me. Or you are pitying me for feeling unlovable because it's not true.

I ask myself why I feel unlovable, and I have a good idea that this is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If I believe I am unlovable, I am unlovable. Yes, I suppose I do push people away. For a long time I had to keep people at arm's length because it hurt too much to draw near and then sever ties. Actually, I write that in the past tense, but this still describes most of my friendships. I didn't want to love because I didn't want to feel guilty for walking, as I inevitably would. And now I've forgotten how to draw near.

But I think there's something else that I fear. As any true introvert might, I'm realising that I am actually scared of people. I am passionate about people and care for humanity, and I'm a sociologist who has made a career of people, but even so I'm scared. I know my little corner and I like my little corner. I like the predictability of my space and I like having time to sit by myself. People distract me from time spent by myself. I love people, too, but I'm scared of losing that little bit of comfort, the only comfort I've been able to count on for quite a while. My introverted comfort. Well, that and West Wing.

So I find myself refusing to love, even when I don't mean to. And so I seem to be unlovable.

I wonder how many other women struggle with feeling unlovable. I'd venture to guess that a lot of us do, even if for different reasons.

I wonder how many men struggle with feeling unlovable. I can't help but suspect not as many.

Since my last post was about rejecting the lies in our lives, I do want to say here that I acknowledge the lie inherent behind what I've written just now. But I don't yet have a truth to counteract it. And if anyone is reading this, and wants to say that the Truth is that God loves me, then I will reply by saying that that tells us a lot more about God than it does about me. And if that's just the way it is, then maybe I just need to accept my unlovable-ness for what it is.

I'm back!

2011-11-27T22:04:00.001Z

CulturTwined is still going strong and is where I'm focusing my efforts, but I've felt the need to be a little more contemplative in my writing than I have in the past. A good friend has always been telling me to have an "open heart", something that in theory I think I have, but in practice I know I don't. I'm open to the idea of having an open heart, and I want to be open, but the reality is that the life I've lived has taught me to shut down.

So I'm going to attempt a deeper level of introspection, of self-analysis, here. It's a little scary to consider... I've always worked pretty hard to not bare too much to the world in these parts. But I feel like God has convicted me about starting to slowly pick away at my defenses, and this is the best place I know to start. So I don't know how this is going to pan out, I have no idea how often I'll be posting here or what I'll be writing about, and I don't necessarily expect anyone to read it - after all, who wants to read the self-examination of another human being? But I'm declaring myself "back" - to myself, anyway.

And see? Here is where I'm stuck. The message at church tonight really convicted me about something in my life: it was about acknowledging the Truth of God in our lives and challenging the Lies we tell ourselves. The preacher-lady gave several examples from her own life of how this plays out and, I can't remember which of her stories sparked it, but I realised that I'm dealing with a lie in my life. She said something about the opposite of faith being fear. Faith obviously equating with Truth, with Fear obviously equating with Lies.

Because just earlier today I was thinking about how scared I am of things that I really want. So then I begin to question whether I really want them - how can I want something when I fear it? And therein lies the lie: it's actually not a question of whether I want it or not, maybe I do and maybe I don't. But God has promised me what he's promised me, and I have to have faith that he's going to do what what he promised, without fear - regardless of my own desires which, to be fair, I don't even understand.

So that's my lesson for today. Have faith, learn how to let the faith defeat the fear. Believe the promise and stop wondering whether I want to or not, because the Truth is the Promise, not my desire. The fact I need to want it is the Lie. And then God will do what he'll do.

But it goes a bit further than this, to be fair... if I don't learn how to do the above, then there's no reason to expect God's promises to come true, is there? Which may be what I want, but it shouldn't be, should it?

Was this ridiculously cryptic? Probably. I'm not very good at this open-heart thing.

It's time!!!

2011-09-02T01:22:00.000+01:00

Rev your engines... switch your RSS feeds... and consider joining in the conversation!

Today was the first post on my the blog. Check it out at: http://www.katiworonka.com

To subscribe to the feed, use... http://www.katiworonka.com/culturtwined/blog-english/

And if you're a writer or a picture-taker or someone who likes diversity, please consider contributing a story. I want this blog to be a conversation, and the culturtwining that happens there will be all the better the more cultures we have to intertwine.

I'm going to miss this blog. The past few years that I've spent here, and the lovely people I've met through this space, especially in the Imperfect Prose community, have meant a great deal to me.

I might keep it alive when I just want to rant about my angst in life or things like that. But I'm not sure I can keep up with two blogs so that may or may not happen.

WARNING!

2011-08-29T02:37:00.002+01:00

After I first got back to the U.S., I was watching TV with my brother one night when a commercial for some kind of medicine came on. I honestly can't remember what kind of medicine it was, except that it was targeting men around their 60s.

The main character of the commercial said something along the following: "Before XXX, my life was awful. I couldn't do this, I couldn't do that, this and that were always hurting... Then!" And he took on a very positive tone. "Then! I discovered such-and-such medicine. Now, I can play ball with my grandkids, barbeque..." He was walking in a green area with a fence as he said this. "This doesn't hurt anymore, and this actually feels good! Plus!" The tone of his voice was truly joyful now. "Plus! This can cause backache, headache, kidney failure, migraines, heart failure, brain aneurisms, etc. etc. etc.!!!!!"

It was only toward the end of the litany of potential disastrous side effects that I realised that he was listing potential disastrous side effects.

After all, he just sounded so happy about it that I almost missed the fact that there were side effects at all.

I mentioned this to my brother who told me that there's a new law stating that side effects need to be an active part of the commercial, not just a quick mutttered-off list at the end. Well, ok. This commercial followed that rule, but the side-effects sound better, not worse, when communicated this way.

THEN... I learned about the new rules for cigarette label advertising. The FDA is also wanting to make sure customers really, really, really, understand the risks. So much so that now cigarette companies need to advertise anti-smoking campaigns on their products. They need to advertise against themselves. Not just warn, but promote... in pretty graphic ways! Check out these ads from the FDA site if you haven't already seen them...

I don't know, I tend to think they're going a bit overboard. Exaggerating can have the opposite effect, can't it? This all just seems a bit weird to me, that's all.

bloggers in Libya

2011-08-26T18:00:00.003+01:00

This article is fascinating! A bit long, though, so here are some of my favourite quotes:

Six months on and it is heartbreaking to look at how eerie the Libyan blogosphere is, row upon row of bloggers in Libya are silent because of the on-going war. From the silent ones you realize that they are in the cities under Gaddafi control and therefore have no access to the internet.

[Ghida's] old blog is gone and only the one with poetry is left up.

Six months on and it is heartbreaking to look at how eerie the Libyan blogosphere is, row upon row of bloggers in Libya are silent because of the on-going war. From the silent ones you realize that they are in the cities under Gaddafi control and therefore have no access to the internet.

So if you are in the liberated parts of Libya you can expect to express yourself freely against the Gaddafi government...

I don't know yet if you can criticize the National Transitional Council though!

one of the few blogs which is not with the rebels... If posting from Libya then it must be manned by Gaddafi's electronic army because ordinary Libyans in Tripoli do not have access to internet unless they got hold of a VSAT or Thuraya phone. However, obviously the person running the blog is putting a lot of effort into finding news, links and photos that aim to counteract the news in the MSM about rebel gains...

The blogger is wondering why his or her voice is not featured in the media...

Thanks for the insight... http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/08/21/libya-bloggers-between-dictatorship-and-war/#comments

when a good idea goes terribly, terribly wrong

2011-08-26T02:28:00.003+01:00

A few months ago, I blogged about how an anti-female circumcision campaign MAY have resulted in an increased rate of girls being circumcised. Well, today I have another example of a well-intentioned (I think) idea that may have made a problem worse: Fake Cigarettes.

I suppose I could post a photo here of them, but I'd rather not advertise them. Here's why...

I have now encountered these items three times.

The first time was on an airplane. As I walked up the aisle to the w.c. I noticed a man sitting slouched in his seat with a relaxed look on his face. A trail of smoke was wafting up by his face. I followed the line of smoke down to his hand and found a cigarette there. Alarm bells screamed in my brain as I envisioned the fumes reaching a smoke detector somewhere on the ceiling of the plane, setting off whistles and causing an emergency landing. Plus, he was only three rows behind me and I hate that smell! So I started glancing around the cabin in search of a flight attendant. Not immediately sighting one, I looked at the man again and realised that there was a little glowing light bulb where the embers would usually be burning, and then realised I couldn't smell anything. It was not a real cigarette, just a brilliant imitation.

The second time was actually a sales booth hawking the things on a Friday afternoon on Canary Wharf, near all the young professionals in suits chilling at pubs. A friend and I stopped to ask more about these strange inventions and the sales rep was thrilled to give us a demo. He said he especially enjoys selling them to non-smokers, as my friend and I were. I have no idea why he likes that particular challenge, since we didn't have much positive feedback to offer him and certainly didn't buy any. He explained to us that they still burn, but not enough to exceed regulation levels of fumes - they work a bit like arguile (i.e. hookah or shisha). Fake cigarettes do have nicotine, but much less than regular cigarettes. Actually, they come in three different strengths: almost-full nicotine, reduced nicotine, and no nicotine. In that sense, they can be used for cutting down. But the sales rep said that he doesn't see that as the point. He likes that he can smoke without having to worry about no-smoking zones and without feeling like he's inconveniencing others with the stench. They make being a smoker easier.

The third time was in a Target superstore. As on the airplane, I saw the distinct fumes of cigarette smoke and traced them to a man's hand. As on the airplane, my first reaction was that he was dangerously breaking the rules. But then I remembered the airplane and the demo, and understood what was going on. And I thought to myself, How strange that this commodity allows this man to smoke in a place where he usually can't. He can now be a true chain-smoker and not adapt his lifestyle at all.

The first story was in Egypt. The second story was in England. The third story was in the U.S. This is an international phenomenon.

In all three stories, a man (yes, a "man"... I wonder if that's significant) was able to use this device to smoke more, in places and at times where it is now illegal and inappropriate. Even if he is cutting down on the nicotine, he's still smoking more, not less.

Were these things created by a corporate monster who saw a great new market for smokers in a world that has grown unfriendly to smoking? Or were they created by a well-intentioned group hoping to help people quit? If the former, clever move. If the latter, OOPS.

Have I helped make the problem worse by writing this blog? Have I become publicity for a bad idea? Oh well.

glazed eyes

2011-08-25T01:58:00.002+01:00

After a full month doing "other stuff" which has included a good bit of resting as well as things I love doing like writing, I went in to the office this week. I'm not really working, just catching up with various colleagues, doing a bit of networking, and gearing up for starting a new project soon. It's not really that intense, and it's nice to see my colleagues again after a full month not really thinking about work.

Wow. I'm tired.

Right now my eyes are having trouble opening completely, my limbs are dull, and I'm having a bit of trouble putting together complete thoughts in this blog.

Here's what I think happened. I was more worn out than I thought. I knew that the last several years of traveling and working in intensive zones took a lot out of me, but maybe they took even more out of me.

Then again, maybe it's just pure old culture shock. After all, things like driving cars and ordering food at restaurants are disproportionately irritating to me. That's usually a symptom of culture shock.

I'll get there. Tomorrow's a new day, with fresh energies. There's so much exciting stuff I want to do, and I can't wait to do it. After I just lay my head down and sleep for... just a... few... minutes...

Libya... freedom or stability?

2011-08-22T01:11:00.003+01:00

The news services of the world are going crazy. The media is having a heyday. Reporters have something glorious to report.

Not only is it big news, but it's happy news. We don't get happy news very often that's also worth sharing and selling. But today we have it.

The rebels are finally going to win in Libya. Gaddafi's claim to rule will shortly be over. In fact, the latest news I've seen reports that all he's really ruler of right now is his own compound. The rebels have won the rest.

We are supposed to be celebrating. This revolution of the Arab Spring has not gone smoothly as did Tunisia or Egypt, but in the end everyone's efforts are paying off. Freedom has won. Dictatorship is over.

Or is it?

I don't know much about Libya, but last month I spent an hour with a man who had lived in Libya for the last 15 years. He said that, while he never felt free under the previous government, he also has little hope for the future of Libya. The rebels are not really freedom-loving teenagers; they are actually Muslim extremists supported by big money in support of a religious movement. I don't know if he's right, but his stories reminded me that Libya is a complicated place.

My friends in Egypt, the home of the famed mass of humanity that overturned a regime in 18 days, are now facing the reality that revolutions don't actually end in 18 days. Or six months. The so-called revolution in Egypt was the end of the prelude, the end of the introduction, the end of the launching event. The real revolution is a long, dragged out, painful process.

I'll be surprised if it's different in Libya. After all, Libyan people don't know much about running a country and they don't have much experience with democracy. They've always had a dictator taking care of those details for them.

So, a Western-style democracy of majority rule with minority rights and respect for human rights, may be the end product, but it will take a long time to get there. Or, maybe some amazingly dynamic leader of the rebels, someone who reminds us a bit of Mr. Muammar, may just step in and take over. Or, a religious authority may exert itself and become the new leader, ensuring majority rule but with little respect for minority rights.

Either way, it's a long road ahead. I'm glad the media is celebrating today, but I hope we don't forget Libya tomorrow.

Longing

2011-08-20T19:05:00.001+01:00

During my vacation back in June, I read a book called Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley. It's about spiritual disciplines based on liturgical practices. And it met such a precise need in my life at that moment that I copied quite a bit of it into a journal that is almost always with me. From time to time I pull it out and follow the instructions the book set out for a particular discipline.

I just opened it and opened to my notes on the introduction: "Longing"

And thought to myself that I'm having a trouble longing at the moment. Usually I very much relate, perhaps too much so, to longing. But not here, not now. At the moment I'm seated in a shop near Georgetown in D.C. Everything around me is so geared to satisfaction - the opposite of longing. Good food, conveniently located cafes, shops, predictable traffic. At the moment we even have good weather.

I don't know that I am really satisfied, but there's too much effort going into my satisfaction that I'm left with little effort available to long.

Longing in the book is for a number of things... Life, healing, change. It asks, "Isn't there something better I should be doing with my time?" And then acknowledging authentic desires to touch the reality of God at heart and of how much God himself longs to do things for us.

That's good stuff, more satisfying than life, even.

Ironic, then, that I've known this longing intimately when in places like a walled compound in Darfur, a desert monastery in Syria or a rice field in Indonesia... But find it so elusive when at home in more 'familiar' surroundings.

Angry Birds

2011-08-19T13:38:00.003+01:00

"Can I play some Angry Birds?"

"No more Angry Birds today. You've already played your fifteen minutes for today."

"Well, then, can I watch you play Angry Birds?"

This conversation has repeated itself almost daily since I've been in Virginia. The lover of Angry Birds is my almost-three-years-old nephew. The nay-sayer could be any adult in the household. The boy is truly enamored by that game. As he drifts to sleep at night, we can hear him over the baby monitor talking about pulling birds in a slingshot, using egg layers and bombs, and hitting the pigs with the birds. The greatest achievement in his short life has been winning levels on Angry Birds.

At first I though that this was my nephew being three. Little kids get obsessed about things, usually the most obscure and unexpected things, right?

Well, not this three-year-old. He's totally down with the latest trends. Last week when I ventured out to visit some extended family, I was reading about smartphones with my aunt. She's looking to buy a new phone. One of the features most commonly advertised was the ability to play Angry Birds on such-and-such a phone. We read the reviews to see what consumers thought of these phones, and some of the comments we read included things like: "This phone gets really hot while playing Angry Birds", or "Angry Birds runs slow on my phone."

That afternoon, I walked by a phone shop and the display was a big picture for a Samsung Tablet featuring Angry Birds. In big bright colours.

I've played a bit of Angry Birds. It's kind of fun. I'm far from addicted and my only motivation for playing is to unlock levels for my nephew so he can play on my phone. But it's kind of fun. I guess. But really? What is it with this game that has taken over the nation?

The demise of the independent coffee shop

2011-08-18T01:22:00.004+01:00

After three years without spending any substantial amount of time in the U.S., I am seeing things through fresh eyes. Again.

One of my first destinations upon returning to town was my favourite little independently-owned coffee shop in Northern VA. It's a cozy joint with old overstuffed sofas, rickety chairs painted in pastel colours, mighty good coffee with cheap refills, and a substantial after-school and summer vacation clientele consuming ice cream. I estimate that almost a full half of my novel was drafted sitting at Stacy's Coffee Parlor, which gave me free Internet and a smiling face every afternoon.

I never really bonded with Stacy, but I saw her talking with her old-timer customers and wondered what it would be like to be a part of the community. The staff were also friendly and gracious even after my third hour banging away at the keyboard. I often wished I bought more from them than just coffee, but coffee was all I wanted, and I was broke and unemployed. Once in a while I would get into an interesting chat with another customer, and I remember once someone almost convinced me to go work for an elevator company.

You may already guess where this is going. If not, let me add that there is a Panera Bread right across the street and a Cosi's coffeeshop a block down. Both have opened within the last 4 years or so. There's also the token Starbucks a little further down the road. The road is named Main Street... doesn't that break your heart?

And so it is true: Stacy's is no more. Sometime during my romps around the globe, Stacy closed her doors for the last time. I'd like to think that she joined the Peace Corps or moved her shop to another much larger location. But the plethora of boarded-up shops in the U.S. I've seen this visit, combined with the even bigger plethora of Starbucks I am seeing just about everywhere tells me that this is wishful thinking. It's not just a moral desire to support the little guy that breaks my heart - Stacy's just seriously had more PERSONALITY than any Starbucks ever will.

The other day, some friends and I wanted to go out for coffee. The only place we knew of in the area was (obviously) Starbucks. None of us wanted to support the giant so we asked a local waitress if she knew of any independently owned coffee shops. She pointed us in the direction of a quaint neighbourhood with plenty of cute cafes.

But it was 6 p.m. on a Saturday. They were all closed. C'mon guys! We want to support you but you have to get with the programme! After guzzling our fair share of gas looking for a S'bucks alternative, we gave up - if the indy guys aren't going to hold up their part of the bargain, we can't give them the support we so greatly desire to give.

At the very last moment, right before we pulled into the Starbucks driveway, we were saved. This one awesome coffee and pottery painting joint was open for business, and the joyful smile of an independent barista welcomed us at the entrance. If you're anywhere near West Baltimore or Howard County, please please honour them for good service and flexible hours and free wireless: Find them at their website http://www.thepotterystop.com/about.html

(photo credit: http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-washington-dc/falls-church-favorite-stacy-s-coffee-parlor)

A personal update

2011-08-16T19:55:00.003+01:00

I can't remember the last time I've gone so long without posting on my blog! It's been almost three whole weeks. Maybe no one is reading anymore.

But as is usually the case, I've been racking up a list of topics just itching to be talked up. I'll start writing again tomorrow.

In the meantime, let me share what I have been doing.....

SLEEPING!

I don't think I've slept so much since the summer after my sophomore year at university, that is, after going 9 months averaging 3 hours of sleep a night. This time, I don't have an excuse. Most people are thinking I must need to catch up. Perhaps my soul needs to catch up.

Either way, it sure feels nice, except for the kink in my neck from too much pillow time.

Other fun things I've been doing include playing with my almost-3-year-old nephew, trying to avoid stressing about two visas for which I'm applying, and planning my new blog. Yes... please do get excited, there's a great new blog coming your way. I know it's great because my brilliant brother came up with the name.

replying to comment

2011-07-29T22:44:00.004+01:00

I just had a first-time experience... I got some hate mail on my blog! The following is what I wrote in the comments section on that particular post. I love dialogue and feel bad about having taken down the comment but it contained information that shouldn't be on my blog. I may be opening myself up to a huge can of worms, but I want everyone to be happy and I love to talk things out, so here is the comment:

"I'm sorry Anonymous, but I had to delete your comment. My blog is about exploring ideas, not tearing down individuals, which is what I felt you were doing. If you feel I am tearing down individuals in my blog, I apologise - that is not my intention. My intention is to seek a deeper understanding, and if you can pinpoint what exactly I said that attacked an individual, or a group of individuals, I will gladly delete or change it.

"Also, as a point of courtesy, I do believe 'hate' comments should not be posted anonymously. My understanding of internet etiquette is that comments such as yours (particularly because you used my full name which I never do on my blog) should be connected to your identity. Please if you re-comment, I'd appreciate if you identify yourself.

"Thank you so much for understanding and I hope we can talk openly and get to a deeper level of dialogue.

"Finally, the one point you made in your comment to which I can reply is the following: I believe immigration and multiculturalism is a beautiful thing, and I definitely think my Muslim friends contribute a great deal to European society. I also think that Muslims have the right to proselytise just like Christians have the right to proselytise. I believe we are all equal as human beings, under God. If you interpreted my words differently, again, I apologise."

But the places that used to fit me cannot hold the things I've learned

2011-07-27T20:17:00.004+01:00

(If you haven't yet, please do take a moment to advise me about what my blog can or should look like in the future: everything is changing! Please comment.)

Today I was walking back home from Central London. I crossed the Thames and navigated past Waterloo Station during rush hour, then made my way to the flat of some friends who have been gracious enough to let me consider their place home while I figure out what I'm doing with my life.

I decided to pull out my ipod - after all, most of the other people walking on the streets had headphones. Apparently that's what Londoners do. I'm all about cultural adaptation.

The second or third song that came through my mix was "Painting Pictures Of Egypt" by Sarah Groves. By the middle of the song I was struggling with tears. Why was this, I wondered. Was it because it's a beautiful tune? Well, honestly, I've heard better. Maybe the words? So I rewound to start the song again and started to pay close attention.

And I was take breathless. This woman was singing MY heart!

(let this be a warning to any of us who think song lyrics don't really matter - somehow they went straight to my subconscious without passing through my noticeable brain.)

Here are some excerpts, some of the lines that most touched me. Note the boldface especially.

And the places I long for the most are the places where I’ve been. They are calling out to me like a long lost friend.

It’s not about losing faith, it’s not about trust. It’s all about comfortable when you move so much... and the place I was wasn’t perfect but I had found a way to live.

The future feels so hard, and I wanna go back! But the places that used to fit me cannot hold the things I've learned. Those roads were closed off to me while my back was turned!

If it comes too quick I may not appreciate it. Is that the reason behind all this time and sand?

You see, this morning as I was praying I was reminded of how much fear is in my heart. The excitement of transition, of a new phase of life, and of being in a place where I can cook and walk (!!) have helped to distract my heart from the sense of dread that I just might not make it. I can't help but wonder if I'll only last three months and hit the road again, because transition is all I know how to do... or that I won't learn how to live in community, instead hiding my head in the figurative sand of wherever becomes my home and never learning to share anything. Then there are the little fears, that the various practicalities of moving to a new place won't work out.

While I know I need to do this, it's so much easier doing what I've been doing. The future feels so hard and I want to go back! Well, I don't really want to go back, but I know how to do that. I don't know how to do this.

Because I'm worried that the places that used to fit me, before this decade of insanity in my life began... I'm worried they can't hold the things I've learned. I'm worried that the roads of friends, relationships, a home, a routine, that those roads were closed off on me when my back was turned.

I'm full of hope for this exciting new phase, but... yeah.

(this would have been an imperfect prose post, but as we say in Arabic, MABROUK to our lovely hostess Emily who just became a mother once again!)

everything is changing! Please comment.

2011-07-25T22:16:00.003+01:00

So I owe a heartfelt thanks to the many of you who read and commented here in the last few weeks as I've processed my pre-move. Your words have encouraged me tremendously. I suppose after sharing my angst of the last few weeks, I'm probably owing you an update, something along the lines of 'first discoveries upon moving to London' or something like that. But it would be a pretty boring post, as the last three days have been doing little other than sleeping and catching up with old friends. I'm sure I'll have a bloggable reaction to London soon and then I'll be happy to share it.

But today, I wanted to ask your opinion, your help. Today's post is about asking for your advice. I know I don't have millions of readers, but I am sure some of you are reading this on your RSS feed, happily lurking and never commenting. I know who you are... well, some of you... and will be sad if you don't comment today. Please, today, I'd really really like your comment if you would... (picture me right now with a puppy-faced tear dropping from one eye as I write this in the faint hope that I still have at least one or two friends who will take the 2 minutes to comment on my blog)

Now that I've ended my Egypt assignment, I feel like I've crossed into a new phase of life. OK, I don't really feel like that, but I feel like I should feel like that. A lot about my life is going to change in the coming months, although I don't really know what or how.

What I do know is that it's time to start being a bit more intentional about blogging. Right now, I write whatever I write here and give it little to no strategic thought.

But as a part of my new life, it is now time to revamp the blog. Or start a new blog. Or replace this blog. Or all of the above. I want my blog to be a bit more focused, to fill a niche. Maybe I'll keep this blog as-is and add on another topical blog. Maybe I'll switch over entirely.

I need your wisdom here... What do you want to hear from me? What would make this blog interesting and relevant to your world? What bloggy niche do you think I might fill? Are there any features my blog should include? And if you come up with a title for that niche and I choose it, I'll probably owe you a prize.

Thanks!!

A chilling thought indeed

2011-07-24T21:59:00.004+01:00

So I was just doing a bit of websurfing and came across an article from the Associated Press which posted some excerpts of a manifesto written by the gunman in Norway who went on a killing spree this past Friday. Here is a particularly disturbing quote...

"Multi-culturalism (cultural Marxism/political correctness), as you might know, is the root cause of the ongoing Islamisation of Europe which has resulted in the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe through demographic warfare (facilitated by our own leaders)."

My first reaction on reading this was that these are the railings of a truly deluded crazy person. But re-reading it, I realised that there are probably a lot of people who agree with him. People who think that society's problems these days are largely due to a fear of being 'politically incorrect', because the media generally favours things like immigration and diversity over preserving the way things used to be. An open policy welcomed a large number of Muslims to Europe and which invited Islamisation which is slowly taking over. This is the classic Clash of Civilisations at its best.

Yes, actually, come to think of it, I know a lot of people who, I suspect, agree with him about this. I don't expect the people I know to translate that belief into killing sprees that take the lives of a hundred people in one day, because they are actually good-hearted people. Plus, obviously the killing spree was not an effective way to prove his point. In fact, this man has managed to make the 'white nationalists' look bad and thereby make the 'islamists' look good.

If I am completely honest with myself, I actually have to admit that this man has a point. It's become strangely 'politically correct' to support Muslims and Islamists when similar support for 'Christians' or, for that matter, 'white people' is labelled as racism. If it weren't so incredibly sensitive, I could tell some striking stories here which would sadly illustrate how uncool it has become to be that which used to be dominant.

But, really, you've got to give what you take, right? If we are truly multicultural, then Muslim and Christian should be on equal social footing. Islamist and white extremist should evoke a similar reaction. Americans, Brasilians, British, Syrians and Indonesians should all be equal before God and before man. So why is it that in liberal circles, people who are 'different' get put on higher social footing? I know some people would answer that it's corrective, because minorities are disadvantaged from the outset, but I would reply that I think maybe it has gotten a little bit out of hand. I think my stories would illustrate this better than the statement, but sadly, I just need you to trust me that the very fact I don't feel comfortable sharing the stories proves my point.

And why is my asking this question so incredibly politically wrong? Can anything be done to start calling a spade a spade? I certainly do not advocate for murderous rampages. But it'd be kind of comforting to think that there might be some other way to restore respect to the good old boys while still learning to respect people who are different from the majority.

nice people

2011-07-22T21:44:00.002+01:00

In Arab culture, a woman has the right to not want to sit next to a man who is not her relative. In conservative families, this is a requirement: so much so that women won't leave the house if not accompanied by such a man. In less conservative families, it's still generally a good idea.

On the other hand, I get the impression that only the conservativist of conservative men have that right (i.e. not to want to sit by an unrelated woman). And even fewer men avail themselves of that right.

So generally when a couple is traveling together and they are assigned two of the three seats in an airplane row, the man will take the middle seat so that his wife is not sitting by an unrelated man. As a lone traveller woman who has absorbed a bit of Arab culture, this always irks me, because it means I end up sitting next to an unrelated man, but because I'm an independent woman (verified by the fact I'm traveling alone) and a foreigner, no one seems to care. I feel like pointing out to those men that I'd rather sit by their wives than by them... i've never had the guts to say it but I probably should.

This was all a rather long prelude of context for what happened on the airplane to me today. I boarded the plane and when I arrived at my row, I was ever so slightly dismayed to find an Egyptian-looking man in the middle seat and a woman - presumably his wife - at the other end of the row. Once again I was stuck by the man.

But when I started to put my bag in the overhead bin and prepare to sit in that chair, I saw the couple exchanging looks. It almost seemed like they noticed I was a girl... but no, it couldn't be.

And yet, sure enough, the woman stood up and went to get something from her bag on the other aisle. Then the man stood up. The woman soon edged her way back in to take the middle seat. Glory be! This was the first time ever an Arab couple had thought of my feelings on this rather petty but quite sensitive matter. (I suppose the wife could have been looking out for her husband's integrity but I prefer to think they were respecting me.)

Then the niceness continued. The man rummaged around in overhead bins until he found blankets and pillows. He passed a pillow to his wife and she handed it to me. Then two more for them. Then he gave her a blanket and she handed it to me. Then two more for them. I smiled and said 'thank you.' Really, I was a bit speechless at such a display of unobtrusive niceness on an airplane.

As we all settled into our seats, they didn't try to make small talk with me or interact me with me in any other way. I hope they weren't waiting for me to reach out because, if so, I didn't get the hint. But I could hear them chatting with each other, laughing, giggling: talking like life-long friends and lovers should. This, as we all know, is not something that is seen everyday on an airplane.

It occurred to me that being a nice person and being a happy person are connected. To me, it seemed like because they were nice, they had the freedom to be happy too.

work blog

2011-07-21T22:28:00.002+01:00

Here's a little blurb I wrote a few weeks ago for work... enjoy!

Southern Hospitality, Egyptian Style

Egypt obituary

2011-07-20T20:34:00.002+01:00

I thought of this blog title because I am leaving this country in 36 hours. Assuming flights aren't delayed, exactly 36 hours, as a matter of fact.

And it's time to look back on yet another four-month posting and think about what I will miss and what I won't. (I did this after my abrupt departure from Timor Leste... see here. Or here is what I wrote when leaving Indonesia... although I wasn't even leaving Indonesia yet!)

But in those blogs, I used the words 'reminiscing'. Why is it that today the word 'obituary' comes to mind?

Is it because the tents are still up and the revolutionaries are getting antsy? Is it because the elections have been postponed because no one is even remotely ready to think about who could run this place? Is it because we are all scared of something but we don't know what?

Or is it because I came to Egypt to help scale up an office, but the staff is now half what it was when I arrived, and there's a general sense of resignation floating around? Is it because I don't yet know whether I'll look back on this season as a time that I did anything, at all, to help anyone because all the projects we're supposed to be starting may or may not start?

And all of this adds up to a difficult list, but I'm going to try:

Things I will miss about Egypt:

Otlob.com
Feeling completely justified about feeling exhausted at night and vegging in front of the TV
The Kempinski bed
Full-time access to a treadmill
Some absolutely lovely colleagues
Being able to lean out the window and see the Nile
Sunsets over the Nile
The feeling of possibilities (like going to the Sinai for a weekend!)
How cheap things are here
per diems

Things I won't miss about Egypt:

Customer service at the Kempinski
The humid heat
The fact that my world is 300 square metres big
Avoiding harassment whenever I walk on the street
Negotiating taxis, what I want to order at a restaurant, and just about everything else
The 100 soldiers between the hotel and the office (a 200 m walk) who stare at me every morning
The isolation of living in a hotel room
Other people coming in and cleaning my hotel room however they want (that is, rearranging things)
Office politics
sad news and intensity of emotions
feeling braindead

Dear Imperfect Prose friends, it's been so long! I hope I can read your blogs but I am getting ready for a big move again so we'll see if I pull it off. I've missed you and I share this with you with all the kindest of wishes

software recommendation for you writers out there

2011-07-19T21:36:00.004+01:00

So, this week I switched my RSS feeds over to Google Reader. I should have done this ages ago, but better late to the game than never joining at all, right? I was inspired to do this because I plan on joining the Android revolution within the next few weeks (the conclusion of my iphone-induced panic moment last week), so making myself google-friendly may make my life easier. It also may mean Google has the capacity to steal my soul, but I'm just not going to think about that for now.

One by one, I took the feed addresses from my AppleMail reader and typed them in to Google. Each of the blogs and news feeds that I read popped up in perfect user-friendly order. I was so impressed!

This is actually NOT a blog about Google Reader, so I'd better get to the point.

There is a blog that I had signed up for several months ago, but AppleMail had never syncked it properly so I hadn't actually read it. Google opened it just fine, though, so I was finally able to read this Brasilian author's blog.

For your Portuguese-speakers out there, this was what Google Reader produced for me:

"Keep calm and just write"

For you non-Portuguese speakers, in summary, this blog gave the most glowing review ever to a certain application, aptly named "OmmWriter" (as a casual yogini, I totally get the concept of using a one-syllable humming word to centre my thoughts). She said that as a writer easily prone to distraction, this programme does 50% of the work for her. That's quite a claim.

Well, after reading a raving review like that, I just had to check it out. As it turns out, the timing was pretty good, because I've been working on writing a report all week. And, you know what? It is amazing, with potential to revolutionise my life as a writer. Except for the music - I prefer my own.

In short, what OmmWriter does is white out your entire computer screen so you have nothing but a plain-text writer visible on your computer. This sounds a bit cliché, but Ommwriter does it so artfully and tactfully that it totally works. I thoroughly enjoyed writing the report this week, and time just breezed by because I was all into the writing and forgot to wonder if anyone had emailed me.

If you are any shape or form of a writer, and have any inclination whatsoever to distraction, you should totally check it out. (Oh yes, and it is free.)

http://www.ommwriter.com/

Hotels in the Saieed

2011-07-16T21:34:00.003+01:00

So after my little angsty interlude yesterday I'm back to sharing some travel tales of our week in Southern Egypt, aka Upper Egypt, aka the Saieed. Incidentally, many Westerners seem inclined to call it "the Upper Nile" and that one is wrong. It's got enough correct names so there's no need to tack on a wrong name, right?

Today I thought I'd share a bit about what it's like actually traveling there as a foreigner (and why I was so shattered upon return - although to truly appreciate that you'd probably also need the schedule of meetings we had lined up in each place. It was a lot):

Day 1: Wake up at 2:30 a.m. for 3:00 departure to airport for 4:45 departure to Luxor. Luxor is a hot tourist attraction here in Egypt, home to the famed "Valley of the Kings", a very hot desert with some amazing historical artifacts. So they have their own airport but it would be a little cheeky to start ahumanitarian programme there (although right now that tourism is low, they really are suffering). Arrive Luxor 5 a.m., drive to Qena city, which is 1 hour north.

Night 1: Make history as the first women ever to stay in Hotel Hamd. This entailed occasions such as reception forgetting to give me my change, the clerk not understanding why I was asking him to go down to the all-men's café to order my coffee for me, management failing to stock the hotel with toilet paper and all staff refusing to go out and buy some, the hotel not giving us towels or sheets. Oh, and the best moment was waiting 15 minutes because there was a guy praying in the middle of the lounge area outside my room, and I didn't want to "ruin" his prayer because a woman walked in front of him during his prostrations. All these special moments aside, we were absolutely exhausted from the previous night's travel schedule, so I couldn't tell you for sure, but I think the room was very comfortable.

Day 2: Travel 2.5 hours by hired car, north to Soheg. On the way to Soheg get picked up by the fuzz because we're approximately the third foreign people in a decade to go on a road trip from Qena to Soheg.

Night 2: Enjoy the Nileside breeze, with a cup of tea and some cats in a stately old mansion which has been converted into a hotel. The rooms were spacious but not luxurious, but the air conditioning worked and the showers spewed hot water. What else does a girl need? Meanwhile, consider celebrating someone's marriage with them downstairs as the dance music wafts through the facility, and brainstorm ways to not only feel pity but actually help my poor Egyptian friend who is fielding phone calls every 10 minutes from some 'official' asking questions about us (including things like 'where did you go this afternoon?' as if they weren't trailing us the whole time).

Day 3: In a different hired car, trek 2 more hours north to Assiut. Because of traffic and a late arrival, we had to go to a meeting before checking in to our hotel, which actually turned out to be nothing but delayed gratification.

Night 3, Day 4, Night 4: Sleep, and enjoy the only few minutes of downtime all week, on a boat.

Our rooms were Nile view, which meant that out of my enormous window I saw lots of water and palm trees on the other side of the river. It was perfect. Except that the airconditioning in my tiny ship cabin didn't work and I couldn't open my window, so the best solution I could come up with was to keep the curtains closed with the hopes that no heat from the sun could enter the room. One of the mornings I did so happen to wake up for a potty-break right at sunrise and it was gorgeous. Unfortunately the appeal of the still beat that of the sunrise and I lasted no more than 3 seconds.

Day 5: Though we were supposed to catch a train at 7 a.m., we managed to hire the car of a friend of a friend and leave at 9:30 a.m. to travel 2 more hours north to Minya. Arriving in Minya felt like we'd exited the badlands and were back in civilization. Not that Assiut or any of those places were really badlands, but Minya felt posh.

Night 5: Stay at a hotel right on the Nile which was also breathtakingly beautiful and the site of a wedding party. It was only a pity that we were way, way too exhausted to enjoy it. I was also getting a bit sick from some bug combined with bad diet and no exercise for a week.

Day 6: Three hours further north and we were back in Cairo. The Kempinski never felt so much like a homecoming.

impending

2011-07-15T13:37:00.003+01:00

One week from today I will be making the *BIG* move. Though nothing at all is in any way whatsoever decided yet... don't know where I'll be living, how the job thing is going to work out (though I feel peace about that being an ongoing question), or in fact whether I'll be allowed to stay... I am going back to the country where I've most recently lived for more than a couple of months, the country where my parents live, a place where I have friends and mostly understand the logic behind 'the system.' I plan on sticking around for a while. In my world, I'm setting a very ambitious mental/emotional goal of two years, which seems a bit over-ambitious - after all, I haven't pulled off anything more than 4 months for nearly a decade now. But I'm trying to think big.

I woke up this morning and realised that I'd been dreaming of choosing an iPhone. I have never actually wanted an iPhone, but I decide that once I move to a country with 3G technology and plan on staying there more than a couple of weeks, I want to get something that lets me take advantage of that. I dream of catching up on blogs and writing in random remote places, of talking on skype on a phone, even occasionally going places without my computer (yes, I know, I'm a bit of an addict). For those of you who so kindly read and comment on my blog and to whom I so rarely return the favour, maybe I'll get better at actually interacting.

And so this has started a day of processing all the things that are going to change for me in a week. Most of them are terrifying me: they are ways in which I have grown dysfunctional and skills I will have to re-learn.

For example, what do you do when you have met up with a friend for a cup of coffee, enjoyed catching up but didn't make specific plans for hanging out again? In my world, I never make plans because I'll be leaving soon and will call them for coffee when I'm in town again. I haven't done do-over cups-of-coffee for years! This concept has me a bit frightened.

For that matter, how do you schedule social activities knowing that you can do them anytime in the next year because you'll be around all year? I'm used to there being a sense of urgency to all socialising due to impending travel and am not sure how I'm to deal with a blank slate.

How much shampoo should I buy? How many toothbrushes? Those decisions are always based, for me, on how long I'll be in a location where I won't have easy access to a drugstore. So, does that mean I should only buy one of each? But what if I run out one day... shouldn't I have spare?

Similarly, how does one choose a good towel? My previous logic of the-best-quality-that-takes-up-the-least-suitcase-space/weight probably doesn't apply anymore.

And subscriptions? How do those work for phones, websites, magazines? Three-month, six-month, year-long... Those have never even been an option to me before so I've just rejected them out of hand. But the advertisements point out that you save money with a longer subscription - how do you decide?

As I write this, I am reminded of how incredibly simple my life has been. It's me, my laptop, a suitcase with clothing and a few special items like a coffee press and portable speakers, and my passport. I haven't changed my status with my bank in any way for years, hardly ever use my credit card, don't really have any friends outside of work colleagues. It's not going to be so simple anymore, is it?

But from everything I've seen and read, I think it will be more manageable. All this moving around, combined with long hours and stressful work, has diminished my capacity for complexity in life. I'm counting on that, and that all these things which seem so overwhelming to me now will actually be more manageable than a constant state of culture shock.

death by powerpoint

2011-07-14T21:06:00.004+01:00

On our trip to to Upper Egypt last week, our assigned task was to find out everything there is to know about women, specifically their needs for economic empowerment.

So we did a bit of networking, called around to friends of friends, most of whom were former colleagues of current colleagues, and rather quickly managed to arrange dozens of meetings with local NGOs. Meeting other types of people (businesswomen, professors, average women) was not so easy but we managed a little something. But the local NGOs were eager, even thrilled, to meet with us.

Because it gave them an opportunity to do this:

I know it's not a new concept, but can I just say, again, how effective powerpoint presentations can be as a lullaby?

Apparently someone, someday, probably a representative from some donor representing some wealthy Western country (I couldn't imagine which) came to town and trained local NGOs on how to be a good organisation, including how to make a splash. I'd wager that that visit happened sometime after the invention of powerpoint but before the coining of the phrase "death by powerpoint", and well before anyone invented guidelines such as "no more than four lines per page and no more than five words per line."

No, these powerpoints are thorough and long. Some NGOs have years and years of experience and every... single... project... gets... its own slide. For example, one NGO we met told us they have implemented 43 projects, and every single one got its own powerpoint slide filled with words. Fortunately, this particular NGO was also hyper about photos so there was something to look at, but still. After the introduction slides and the concluding slides, which included things like a full organisational chart and a description of their decision-making mechanisms and the history of their founding, we were treated to 43 project slides.

That's not what we wanted to meet them for! We wanted them to tell us about the needs of women. We wanted to - heaven forbid - ask them questions! But when you only have one hour scheduled for a meeting and 43+ powerpoint slides to navigate, there is not much time left for question-asking, especially because by the end we were in that peaceful sleepy-dreamy place of an afternoon nap.

There is, in fact, a reason why they put us through this torture. It's not entirely because they thought we'd be entertained or educated. It's because, misguided though it may be, they were thinking they could impress us. They'd love to work with us, and were hoping we would be so pleased with what we've heard that we'll go back to our main office and tell them how amazing such-and-such an organisation is.

Upper Egypt... they're not really that scary

2011-07-13T18:17:00.000+01:00

This is a post I would have not thought to write before going to the Saieed (Upper Egypt), but we got a great photo, and I AM back safely, so here goes...

Can't you just envision bandits hiding in those mountains and attacking us as we drive through? I'm just saying.

Apparently Upper Egypt has a bit of a sordid history - while the rest of Egypt is so excited to have freed itself from the strong hand of a 30-year regime, the southern states never seemed to care about that in the first place. Instead, they have their own ruling parties of tribes and clans.

These 'rulers' are considered by many to be the reason that FGM is so widespread and women's rights in general so limited, and they are also the ones who have ensured that very few people in the south seem to care that Egypt's government was recently toppled. They never cared for the police or security in the first place. Instead, there are stories of bandits hiding in mountainsand attacking, even lynching, people they don't like - like the government and the police (making our police escort all the more ironic).

Fortunately, I didn't put much mental energy into thinking about this while we were driving on the desert roads. It only occurred to me afterwards that I might be perceived to be on the side of the government, not the side of the Saieedi tribes, and thus subject to attack. And fortunately, there was no reason to think about it because nothing at all happened.

Instead, I'll remember cute moments like the time one of our drivers told us he owns a tree in the desert. We didn't really believe him, but sure enough as we drove by a break in the rocky mountains, there was one lone joshua tree. His tree, he claimed with a twinkle in his eye. And so, as much as the legend and lore make me think I'm supposed to be scared of the Saieedis, I actually found their culture to be kind of adorable.

FGM

2011-07-12T18:10:00.000+01:00

official statistics range from 93-97% prevalence in Egypt.

There are billboards all over Upper Egypt - that is, Southern Egypt, but referred to as 'upper' because the Nile flows from south to north - warning people that circumcising their daughters (FGM) is not recommended. I wanted to get a photo of one of these billboards while I was there, but it took me a while to work up the courage to ask a driver to pull over and by the time I got to guts I didn't see any more billboards. (A friend said she has a photo; maybe she'll give it to me and I'll share it with you.)

Anyway, what I learned last week was that there has been an extensive awareness campaign throughout Egypt, during the last decade and a half or so, to try to decrease this incredibly high percentage. In addition to billboards, there have been television specials, educational activities in schools, and countless programmes by charitable organisations. Health institutions have also gotten involved, encouraging doctors to help decrease the rate of illness and fatality that is a fallout of FGM. If mothers are going to circumcise their daughters, at least they can do it hygienically and safely.

The other thing I learned last week is that it may not have worked. It may have made it worse. Some anonymous focus group discussions I read about indicated that before the awareness campaigns, men didn't really know much about it. Now that fathers have been 'educated', they have started to actively encourage their wives to make sure and circumcise their daughters because it's better for the family and for their reputation.

Furthermore, when all the doctors got involved, mothers who previously were unsure whether the health risk of FGM was worth the perceived advantages, became comforted to know that they could send their daughters to a professional doctor with good equipment in a clean clinic to do the job.

I'm not sure how to deal with these bits of information. If it's this widespread and growing, then that means that most women I know - even well-educated middle/upper-class women - have been circumcised. It also means that it's not a religious thing because Christians are also doing it, thereby shattering the image in the West that it's an Islamic fundamentalist thing (some say the rate has decreased dramatically among Christians but I don't know).

On the other hand, some figures suggest that it is going down. In the last generation it may have decreased 10% - at this rate, in 10 generations, women in Egypt will no longer have to deal with this!

Don't ever worry about the traffic police in Egypt

2011-07-10T20:12:00.004+01:00

There is a rather odd security policy in Upper Egypt: Foreigners visiting the area are always provided with a police escort. It's for our own safety, they say, but I have to admit I felt safer when we were not driving 130 km/hour to keep up with our escort on a barely-paved rural road!

We'd been warned that we would receive an escort, and had hoped it would not happen. But right as I was dozing off on the outskirts of our destination city, I heard a police siren and felt the car slowing to a halt. I was hit by the dread of a girl who has been pulled over for speeding and so was rather relieved to discover that it was our escort.

A newish blue car with matching blue police lights pulled up alongside us. Four men in uniforms were inside. They asked what hotel we were headed to, then confidently pulled out ahead.

Seconds later, we came up behind a bus. The sound of the siren burst out, followed by the irritating sound of an emergency vehicle's horn. You know the noise: a scratchy, low-key beep that hurts somewhere in the gut to hear and instills fear because something must be wrong if you're hearing that sound.

No, the bus did not pull over, so the cops did what any driver would do: changed lanes into oncoming traffic, took advantage of the larger vehicle's halt on a speed bump, and pulled out ahead. What could our driver, who thus far had been exceedingly kind and cautious, do but follow? The bus was too fast, though, and it did the ambulance chasing thing, using the wake left by the cop car to pass a truck. Eventually we got around the bus and began the harrowing drive into town. Don't they know that we are already more likely to die from a traffic accident than bandits, even when our driver is being careful?

They stuck to us like glue for the duration of our time in that city. When we entered a poor neighbourhood to lead a focus group discussion with women, they followed us in. We were the affair of the week in this little rural community: a celebrity had come to town! When we finally emerged from the car, I heard one child say to another, "I wonder if they are American." I felt so much safer now (she says sarcastically).

Yes, we are. And that is why we had an escort. Ironically, though, when the cops first met me after we got out of the car at the hotel, they thought I was Egyptian. And now, thanks to them, all of the city knows that an American came to town. Yes, I felt so much safer.

And my poor Egyptian colleague! She got the brunt of it all, I'm thinking, because they took her number and called her every. single. half-hour. "Where did you go today? Where is that? Who was with you? Where are you going now? How are you getting there?" As if they hadn't been with us every step of the way.

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 6 (and last)

2011-07-01T17:31:00.001+01:00

About the Monastery

(yes, I am thinking six chapters is really truly enough rehashing of a 30 hour weekend tour, so I will wind down for now. In fact, no guarantee of blogs for a while, since for the next week I'll be trekking in the proverbial 'field' - that is, actually for once hanging out with the people my organisation serves! Hopefully this means there will be some great stories when I get back.)

I wanted to share some interesting facts about the Monastery of St. Catherine, which sits at the foot of Mt. Sinai and is a special pilgrimage destination for Eastern Orthodox. For me too.

The most important thing to know, I suppose, is that it feels like Disneyland. At least for the tourists - ahem, pilgrims - it does. It is open from 9 am until 12 noon every day. Only. There are brief prayers at quarter to 12 open to the public, but otherwise visitors are expected to do nothing but tour, see, photograph, look.

So the tour guides gather up their sleepy post-mountain little flocks between 8:15 and 8:50 to gather at the tiny entrance to the ancient concrete fortress, with a door that barely fits one-and-a-half people. At 9:00 the monk in charge of tourists - ahem, pilgrims - comes out and announces the rules, once in English and once in Russian (he doesn't bother with Arabic): don't talk too loud because this is a special place, please support the monastery by buying your souvenirs at the gift shop, consider lighting a candle in the church. That's about it. Then the crowds push their way through the doorway. (We went post-revolution when tourism is still low, in the heat of summer when hiking Mt. Sinai is not as desirable. I can only imagine the mayhem of entering this holy site, say, last December.)

In the monastery, there are four main features to see:

1. The Moses Well. Honestly, I never bothered to figure out what this is. I've been to the "Moses Spring" near Petra, where they say Moses hit the rock and made water come out. Is this a replica, or a competitor to that place? Or the original? Or something else? Dunno - it was an old-fashioned hand pump well with a explanatory sign in Greek and in Russian.

2. The church. It is Greek Orthodox and it is very Greek Orthodox. I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by all the chandeliers when I walked in. Barely a space in the air is free from silver chandeliers. I lit a candle and prayed for a prayer. "Mercy" is the word I felt God gave me. "Lord, have Mercy. Kyrie Eleison." So that is what I prayed. So much mercy is needed, it is true, in a world full of pain.

Also interesting in the church: Russian men wearing shorts had been asked to tie sarongs around their legs so they'd be decent in a holy place. Awesome. There was a monk in the church whose job was, it seemed, to identify the Orthodox visitors, presumably by their behaviour in church - that is, crossing themselves and kissing icons. He called them over to do some activity, I think to write out prayers. I wish I had faked it and been invited to write a prayer. Behind the divider (sorry, I forget the name for the place that separates the part of the church where only priests go with the rest of the church), to the side, we had a good view of St. Catherine's coffin. Also in the church on display was one of her fingers which I noticed many pilgrims kissing. I read somewhere that her fingers can allegedly be found in many churches, including Westminster Abbey.

3. The oldest manuscript of the Gospels. I didn't go in to the manuscripts museum area, as it cost extra and I didn't feel like I'd like it more than spending extra time in the church. But a friend went in and told me about it. It's full of some of the most amazing bits of church history imaginable including ancient texts in the languages of all of the ancient Christian traditions: Coptic, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac... A few items have been snatched away to other museums, to the great chagrin of the monks, but many are kept in the monastery. That monastery is worth a fortune, I'm sure.

And yes, among the items there is what is likely the oldest surviving manuscript of the Gospels. It was written on cloth and then erased, then something else was written over it. Over time, the initial inscriptions became visible again, due to the type of ink that had been used, and now you can see the old writing with the blind eye, apparently. This document dates to the 2nd century and matches newer manuscripts word-for-word! That and some other St. Catherines finds apparently went a long way to confirming the stability of Christian theological tradition.

4. THE BURNING BUSH. How did I not know to expect that?! There is a bush there that has survived for longer than the monastery has been around. That's about 1700 years. And the bush could be older. And if it's that old, who's to say it's not as old as Moses? And when you see that desert and see a verdant flourishing bush, you have GOT to wonder. They said they tried to replant parts of it elsewhere and it didn't survive, although they did move it over a couple of metres within the monastery courtyard. Apparently it produces some bright leaves which look a bit fiery, and so many people do believe this is the one and only and the same burning bush.

This is a real monastery, and when I say it's Disneyland-esque, I should clarify that I was only allowed to visit less than 1/4 of its property, as most of it is off-limits to the tourists - ahem, pilgrims. I heard one story of an American woman who was invited to stay there, which must be incredibly special and rare. If I had rated an invitation like that I don't imagine I could have said no!

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 5

2011-06-30T17:30:00.000+01:00

كاترين

While I've long been curious to see Mt. Sinai, both for its biblical significance and for the beauty described by friends of mine who made this trip many years ago, the mountain was not the driving force between making this journey.

During my very first week in Syria, I asked a woman who spoke both English and Arabic if there was a name that I should adopt in Arabic that was similar to my own name. Everywhere I've lived, I've tried to translate my name as I learn the language, and it seemed appropriate to do the same for my time in Arab lands. The woman said that there was no need, that "Kathryn" is actually a comm

on name in Arabic.

It turns out that her statement was not exactly true. I have yet to meet an Arab woman named Kathryn. But what I did learn, and come to appreciate more and more over the years, is that I am named after the patron saint of the monastery that lies at the foot of Mt. Sinai. St. Catherine's monastery (it's all spelled the same in Arabic, even if we have dozens of spellings of my name in English) is a spiritual destination for many Christians, particularly of the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Ever since I learned this, I've had a heartfelt desire to see "my" monastery, feeling that there was some important personal connection to this place. Now that I've been there, I have decided that I'm mostly very grateful for the heritage I have in my namesake's story. During this trip, I finally learned a bit of history about this woman who was important enough to have one of the oldest and most venerated Christian monasteries in the world named after her.

The story of St. Catherine is mainly legend, and apparently the Roman Catholic church no longer includes her name day as a mandatory feast because there's not enough conclusive proof that she ever lived. But her story lives on and will inspire me.

She was born in Alexandria to an aristocratic family. Legend has it that she was very beautiful and very intelligent. I like her already. Her birth name was Dorothy, and she converted to Christianity in her teens. Catherine was her baptismal name, in Coptic I think, and it meant Stephanie in Greek. (This is an awesome coincidence since my mother's name is Stephanie.)

Shortly after her conversion, she was talking with the Empress and Catherine convinced her to convert to Christianity. The emperor was naturally furious and he apparently brought together 40 of the brightest intellectual minds in his kingdom to persuade Catherine back into paganism. Instead, Catherine persuaded all 40 of those men to become Christian.

Other events must have transpired, and finally the emperor decided he wanted to marry this intelligent and beautiful young woman who had charmed so many. (I love that this is the way a woman with my name is described.) So he presented her with an offer of marriage, saying that if she turned her back on her newfound faith, he would marry her. She refused, so the emperor condemned her to death using an instrument of torture, a water wheel. Miraculously, though, when she was on the water wheel, instead of her body being crushed and pulled, the wheel exploded. The flying bits of wood killed a few of the onlookers.

So the emperor had her beheaded.

Legend also has it that her remains were miraculously transported to Mt. Sinai where they still remain.

I am so thrilled to have such a fabulous heritage.

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 4

2011-06-29T17:29:00.001+01:00

Gender in the Sinai

After a few beautiful and spiritually uplifting posts about my time on Mt. Sinai, I need to interrupt with a standard Kati-gender-promotion commercial break.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I did not notice this until the very end of my trip. But the terrible truth did eventually hit me:

I only saw THREE women during my entire time in the Sinai.

(This is not counting tourists, most of whom were Russian, and a few conservatively dressed Arab Muslim women with their families. But even those were few.)

Two of the women I saw receptionists at the hotel in Sharm el Sheikh. This is a frighteningly small number, considering that the hotel had gobs and gobs of staff. Beach attendants, pool attendants, waiters and bartenders, shopkeepers, housekeeping, busboys in the restaurant, cooks and chefs, concierge staff, travel agency representatives, baristas... not a single lady among them.

Outside the hotel in Sharm was no better: taxi drivers, check-in at the airport, restaurant staff, storekeepers, street cleaners, you name it... all men.

When we caught the tour, naturally, our guide, driver and police escort were all men. (As an aside, I love how none of them actually climbed the mountain with us. What kind of a police escort sends us on our way up a mountain and says, 'have fun!'? Protection and monitoring of tourists is only ensured as long as no physical exertion is required. He was wearing a suit and dress shoes, too.)

The first thing that tipped me off to the decided lack of feminine influence was that the restroom attendants were all men. Usually, in most parts of the Arab world, cleaning the toilets, handing out TP, and claiming a coin from every tourist is one of the few areas where women can make a bit of profit off the tourism industry. Not on the Sinai. In the restrooms I used in the Sinai desert, I was handing my coins to men, which honestly is a bit awkward for a girl.

We climbed the mountain to the tune of dozens of bedouin men. Our tour guide handed us over to a fit young man who walked us up - very quickly, I might add. Dozens of groups of tourists warranted dozens of guides. In addition, there were coffee shops every 1-2 km along the trail, all managed by men, in some cases boys between the ages of 10 and manhood. On our way down, the bedouin presence was reinforced by boys hawking rocks along the trail (let's take another moment for an aside to consider the irony of buying rocks to carry while hiking - they were nice but not worth the weight).

Still no women.

Finally, after hiking up and hiking down, using the loo and eating breakfast, and an hour journaling and napping, we prepared to enter the monastery. From the monastery courtyard I saw a bedouin woman walking in the far-off distance, wearing a purple galabeya and with her head covered in a flowery scarf. The brightness of her outfit was a sight for sore eyes. The fact she was the first non-tourist woman I'd seen in such a long time was truly refreshing, even if it made the absence of women everywhere else that much more noticeable.

Then we entered the monastery. Even though it's named after a woman, this monastery boasts only 3 sisters, I think, in comparison with 20 monks. We didn't see any of those women either.

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 3

2011-06-28T17:52:00.005+01:00

**dear imperfect prose friends, this last week I went on a little pilgrimage to climb Mt. Sinai and visit St. Catharine's monastery and am writing a little about my experience each day. I chose this chapter to share with the group, but maybe you'd find another chapter more interesting - take your pick :)

"This is the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen. And the sun hasn't even risen yet!"

So said my colleague as we sat next to a boulder in hopes that it would shield us from the worst of the wind, her bundled in a blanket, my other colleague alternating between blanket and walking around to keep warm, and me tucked deep into my hoodie.

Behind us, boulder. To our side, chatty Russians. All around us, an entire sky bursting into visual song.

Except for the bedouins hawking blanket rentals and the Russians discussing poses and clicking their cameras, the silence was piercing.

The day before, sitting on the beach in Sharm el Sheikh, I'd pulled out my Bible and opened to the book of Exodus, to get in the mood for this pilgrimage on which I was embarking. Here is just a snippet of what I read in chapter 19:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the LORD descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently.

After reading that, I'd arrived at the hike truly half-scared that I would be struck dead the moment I set foot on the mountain! Instead, the proverbial mountaintop esoteric silence illustrated just how great an event it was on that day when God revealed himself, possibly in this very spot (of course, historians dispute which peak in the area is the true Mt. Sinai). This was not a place where thunder and lightning was ever likely to strike, and there was nothing flammable for miles that might produce smoke. No fire, no storms, and I was certainly glad that the mountain was not trembling violently as I sat up there!

A few chapters later in Exodus (chapter 24), the tale goes on to describe how the mountain's top was covered by a cloud while Moses met with God. Again, this stark, quiet desert setting had no hints of potential cloudage. This was a story in which God truly showed up in style.

The third and final chapter that I read on this Sinai pilgrimage was Exodus 32, the famed story of the golden calf, that scene in which Moses (Charlton Heston in

the Hollywood classic) breaks the stone tablets out of anger. My thoughts on this chapter warrant a blog all themselves, but suffice it to say here, that I can see how Moses sided with God in that story. Standing on that mountaintop, heaven feels about two inches away. I guess in Moses' case, he was in a cloud so he couldn't see the sky, but instead God was even closer yet! Meanwhile, looking straight down those hundreds of feet of cliffs, the camp of the people must have looked like another world entirely.

Being up there is being with God, and how could the sunrise from a place like that be anything less than the best?

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 2

2011-06-27T17:30:00.001+01:00

Moses the trekker and mountain climber

There are two ways to get to the top of Mt. Sinai, although I only knew about one of them when we arrived at the hill. One route is called the 'camel path' and is a 6 km trail with a constant upwards slant. At the end, are 760 roughly hewn rock steps to the top. The top of the mountain is so steep that I don't imagine there's any alternative to steps, other than good old fashioned rock climbing.

(photo credit: http://abcnews.go.com/widgets/mediaViewer/image?id=8573745)

The other way up is steps and steps alone: 3700 or so. Apparently they leave from somewhere behind St. Katherine's monastery and head straight up.

So as I was climbing up the camel trail, and then the steps, I became more and more aware of the fact that Moses was apparently in his 40s when he went up the mountain to meet with God and collect the commandments. I'm thinking that a man in is 40s back then was probably equivalent, in terms of physical fitness, to a man in his 60s or more now. I'm also thinking that his sandals were not very good. Finally, I'm thinking that the steps and the camel trail date back no more than a millennium or two, not four, which means that he scaled that hulk of rock.

My respect for Moses during this trip grew a great deal.

Because I also recalled my visits to the lovely Mt. Nebo, where Moses apparently saw the Promised Land before dying.

According to scripture, there was an occasion on which Moses got full of himself and equated himself with God, and his punishment was that he would never set foot in the Promised Land. But God would let him see it at least, after the people finished their 40 years of wandering in the desert. They wandered for 40 years because the first time they came close, they sent some scouts to check it out who told them about how awesome it was and how strong the residents were, so they got scared. God told them they shouldn't be scared and to make sure they learned their lesson, he'd let a full generation pass by before they entered the land.

So, Moses led them through their 40 year desert trek and never got to set foot in the final destination. The distance from Mt. Sinai to Mt. Nebo is long, and very, very dry. Scorching hot desert. It wouldn't take anywhere remotely near 40 years, though, and I imagine the extra years were spent in places like Eastern Jordan and Saudi Arabia: places even hotter and dryer yet.

Moses was one resilient man. He climbed that mountain, multiple times, then led the world's greatest ever desert trekking expedition, during the ages roughly from 40 to 80. Then he climbed another, much much gentler mountain, to see the promise which would remain forever out of his reach, and die.

My admiration for Moses is exponentially greater after this Sinai trip.

Climbing Mt. Sinai, chapter 1

2011-06-26T17:46:00.000+01:00

It was a true mountaintop experience. I am jetlagged after my first known all-nighter since undergrad, and I'm trying not to obsess about the fact it's not the cheapest weekend-away I've ever taken. But it was worth it. Oh, so worth it. Both for sociological reasons and for spiritual reasons, obviously in reverse order of importance.

So I will write a few blogs about it, mainly so I will remember this experience for years to come.

For today, I'm starting with a simple observation:

None of the tourbooks bothered to mention that I'd be climbing a mountain with 1000 Russians and a handful of other nationalities. I didn't know that the narrow, slightly-precarious path would be so crowded with tourists. I'd heard there were a lot of pilgrims who climb the mountain and so I expected some other die-hard religious types to be climbing with us. I just wasn't prepared for the [drinking] tourists, of whom there were many.

AND, our guide told me that before the revolution he was going up the mountain several times a week, leading groups. Now, he's averaging two climbs a week. So apparently it's usually much more crowded than what I just experienced.

So... if anyone comes across this blog because you are looking for information on climbing Mt. Sinai and visiting St. Katherine's monastery, please be forewarned of that which I wish I'd known: it's a tourist trap, and a crowded one at that.

Still worth it, but it'd be that much better if there were a crowds-free option.

Branding or Bling?

2011-06-25T20:40:00.002+01:00

An interesting feature of donor-funded development projects is the necessity of making sure that everyone involved knows that they are participating in a donor-funded development project. The idea can't be organically blended into community activities; it needs to be a distinct event. This is one of the reasons why, when submitting a new proposal, we inevitably have a major panic attack when we realise right before submitting that we haven't come up with a name: that name will be the symbol of the project, the gem that holds everyone involved together, doing something together.

The name is soon used as a basis for a professionally-designed logo, and over the course of a 2-3 year project, calendars might be made, along with some engraved agendas, pens, maybe even some bags. All these bits of bling will have the project's logo and the logo of all the donors as decoration. This is called 'branding', and it is important because helps keep the project distinct from normal life, and it helps everyone know where the money came from. (It also helps if a donor actually has an attractive logo, as that will now become the back of a t-shirt or the border of a photo that beneficiaries might hang in their houses.)

So... this is the last week for a project in my office here. After three years of doing some great things, the final ceremony is about ticking off boxes: making sure everyone with any political or societal standing at all is thanked for their support of the project, honouring the participants, remembering the uniqueness of what was done and the singularity of the project participants, and handing out a bit more branded bling.

This last Thursday, I attended the closing ceremony (complete with up-and-coming band performing in a room whose acoustics were designed for speakers or occasional break-out sessions). As a participant in the closing ceremony, I was given: a pin with the project logo on it, coasters with the project logo on it, a pen that can double as a ruler, a USB flash drive, a CD with project stories on it, and a laptop bag with the donors' logos taped to it. When preparing for this ceremony, staff had at one point forgotten to include donor logos on the bling - instead they only put the project logo. But a blighted donor is a reluctant repeat donor so this needed to be rectified quickly. And so it was that the team printed up some little papers with the donors' logos and then taped them to the laptop cases using packing tape.

Further branding included a big banner for the project that was made for this closing ceremony. It's made of durable waterproof material. (Catch the irony here?) It also included the invitations themselves which were thoroughly and appropriately branded. It also included graduation caps and gowns for leading project participants - branded with the project logo. Apparently, as the evening drew to a close, one of the 'graduates' asked what she was supposed to do with this cap and gown? She was told it was a gift from the project and she repeated her question. I like this girl already.

I realise I'm using a frightfully sarcastic tone in this post. Sorry. In all fairness, the bling was quality and cute and I know many people will enjoy their coasters. The branding is fair - as long as community programming is done through big donors, we will have to credit those donors for their support; we give them publicity in exchange for cash. Give a little, take a little... there's no such thing as a 'free' project, we all know the drill.

And it all ended well for me, because as I was leaving a colleague regretted that she'd forgotten to get her laptop bag (with pen/ruler, USB, coasters, CD etc. therein), so I gave her mine.

another little vignette of England

2011-06-22T22:02:00.003+01:00

It was a rainy London afternoon, one of those moments in which I felt I was walking through a stereotype: drizzly rain, dreary skies, lots of people walking very quickly to their destinations.

I am not a Londoner and, as per my personal custom, felt no need to be carrying an umbrella. I dropped that baby off in some suitcase somewhere, deeming it unnecessary baggage weight when travelling. It didn't get much mileage in Sue Dan or Cairo. It is still somewhere in my life; I just don't know where - but I suspect I'll find it eventually.

All that being said, when I'd left the house that morning I'd noticed the clouds in the skies and remembered that I was in London. So I'd thrown a brilliant magenta-pink coloured canga into my purse - just in case.

And so it was that when, during my walk home, the consistent flow of the drizzle reached a point that I could no longer deny the rather obvious fact that it was raining, I pulled out the canga and draped it over my head and my handbag. It was easily as effective as any umbrella, right?

"Amazing weather!" Between the pitter patter of raindrops and the fact that my ears were wrapped in cloth, this is what I heard the man behind me saying, but I wasn't really sure that I'd heard him.

I turned my head and saw that he was indeed speaking to me. So as to affirm his statement about the weather, which I believed could only have been stated in irony, I nodded with a cringed nose.

"Wow, that look says it all!", he said with a slightly shocked chuckle.

I nodded.

"I try to compliment you on the amazing colour of your headscarf and you give me that look. I understand."

Oh. Of course a Londoner wouldn't be commenting on the weather - nothing unusual about that! He was commenting on the canga. And I'd totally shut him down. Oops. So I tried a friendly half-smile and a chuckle of my own.

"It's ok," he continued. "Have a good day!"

"You too," I replied weakly as he traipsed off into the entrance of the college right up in front.

p.s. Thank you so much to all of you who said such flattering things about my divine encounter last week with the woman visiting her husband in hospital. I think all the credit goes to her and her faith!

p.p.s. It seems there were many memorable people during my trip to England but I guess I was having too much fun to remember them. This is the only story I can recall to share here. Strange and sad how quickly people can enter and then leave our lives.

a woman of faith

2011-06-15T11:15:00.003+01:00

As we approached our destination, she and I got up from our seats at the same time and headed toward the train door to disembark: she looked at me with round innocent gray eyes, and commented, "Busy day today, eh?"

To which I replied, "Do you ride this train often?" (It was my first time on this particular route and I had figured the train was always crowded. I guess this made me part of the cause of the 'busy-ness'.)

"My husband is in hospital," she replied. "Has been, for eight days."

"Oh!" I replied, a bit taken aback by her cheery disposition. "What's he in for?"

"He has cancer."

Oh.

"On April 2X he had a kidney replacement."

"That's good, right?" I answered, trying to be conversant and figure out why she seemed so happy about the situation.

"Well, yes. He's had some complications, in and out of hospital, but overall, we're grateful."

"Where are you coming in from?"

"XX City. Visiting hours start at 2pm so every day I take the train to be here by then."

At this point the short pixie lady with the perfect bob-cut gray hair bid me a smiling good day. I started to take my leave of her, but she could tell I was lost so she guided me toward the exit. As we climbed the stairs she explained that every day she takes the train for 2 hours to come to the hospital, followed by a bus ride, and 2 hours home every night after visiting hours end. The trains are often late so she rarely gets home before 10:30 p.m. then starts again the next day. Rather than stay near the hospital, she prefers to be home because someone needs to keep things in order there. Plus, she is hopeful her husband will be released shortly.

Then she started telling me about her husband's surgery. "It's a new technique where they took his kidney out, removed the cancer, then put it back in. It's amazing what technology can do."

"How many kidneys does he have?" I asked.

"Only the one. The last one, they removed ten years ago. That was the beginning of the cancer." I promise you, she was chirping as she said this.

"Wow!" I don't think I would be chirping while telling this story. "So this has been going on for a long time. It must be tough."

"Well, yes. But faith has helped us through it," she said shyly and shortly. Then she quickly added, "Plus, we've been lucky. Good doctors, good technologies, all that."

The smile back on her face, she showed me that we'd arrived at the exit and bode me farewell again, then disappeared into the crowd.

Impressions of England

2011-06-11T17:12:00.003+01:00

I landed last night, flying in from Cairo. My first thought upon leaving Heathrow airport was that the contrast between here and "the field" is a lot less on this trip than it has been when coming from places like Haiti, Timor or Kosovo. Cairo is a big city with paved roads and lots of cars. London has all those things, too.

But... a few images are sticking in my mind during my first 24 hours back:

1. This one isn't really an element of culture shock although it sort of is too, because I really don't think I would have ever seen it in Cairo. As I walked out of the arrivals hall into the orderly throng of drivers toting signs, parents waiting for children, and friends waiting for friends, I passed a man standing a little bit off from the centre of activity. Disheveled and carrying a supermarket bouquet of flowers, his nervous face full of anxiety and hope caught my eye. Because I was busy and a bit distracted, I didn't dwell on the sight, plus I didn't want to stare. But as I walked away I thought that probably the girl he was waiting for was lucky indeed - he was full of good intentions and that means a lot.

2. This morning I was walking into town and passed a little busy roundabout. I stood there and stared as I watched each car taking its turn, each driver knowing her or his moment to go. They were all using signaling but none of them made eye contact with any of the other drivers. Everyone just knew where to go and they got efficiently through that roundabout. THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN CAIRO. (In Cairo, there would probably be a major backup as everyone tried to go at once, or a bunch of near-accidents as people pulled into any tiniest space as quickly as possible: there is no such thing as 'waiting one's turn' there!)

3. Also as I was walking this morning, I caught myself twice swerving my steps to veer away from men on bikes. I was on the pavement (sidewalk) and they were on the road, so why was I veering? I realised that in Cairo, I've learned the hard way to suspect every man of trying to get me. If a man on a bike is riding towards me, even remotely close to me, he will probably reach out and try to grope, or at the very least, say something inappropriate. Obviously this is not a common occurrence in a little sleepy English town. (I am not saying it never happens, I guess it probably does. Just not all-the-time.) So I had to discipline myself to keep walking and not suspect the bikers of lewd motives.

And once I had taken all this in, I realised that the cool fresh air on my face had already dried out my tear ducts after a very difficult few days, and I set about enjoying the rest of my day.

p.s. Cairo has a lot of stuff going for it. I like Cairo, I do! But just for today I want to enjoy being here not there.

a bit of shame-faced awareness raising

2011-06-08T13:58:00.004+01:00

Have you seen the film Blood Diamond? I think it's a rather brilliant film, so when it came on TV a few weeks ago, I thought I might watch. After about 30 seconds, my eyes were filled with tears and I was burying my head in my pillow. Yes, it's a sad film, but not 30 second sob sad. Yes, it's a scary film, but not horror in 30 seconds scary.

I immediately understood what was going on with me. The story had taken on real-life. It wasn't just a heartbreaking tale of a faraway land, it was a metaphor for the lives of people I lived with, laughed with and cried with. The boy soldiers, check. The women fleeing horny men with guns, check. The family of refugees separated by war and doing everything to reunite, check. Sure, I'm none of those people, in fact most of my time is spent in rooms that have air-conditioning and Internet radio. I've only a few times met people who fit those descriptions.

But even so, I feel like it hits home. My colleagues have been there and have seen it, in some cases lived it. The people in a film like Blood Diamond have experienced things like the people I went to the Dar to serve. And nothing has improved for them. Nothing. Maybe they're worse-off, and on some days, the only thing for which I'm grateful is that I "escaped" with minimal emotional trauma.

Today I was catching up on news in Sue Dan and discovered that most of it is bad. I was sent four different accounts of fighting in a border town. Very bad. One of the accounts was an eyewitness account but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to share it publicly so I won't. The New York Times article is much dryer and easier to read, but the story is still ugly:

"On Sunday, members of the southern military raided a police station in the city of Kadugli, looting weapons, United Nations officials said. Clashes broke out Sunday evening between the northern and southern armies about 60 miles away, they said. On Monday evening, fighting broke out ... with 10 tanks ... stationed throughout the town..."

The other accounts add details about people fleeing their homes but having nowhere to hide, other people staying in their houses for days on end, the fact that the market is closed for all business but shooting, lack of food or water or fuel... hospital patients preferring to take their chances running through the countryside with no treatment than to sit as ducks in the hospital, an increasing death toll, new mothers giving birth without any water to drink.

It's bad, and it's not the first city in the area to break out: If you want more, you can google-news "Abyei". Brace yourself.

There's a novel which portrays wartime Sue Dan that is fabulously written and horridly graphic. One day I was sitting in a café in Kht reading a battle scene from the book and I was terrified to walk back to my guesthouse, realising that the perpetrators in the book might very well be the men passing me on the streets at that moment. I'm not done reading it - must take that kind of stuff in tiny gulps. The novel is called Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo. If you're emotionally at a point where you can allow your heart to break for a part of the world I'm guessing most of my readers have never been and will never visit, I definitely recommend it. It tells the story better than the news, and now it has made the news stories come alive for me with a sharp pang somewhere deep in my belly.

Here's a little tiny excerpt, just to give a taste of the battle... battles:

The destruction was worse than he'd feared. Through a thin canopy of smoke, bomb craters, pulverized buildings, and puddles of fire passed below... Ghastly was what it was. Franco and Lily dead, Manfred slightly injured but in severe shock. Michael couldn't estimate how many others had been killed or severely injured. He was going to collect the survivors and the walking wounded and lead them to the airstrip on foot... They were carrying a body on a stretcher, covered by a blanket and attended by an assembly of eager flies whose buzzing was audible from several yards away.

That war ended but it's now coming back. This country needs our prayers... I don't know that anything else will help!

Because your hearts are big, I am trusting that my Imperfect Prose friends will not only accept me being a bit emotional and all-over-the-place, but maybe a few of you will pray too.

Friends

2011-06-06T21:46:00.003+01:00

I have been pondering friends the last few days.

Friends come in different shapes and sizes:

the ones I've known for years
the ones I've known for months
the ones I've known for days
people who I met the day I was born
people who I met the day they were born
people I met one day and immediately knew would become a friend
family members with whom I have a thing or two in common
those who I met through family, some of whom became family
colleagues who are lovely and friendly
especially those colleagues with whom I've gone through the fire and survived
roommates, housemates
and what to make of colleagues who I lived with and with whom I've been through the fire and survived?
there are my butlers who don't make very good friends at all
and then, of course, there are the hundreds upon hundreds of people who once were dear friends - maybe just for a few weeks, but still, they were - even so, now we've grown apart
many of those, and many others are the most friendy friends of all: facebook friends

Then, I realise that the names I would match to that list today are so dramatically different from the names I may have thought of two years ago, not to mention 10 years ago. People who I just KNEW would be lifelong friends when I met them turned out to be just facebook friends. Colleagues who were lovely and friendly but not more at the time, have turned out to be people I've known for years and consider dear. But mostly, I think of so, so, so many people who used to be something special in my world and still are, but are so far away.

Why do I either get a happy warm feeling in my tummy thinking about my lovely friends, or get a dull thud in my heart thinking about those who have grown far? Well...

Friends will listen to me
I will listen to them
We can laugh together, play together, explore together
I can learn from them and be put in my place by them.
Maybe I will have a little something to teach them
When I just need to think out loud, they will bear with me
We might not share the same experiences, but there's enough imagination to go around so that we can learn, and will do what we can to immerse ourselves in each other's world
Even if we lose touch for ages, we can always pick up again
I can cook for them, and they can show me something new. Maybe they will give me a lift.
If they have a house they let me crash, if I have a house I let them crash
When a friendship is growing, something is happening in the heart. When a friendship is shrinking... oh let's not talk about that. It's the fear of the friendship shrinking that sometimes keeps me from growing it in the first place. So silly, I know, but that's humans for you.

So... lately I've had a lot of colleagues become dear, but in return I've discovered that many other friendships have been shrinking. More work = less heart, sometimes. It's time to change that, and I want to go back to my friends. But will they be the same? Do I want them to be? After all, I know I'm not the same. But I am reminding myself to be open to all of the above, both lists, to put as much heart into people as I might ever want to get back from them.

a weird dream

2011-06-02T13:42:00.002+01:00

To any guys reading this blog... this might not be for you. You may find it a bit odd or even disturbing, but it was such a fabulously random dream that I wanted to record it here anyway. (And knowing human nature, I'm afraid I may have just sparked your curiosity... you just can't win, can you?)

So, this morning as I was getting ready for the day, I had a flashback and remembered my dream from last night, which actually only ended when I got myself up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

In the dream I was in some community-living setting (this was indeed a lovely dream for a person living out of a hotel room for months on end) and in the compound, there was a beauty salon. I think there were actually two beauty salons rolled into one. One of the wings was super-duper posh and far more expensive than I could afford, for any of their services! The other was sketchy-cheap, and I knew this because they only offered cold-sugar hair removal, not hygienic hot waxing. I wasn't going for this either - in the past year I've been cajoled into sugar waxing twice and regretted it both times. Ouch.

And then, on the edge of the salon, I discovered that they had some products for sale, but because it was communal living, I didn't have to pay for the products. As I write this here I realise that that's completely incongruous: if I didn't have to pay for those I probably didn't have to pay for the expensive salon either. But then the dream wouldn't make any sense. Not that it does anyway.

One of the products on offer was a gel wax - basically the same product as the hot wax used by the good salons, but softer, gel-like, so I could use it without needing to heat it up. So I took the tube off the shelf and opened it up. I started smearing the gel all over my legs, which were in desperate need of some hair removal, that is, they were so hairy I might have known it was a dream! I smeared that stuff all over on one of my legs, then I realised that I didn't have any paper strips for removing the wax. And if you know anything about waxing, without the paper, nothing good can come of the experience.

So I started walking around the compound, with one trouser leg rolled up exposing a sticky icky leg. I passed my housemates, which included a lot of elderly homey women sitting on stoops and children running around, and explored all the shelves of our home for paper strips for removing wax. At this point the compound was full of shelves of beauty products, and I didn't have too much trouble finding the strips. So I pulled those down and started to lay them out on my waxy legs, then I realised they already had cold wax on them - they were waxing strips that came with the wax. That would only make things worse. So I kept looking, and I kept finding pre-waxed strips in different colours: pink, blue, yellow wax on white paper. Meanwhile my leg was getting more and more gooey and uncomfortable.

And then I got myself awake enough to realise that my leg was intact and perfectly dry.

So, does anyone want to psychoanalyse that one for me??

timor, indonesia, haiti

2011-05-31T20:49:00.001+01:00

Last year I lived on three tropical islands. Three of the most beautiful places on earth. Three of the neediest countries on earth. Ah, but what a lovely life I lived.

While I don't have any intention of moving back to any of those places, increasingly, I will feel nostalgic about one or some of them.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend about diving. I am not a diver, but I know that Timor Leste is supposed to be one of the world's gems of diving. A pang of homesickness hit me as I remembered the time I dropped a friend off at a dive centre for her day's excursion. The dive centre was in the same facility as a posh restaurant where I had an inspiring business meeting. The restaurant was overlooking the pristine blue sea, with palm trees framing the view. And so on and so forth.

Below is, what I just realised, the ONLY photo I took at the beach in Timor! This is not from the restaurant I was thinking of above, but this one was possibly my favourite joint in town. They'd serve me coffee press coffee right on the beach. (Just google image search "Timor Leste" for some better photos!)

I can't remember right now what brought back memories of Indonesia. Someone asked me if it's a nice place, but I can't remember who was asking. I think they asked because I told them that I absolutely adored working in Indonesia. I had the best colleagues who were so kind and so motivated and so on top of their game. And, yes, it is absolutely gorgeous. It is, of course, the world's largest archipelago so it's not really fair to generalise. I lived in West Sumatra, home of the semi-famous Lake Maninjau. Click that link and take a moment to ponder that I took that photo with my unimpressive phone camera. Yeah, beautiful is an understatement.

I didn't have to take any photos in Sumatra, because one of my colleagues is a brilliant photographer who loves to share. I love this photo she took of me in the rice fields next to the Lake, about a half hour from the hotel-turned-office where we worked and lived. We were helping people build temporary houses to live in after their houses were destroyed in a major earthquake. What a lovely place, and a lovely people.

Then, just this evening, I was chatting with a former colleague who is currently in Haiti. It was a brief chat, but in the course of our conversation, she reminded me of the amazing house where I lived, some awesome colleagues, and the great food! Haiti is full of contrasts and those contrasts just increase the searing pain of life on that half of the Espanhola island. It's an exhausting, intense place to be. But so full of life, perhaps the most 'full of life' place I've lived in for a very long time.

All my friends on Facebook who live in Haiti are active posters of photos so I never felt the need to take my own. But I just realised that I DID take a few photos, for an assessment we were doing in a rural area regarding people's needs in water and sanitation. Great fun, right? But here's one photo to share... see how full of life these kids are? I miss that. And the food.

Oh what I wouldn't do right now for some Haitian food, on a Timorese beach, with my Indonesian colleagues... Or some posh food from a Timorese restaurant with some friends from Haiti in the Sumatra mountains... Or just to get to magically visit each place for a few hours.

7 minutes

2011-05-29T20:41:00.003+01:00

Today I learned that a study was recently done regarding the work burden of civil servants in Egypt. The study concluded that the average government employee in Egypt works... wait for it... wanna guess?... have a think...

7 minutes a day

So after I heard that statistic, I was summoned into the enormous building in downtown Cairo where all - yes, ALL - the country's bureaucratic paperwork is done.

A colleague and I followed our bureaucracy expert guy into the sprawling boundless complex. A girl checked our bags then we headed up the stairs with about one hundred other people. We lost our fixer and almost went to the wrong office, but thankfully I caught a glimpse of his white head about two dozen people (and two metres) away from us. We followed him through a labyrinth of hallways to get to the visa desk, where we were required to report.

Now, here's the thing. As we walked past throngs and throngs of people, certainly more than a thousand on just one one floor of the giant edifice, I realised they were all crowding up at service counters. And behind those counters were busy clerks. There were many, many busy clerks, but there were more people vying for their attention.

Those clerks were certainly working more than 7 minutes today.

They were also mainly women.

So now I have an image of, for every busy woman handling the crowds, a dozen men sitting in a back room somewhere drinking tea all day long. Just to average out the 7 minutes.

more on the laundry man

2011-05-27T22:08:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago I blogged about the sweet older very-Egyptian man who runs a laundry shop a few blocks from my hotel.

I did laundry again this week, and was pleased that they recognised me and gave me a discount for being a repeat customer. I decided that with the discount I wouldn't trouble them with a receipt for reimbursement; I'd pay it myself. Three weeks of laundry for 10 bucks, not a huge sacrifice, right. Plus I wasn't convinced he had another work-of-art receipt tucked away in his agenda waiting for me.

So I just paid for my clean clothes and came back to my hotel room, put my clothes away and imbibed of the beautiful smell of freshly laundered fabric. He uses a nice fruity detergent.

Just now I was folding up my laundry bag, which I insist on using so he doesn't waste any more plastic than necessary on me, and I noticed some handwriting in Arabic on the bag:

The Foreign Woman's Bag

The day of youth

2011-05-25T17:50:00.003+01:00

I'm living in a unique alternate universe right now, the universe in which "the day of youth" has come. Formerly, young people were seen as a minority, disenfranchised - like the Dalit of India perhaps. "Children should be seen but not heard", to the extreme. Now something has changed, and the oppressed are standing tall. This is the day of youth.

I even wonder if we shouldn't say the oppressed has become the oppressor - after all, if the world is in the hand of youth, what does that leave for everyone else?

(Incidentally, according to the definition we are using, I will still be a youth for 2.5 more years. Guess how old I am?)

The thing is, it's a little hard to fathom how a minority can be an age group? Does it mean that when the days of one's youth are over, that person's productive role in society is over? Do today's youth realise that by taking pride in their age, they are setting themselves up for failure?

In fact none of this is true, and the older generation is just as proud of what has happened in Egypt as are their younger counterparts. They have been slowly working toward this goal not for months or years, but for decades! But it is also true that they were not able to pull it off without the energetic mobilising efforts of their progeny.

So to Egypt's youth, I want to say, remember not who you were, but who you will become. Remember who brought you into this world, who taught you, who supported you. Keep your energy and passion high, but also remember that you are the majority - 70% of the population - and consider the possibility that you mobilised more people simply because there were more of you to mobilise. Remember that the old way of doing things belonged to a small bunch of people, not to everyone who is older than you.

Please, today is a new day, and do the right thing. Please don't perpetuate the disrespect. You are standing tall, and the world is saying that this is your time. Do the honourable thing, the difficult thing: after suffering disrespect for so many years, now you can shame those who disrespected you by insisting on showing them respect. Build a society of tolerance not only for different religions, not only for women and men, not only for uneducated youth or people from other countries, but for your own parents and for who you will soon become. Then, maybe one day, you and your children will be able to stand up together.

I, Kati, am a youth who knows I won't be young for long, and this just what I think about the day of youth. I'm sharing these thoughts with the Imperfect Prose community because they are imperfect and I learn so much from you all, no matter your age! ;)

ordering food

2011-05-24T20:03:00.002+01:00

Have you ever worked at a restaurant? And eaten that restaurant's food every day? Did you reach a point where it wasn't appetising anymore, and then push through and keep eating it, eventually reaching a point where the very smell of that restaurant made you nauseous?

Well, living in a hotel sort of has that effect. I am convinced that the kitchen here uses some unique chemical in all its food, maybe a special type of oil or some brant of salt. It's something that adds to the lustre of a fancy hotel for the first few days, then grows tiresome, and then eventually just makes me fill a bit ill.

My room has no cooking facilities, no hot water kettle and no microwave. So I depend on the hotel kitchen for all my food. Within a week or two I realised that if I was going to eat breakfast in the hotel, I couldn't eat dinner as well. Now nearing the end of Month Two, I've stopped eating breakfast too! The neighbourhood I'm in only has one restaurant, by the way.

Enter the very best website idea I have ever seen. This site deserves some kind of international award for brilliant innovative effectiveness. It's not only a good idea, but it works. The website is called Otlob.com - look it up if you want! You can choose your neighbourhood in any of Egypt's major cities, then your restaurant, then items off the menu, then click for delivery.

So one day I have Indian, another Chinese, another Italian, another hamburgers. Brilliant: the food is reasonably appetising, and of course I save loads of money because hotel food is absurdly priced. Still not the same as cooking my own food, but a big step up from this hotel whose food now brings to mind feelings of nausea even at this moment just because I'm writing about it. (I think I can handle their waffles or pancakes once or twice a week, as long as I limit myself to no more. :( )

Otlob.com has a high success rate in my book, but once in a while they miss it. The other evening I was tired late at night but hadn't eaten anything so I decided to go ahead and order a sub and a salad from Subway. I put in the order at 11pm, but there was a glitch on the site that delayed it by 15 minutes. No worries - the food would still be here by midnight maximum.

Midnight came and went and no food came. Otlob.com has this great link that says after the alloted time period, "Your food should arrive within a few minutes. If it doesn't come, click HERE." So I clicked and they said they were contacting the restaurant. This link actually works; once I was told that the restaurant had a backlog due to peak hours and the food would be here shortly. Information is gold.

The other night, however, it didn't work. Otlob never sent me an update. So I asked the hotel reception desk to reject the order if anyone from Subway showed up, then I found some crackers and cheese and an apple to tide me over to morning. At 12:30 a.m. Subway called me on my mobile saying they had the wrong address. They were on the right street but couldn't find it. (Yeah, they couldn't find the 5-star hotel next to the embassy on a 200-metre-long street. Whatever.) I said, "Please take the food back. You are too late." They hung up, but they called again 10 minutes later with the same question. I said "I want to go to sleep! No more food, stop bothering me!"

Then I registered a complaint email on Otlob.com. The next morning Otlob.com called me and said they had followed up with Subway and would do so again. Brilliant! It didn't fix my food problem that night, but at least I knew the website cares.

And, really, all my other ordering-food experiences have been hits. In fact, I'm going to go eat my sushi dinner right now.

Privacy

2011-05-21T21:23:00.003+01:00

When I moved to the Dar last September, I was determined to continue blogging even though certain people strongly strongly urged me to stop. They wanted me to stop because anything I wrote could - and probably would - be tracked. They had heard of people being given the boot for much less than a slightly negative blog post.

I countered by saying that I blog under a nickname, don't talk about my employer, and don't describe location-specific details. On the rare occasion that I do write something personally identifiable, it's usually innocuous and probably even happy. That is to say, when I lived in Syria, I blogged shamelessly and openly, just making sure that I remembered to mention my pleasure with that beautiful country, its beautiful people, and the degree to which I felt safe and protected there. If my blog were tracked, I would gain friends in high places, not enemies! Such would be my strategy in Sue Dan.

Then a colleague pointed out that in my list of blogs-I-follow in the bottom corner, there was a link to my employer's blog. Another colleague told me a tale about someone whose blog was as nondescript as mine, and who had said only the slightest negative critique one day. That person was quickly handed an exit visa.

So I deleted my employer's blog's link and took the added precaution of renaming the country, region and city where I stayed. I think you know where the Dar is, right? I think it's kind of obvious but hopefully it would at least siderail a search engine. And I kept writing nice things about my "hosts", even when I was less than happy with them.

Why do I share this story here? Because David left a comment in my blog the other day asking me about how guarded I am in what I share on this blog. He asked me if it makes me uncomfortable to see others baring all. I don't know if he was thinking of one type of 'guardedness' in particular, but I think I'm 'guarded' in two different ways: (1) honesty of the heart, and (2) details of my world.

Well, David, here's my answer if you're referring to (1) the guarded heart: I envy those of you who are able to share your whole hearts honestly. It shows that you are in tune with your hearts and confident enough to share openly. No, it doesn't make me uncomfortable, but it does make me a bit sad because it shows me just how much my lifestyle has taught me to guard my heart. After several years of moving every 3-4 months to a new country and making a completely new set of friends, I have grown weary of the emotional energy it takes to seriously invest in new people. In face-to-face relationships, I certainly don't bare as much as I used to. I have tried to maintain my blog as a haven of continuity where I can always be myself, but that's hard to do. I'm afraid my slightly-protective emotional walls now extend to the bloggy part of my life.

Now, David, if you're asking about (2) hiding the details of my world, I think the answer is much more interesting: I am guarded for security reasons. Many, if not most, of the people I blog about are considered to be living in "sensitive" circumstances. In some cases, if I write enough about them to make them immediately recognisable, I could be putting their lives at risk. Sometimes women's husbands would be upset that their wives were described so thoroughly in a public forum, sometimes refugees could be connected to something they were fleeing. I believe it is highly unethical to portray a person, even in writing, who is in a sensitive situation. But I also believe it is important for (a) the world to know what the rest of the world is like, and (b) me to process my experiences. So I settle on talking about them in vague terms, with details removed. I prefer to delete than to alter their features, and I have decided that anonymising them makes it ok. (Also, as mentioned above, my own safety could be at risk.)

But lest I sound like some kind of saintly angel bringing light to the world, I am even MORE hesitant to blog about people I know and who might read my blog! Part of this is personal fear of rejection - what if they don't like what I wrote about them? But even more, I feel like their lives are their property. If I'm going to talk about them, unless we've discussed the blog in advance, I don't want them to FEEL like I'm talking about them in any way. So I try to tell the truth without telling about them.

But then I see some of you who put your names, family photos, city of residence, and other details on your blog. Does that make me uncomfortable? For me, no - in fact, I enjoy seeing your world! But for you, well, a little bit yes, I am concerned. I know you don't live in war zones or under repressive regimes, but there are crazy people out there. Are you looking for celebrity status just so people can stalk you? I doubt that's what you are thinking, but don't you worry that that could be an unintended outcome? I don't know if it's because I've been 'forced' to be careful for so many reasons, or if it's because the issues are real, but I would be highly reticent to open my world for all to see in any public forum at all.

But that's just me, and the circumstances that have shaped my decision-making are, to say the least, somewhat unorthodox.

Will you share with me your thinking on the topic? How open are you and why? Do you think I go too far in talking about people here, or do you wish I said more?

self-pity

2011-05-18T18:55:00.002+01:00

There is something I've been pondering quite a bit lately, and that is the validity of self-pity. I think it must be rather obvious to most of humanity that allowing ourselves to drown in a mire of self-pity is not a good thing.

But recognising the challenges in our lives and forgiving ourselves for imperfect reactions... that seems not only valid to me, but essential for dealing with the imperfect reactions, aka getting over it. After all, when we try to deny our failings we only fail more, right?

Now, if you read this blog very regularly, you know that the last few months have not been the easiest of my life. I haven't shared many details, but I've complained plenty. I have expressed some degree of self-pity here, and I have mulled over my imperfect reactions.

One of my imperfect reactions has been an inability to listen to others, and engage meaningfully in their lives. I've felt like it takes all my energy to get from day to day, and while I want to care for others and be a giving person, lately I have felt like I consistently fall short in this area. While I recognise my desire to improve, I also have been forgiving of myself, accepting that this is a challenging phase. This, too, shall pass.

During the last few weeks, though, I've heard from a few good friends of mine about bad times they are going through. Just like I won't betray too many details of my own circumstances here, I also think it best not to share any details of their challenges, anonymity or not. But believe me, they are dealing with some hefty pain. Things in the realm of war and abandonment and suffering. Things that make my imperfect reactions to difficult circumstances feel much less justified.

My friends need a friend, and if I can be a friend to them, I should. But I feel like I have so little to give! I have been forgiving myself my inability to invest in others, and when I spent time with friends I feel like this is a season when I need them to patient with me, hoping and praying that soon the tides will reverse. But how do I deal with the fact that there are people who are dear to me, who right now need me to invest in them and be patient with them? Where am I supposed to find those emotional reserves?

homes

2011-05-14T17:25:00.003+01:00

I'm sitting in my room right now waiting for the reception desk to call me to take my room upgrade - my reward for staying the hotel more than 30 nights. (Has it really been 30 nights already? That's a lot of nights for a hotel room!)

While waiting I was watching the sunset over the Nile since, in order to get the upgrade I need to surrender my Nile view. I'm curious as to whether it will be worth it; a Nile sunset is a worthy commodity.

And while watching the Nile sunset I got to thinking about homes I've lived in. I have lived in 8 countries in the last 3 years, and have had at least one home in each country - usually more than one. Believe it or not, I am a nester. It's important for me to feel like my physical space is my own, a place to live, with a special touch. So each one of these dozens of homes has been special to me. I thought I'd try listing one special thing about each home here. We'll see how far back in time I can go! (Moving backwards in time)

1- Current room in the Kempinski - Nile view, very comfy bed!

2- "The palace", our nickname for the guesthouse in Kht where we waited out our two months of exile. More living rooms than bedrooms, so I made one of them into my room. My room also therefore became movie room, and I loved hosting the other girls for episodes of Glee. The highlight of the house, however, was the most spacious, well-equipped and happy kitchen EVER.

3- My room in the office guesthouse in Kht. I stayed there three separate times but always got the same room. It had two very uncomfortable beds and I had no privacy since it was in the office building. But spacious room.

4- Isaac's old room in the Dar. It had a lovely aura around it, was spacious and breezy when the windows were open. I loved that room and looked forward to making it my home for at least a year (I lived there less than one month, as it turns out). When I moved in, I asked the cleaning lady to clean but she didn't do a very good job because I re-cleaned and removed about 1639 pieces of mouse turdy from behind the desk and closet. Ewww.

5- The guestroom in GH4 in the Dar. This had a door straight to the great outdoors. Highlights were the entire set of new furniture they put in for me, the sandbags they gave me to protect against critters entering through the gap under door, and bazillions of grasshoppers. And learning that all my housemates could hear EVERYTHING that went on in that room.

6- The most amazing house ever in Haiti. Where to start? Well, it all starts and ends with the view over Port au Prince. I truly love that house, and hope that P&M are remembering to enjoy it in my absence.

7- GH81 in Port au Prince. This was also a happy place, where much cooking ensued. I had lovely housemates, other short-termers. And we had a mouse, a shameless bugger who ran around the ground floor all the time and once, when I spilled some condensed milk, licked it all up while I waited, ashamed, in the other room for him to stop. Again I say, Ewww.

8- The nicest room in our humble hotel-turned-office in the little village of Lubuk Basung, Agam, West Sumatra, Indonesia. I got this room because in the second-nicest room, where I was originally placed, I didn't feel entirely safe. At 5 in the morning men would chat outside my window and one morning I really think someone tried to come in to my room. I told my boss and he chivalrously offered to switch. This room had its scare of interesting experiences, too, mostly critter-related! Like here, and here.

9- My precious pink house in Dili, Timor Leste. I have such a tender spot in my heart for this house, and I still mourn everything that went wrong in it, and because of it. I miss my housemates, I crave for a happy reunion with my landlord's family, and I want a second chance at making that into a place of joy. Much joy was had there, to be sure, but just as much pain as well.

10- "Casa Minha", my temporary abode in Timor Leste before moving into my fab house. It was attached to one of only two nightclubs in town, and this one was known for its heavy fighting, specifically between Portuguese GNR, UNMIT and Timorese Police. Yeah, the country still has a few issues to sort out.

11- Der Mar Elias, the monastery where I lived two summers in a row leading the Damascus Summer programme. It's not actually a monastery; it's a hostel. But calling it a monastery makes it a safe places for families to send their daughters to live in while they study. I think my most distinct memories from there were when I cried. Specifically, once when my feelings were very badly hurt, and again when I learned my grandmother had left this earth.

12- My flat in Kosovo, next to Jazz Bar 101... ok, I don't remember the number of the Jazz bar, but that's ok, it's the only one in Pristina and it's really a nightclub not a jazz bar. I loved living next to it, even if it did make my flat noisy at all hours of the night.

13- My dear friend S's house in Nicosia, Cyprus. It was a five minute walk from the Cypriot Green Line dividing North (Turkish) from South (Greek) Cyprus. Her building had men who regularly summoned prostitutes, and in her flat we cooked cooked cooked! I learned to bake bread there.

14- A teeny tiny hotel room in Amman, Jordan, where the NGO I worked for put me up. That room will always be special to me, because it's where I recovered from eye surgery. Three days of not being able to handle any light at all, followed by perfect vision! It's also where I interviewed at midnight (due to the time difference) for my current job.

15- The boss's house in Amman, Jordan, where I stayed until he returned and then they moved me to the hotel. This was a beautiful place of rest, with trees and flowers and perfect weather - and while staying there, I made myself iced coffee every day. Yummy!

Wow, I think I did it. Only 15 homes. That takes me back to summer of 2008. All of these places were and are precious to me. People keep telling me that one day I will wake up and realise that I've been living in the same place for ten years. I think that'd be nice, but don't have enough faith in myself to make it happen. I'm grateful for the gift of making each place home, though.

further defining stress

2011-05-13T19:07:00.004+01:00

Someone recently sent me a forwarded email about stress. It included an illustration that went roughly as follows:

If you are given a cup to hold in your hand while standing up, will it be easier to hold if it is full or mostly empty? What if you are asked to hold it all day long, from morning until night? Will it matter anymore how full the cup is? After all, your back will be breaking and your hand trembling from holding a cup still all day!

And so goes stress. Even the most minor of stresses are brutal on the system if maintained for extended periods of time.

This resonated with me, because I look around and I see many people who are in much much much more difficult situations than me, and feel like an idiot for feeling so debilitated. I am finally recognising the lines of connection between the stress in my life and certain areas in which I seem to be slowing down or losing skill. But at the same time, these realisations seem utterly unjustified since I'm sitting on a very comfortable mattress in a fancy hotel room writing this, yaknow?

And yet, it's true. There is some stress that I have been carrying around with for years. Even though those are minor stresses, they've been around for a long time.

That's all. Just another morsel of thinking in writing.

Intimacy and other random thoughts

2011-05-11T17:50:00.003+01:00

I'm just a tad unnerved by the realisation of how little anonymity I can have on this blog. Either I hide every single detail about myself, or I accept that every minute detail can be known. I tend to strive for a happy medium, something that is true and informative, but not too intimate. But that doesn't work. For the resourceful surfer-hacker out there, all can be uncovered.

So today I think I will ponder the concept of intimacy.

If you've been following my blog lately, you know that I've been putting a lot of energy into rather weighty topics. More than usual, that is. After all, I'm a sociologist, so deep thinking is my trade. While I prefer to write my portraits, these days, it seems the portraits are consistently pointing me to analysis of some sort. I'm not doing such a great job of enjoying those portraits merely for the beauty of the people I'm attempting to portray. Instead I'm probing, analysing, seeking.

I feel like if I understand their story, perhaps I will understand my own story just a little bit better. During the past week some colleagues and I have been meeting with local youth networks and they have been drawing their social maps for us. The social maps are a good reminder that everything in our world is interconnected. Your life may overlap with mine only through this blog, or through reading each other's blogs. But what happens to me impacts you in some small way, and what you learn can be insightful to my own view of the world. It's a beautiful thing, this interconnectedness.

Which brings me back to intimacy. I am noticing in my complex web of layered relationships, that most people I know are better at intimacy than me, are able to open their hearts further than I can mine. (For example, most people wouldn't spend most of their blog post on intimacy writing about social maps!)

And yet, you might posit, this blog is so introspective, it shares so much! That's what I used to tell myself, but I'm seeing that voluntarily peeling back one layer of skin is a great way to get out of having two or three or four layers ripped off. Generally, avoiding deep wounds is a good thing, but there are also many instances in which the wound is needed, if for nothing else than to heal a yet-deeper wound.

There is a lot about myself that I don't acknowledge even to myself, and much more that I don't acknowledge to others. Part of it is my reaction to my lifestyle, which has left my skin too tender to react to further cuts in a healthy way. Raw, irritated skin probably can't handle more than one layer of removal. But habits die hard, and if it's not something I do, I'm not sure how it's something I would learn to do.

And that's about all I have to say about that, because this blog is an acknowledgement of what is, not an attempt to peel more skin. Not yet, anyway.

...sharing my very-very-imperfect words with the lovely community of much-more-perfect-than-mine words, Emily's Imperfect Prose

Responding to my own blog! (more of my take on it)

2011-05-10T16:26:00.005+01:00

Blog comment threads are supposed to be active and fast-moving. I guess I just don't have what it takes to participate in, much less moderate, a comments discussion, because after I wrote my blog about the reaction to Bin Laden's death, I got some very interesting feedback, both on my blog and on facebook, but I didn't come up with any good responses quickly. I'm still not sure I have a good answer, but I'm ready to try, so I figured I'd better just write a new post and start over, so to speak. If you missed the first one, here's the link: http://blog.patrianoceu.org/2011/05/my-take-on-it.html

(And I'm sorry this post is long.)

Here are a few blurbs taken from the comments that I had trouble responding to. They're my food for thought in today's post.

Nations are not individuals, and the purpose of our government is to protect its people.
USA does not turn the other cheek. USA is not a Christian nation or nonviolent. Where do you see that in our history?
Hearing Afghans comment on the evil and suffering Osama has caused THEIR country over the past 10 years has put this in perspective for me.
One might also ask why is the pain of an American worth LESS than the pain of someone in those countries? Yes they've had a long history of violence, but does it really make it any easier for Americans?
Perhaps, news of OBL's death is the closest thing we'll have to a V-day in the War on Terror. Does that context allow for some sort of celebration?

I think what I'm about to say doesn't directly respond to any of those thoughts, which are of course all very valid. But your thoughts sparked new thoughts so that's what I'm sharing here. In essence, this discussion helped me realise just how awkward and potentially misleading the phrase "war on terror" is.

As a war against a concept instead of a war against a nation, I am thinking that it falls better into the category of the "war against drugs", that is, a pervasive type of crime rather than a particular enemy. We fight the criminal activity at home and work with other governments to break up drug lords' kingdoms elsewhere. We have not and, as far as I know, will not declare war on Colombia or Mexico, for example.

Somewhat as an aside, doing a little bit of web research to decide what I want to say here today, I learned that the average annual number of illicit-drug-deaths per year is approximately 17,000 people in the U.S.A. This is just a bit less than the annual number of homicides in the U.S.A. (upwards of 18,000), many of which are of course also drug-related. (THESE are in fact a tiny fraction of the number of deaths each year due to tobacco (435,000) and - checkthisout! - poor diet and physical inactivity (365,000)!)*

I also came across a plethora of numbers quantifying the human toll of the "war on terror", but I didn't find them very useful to analyse because they're usually given as cumulative totals instead of annual figures, and cited according to any given nation and nationality. But one article suggested that from 2001-2006, the total total total figure might be as much as 180,000 deaths, or 36,000 people who died each year, worldwide, in this "war on terror". Just now as I write this, I see that that's around the same as the drug-induced plus homicide deaths in the U.S.A. only, per year. All these numbers are frighteningly high, of course, because each of those staggering numbers represents human beings, and I don't want to be blithe about any of it, but nonetheless I appreciate them for the perspective they give.

Back to the topic at hand, I found it interesting that about half the people who read my blog agreed entirely with me, and the other half responded by defending the U.S. military response. (I'm relieved no one disagreed with me by trying to argue that it was a good thing to celebrate death!)

And I think that maybe, just maybe, the reason why the whole response to Bin Laden's death, which brought back memories of the response to 9/11, evoked such extreme responses, comes down to how we define "war". Is there a "war on terrorism"? Yes, there is. But have we declared war against a nation, or is this war a rhetoric for a type of crime that is particularly malignant? Well, that's where we diverge. In the war on drugs there is no "V-day", there is no victory. There is just the hope that the crime rates will decrease and survival rates will increase.

Whereas, in a war against a nation, someone one day surrenders or withdraws and the other guy gets to say they won. I personally do not see that happening in the war on terror. We will not have victory and nor will they. Yes, we should keep struggling to decrease the criminality and promote respect for human lives, but we should not deceive ourselves that one day we will win the war and terror will cease. When people find new lucrative or politically effective ways to achieve their means, they will use those means as long as they can possibly get away with it, so I unfortunately believe that the world will always have drugs and the world will always have terror. Let's just do what we can to keep them to a minimum. Law enforcement arrests and prosecutes, and in my career we educate, all of us working toward the same goals of life and prosperity, especially in people's hearts.

And thanks for the reminder that Afghans suffered at Bin Laden's hands as well: terrorism is everywhere and opponents to terrorism are everywhere. This is why I think it's really dangerous to treat this "war" like the kind that Congress declares. Because it justifies us thinking that Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan is the enemy; even worse it teaches us to say Muslims or Islamists or religious fundamentalists are the enemy.

So no, I'm not saying that the United States should be wussy or something like that, although I still rather passionately believe that nonviolent responses are stronger and more effective.** I'm saying that the way we are fighting the war against the crime has some pretty awful repercussions for our foreign policy, which is actually pretty much a different thing, though of course there is overlap. If we raid a plantation in Colombia and take prisoners, we may be getting the "bad guys", but if we aren't also working to promote a positive image of our shared values and goals with the Colombian people, they are going to side with their drug lords, because that's human nature. Right now I fear the U.S. is making exactly that mistake in catching the "bad guys" of terrorism; this was a golden opportunity for us to show the world that we share those values of life and prosperity, but instead, in order to score political points at home, our government has allowed, even encouraged, the media and its citizens to push an us-against-them idea that us=Christian Americans and them=Muslims everywhere else.

...

Now there's one other thought rolling in my head that I'm not exactly sure where to place so I'll just tack it on here at the end: how do you bring justice when the criminals have already killed themselves? I'm not thinking specifically Al Qaeda here, because this question is, I think, more applicable moving forward than looking to the past. But all around the world, I see this story repeating itself: out of our desperation for closure, are we looking for justice in the wrong places? Are we blaming Muslims or Palestinians or Pakistanis for a crime committed by their brother or neighbour, because their brother or neighbour is already dead and that is just terribly unsatisfying?

* Stats were repeated on a few sites, but the most informative was http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30

** In my line of work I get some pretty inspiring stories about community-based nonviolent work in Latin America that is making impressive headways in the war on drugs. We have those stories in the Arab world, as well, although the rhetoric of war and fighting still tends to be louder at the end of the day. That, I suppose, might be a topic for another post.

sunsets and symptoms

2011-05-09T17:43:00.002+01:00

Watch this space, for I may soon be giving up my Nile Sunset View, cashing it in for a suite overlooking the historical architecture of the neighbourhood. They would have given me a my 'medina junior suite' today, but it would have two single beds. I'm holding out for the king-sized bed.

I woke up this day feeling shaky and appetite-less. I wonder if it's psychosomatic, because a colleague yesterday gave me a little lecture that could be summed up as follows: "If you have any symptoms of post-traumatic-stress now, it will only get worse." She went on to tell some rather shocking stories from her own experience which made me feel petty and pitiful at best. But I think her point was still valid: I'm coming out of some seriously crazy and stressful years, and if I find a way to slow down and normalise my life, little by little, I can expect the symptoms of the last few years' stresses to bubble to the surface. They will emerge because they can, because I give them time and space to do so.

So after she said this, I decided to wake up this morning with stress symptoms. I don't think the symptoms would really move that fast, though, and maybe the whole thing is just a great reminder that our bodies really do follow our minds. Or it's a great reminder that I need to take this slowing-down thing seriously.

In response to the fluttery tummy feeling, I just walked to McDonalds and ate a Big Mac, Fries and Milkshake. It helped, but only a little. In fact, the horn-infested fast-moving rush hour traffic I navigated to get there may have cancelled out any comfort-food benefits on my system. But this I will say, the fries were fresh and may just have been my best McD's fries ever.

Anyway, random post, I know, but I miss my blog so thought I'd stop by with my thoughts for the day. And writing always puts things in perspective: the act of typing words-to-blog has definitely helped the tummy situation.

Saving is great! Another woman's words...

2011-05-04T20:06:00.005+01:00

I didn't write this story. It's actually a modified version of a case study collected by a colleague last week, and I've been working on translating it tonight. But it's what's on my mind today and I found it to be encouraging and so I thought I'd share it with you. The story probably needs some background to really make sense, but I hope you at least enjoy the spirit of what this lovely woman is saying!

I am 39 years old, a housewife, and I live in a camp for displaced people. I am from one of the Noo tribes - originally from a part of the Noo Mountains known as the six villages, of a tribe called K. My village is located east of our tribe's mountain and is bordered to the west by an agricultural project where they grow sesame and bread and corn and cotton. I am descended from a Muslim family both by my father and my mother's father. I now live with my husband and my three children. My husband was working in the Military army, but was transferred out, and he now works as a day labour construction worker.

I first joined the women's savings group 13 months ago, and am in my second cycle of savings. The savings group is called “Togetherness”.

I heard about the savings group idea through my husband, he told me that there were girls teaching the women in Block 15 and gave me the name of the teacher there. He said, "There are people who have a savings fund and I spoke to the leaders of the group and told them to come here." I went, along with some of the women from my block, to Block 15. We met the teacher and we agreed to hold a meeting with the women of Block 37 to tell us the idea behind saving. I did that because I really wanted to do something for women's development in the Block.

Most of the women in my group are from tribes near my own, but there are actually women from all over. The great majority of members are married and all of them are Muslim. Before starting the group I was making handicrafts in my spare time, and a few other women spent their time in Qur'an classes before. Now I continue to build my little
business of handicrafts.

Our group means togetherness - people are interdependent with each other, solving the problems of others and solving our own problems. So saving together creates a unique social fabric. I did not know members of the group before but now relations are strong among all the members of our group.

Before, I didn't know that savings together would mean things like a constitution and laws and fines. The most important element was to have a regular meeting of all members in one place, as we do in our group. This means that social relations are strong between me and the women, women who I did not even know before. For me, everything about my life became completely different, even the my daily routines changed: before I didn't have anyone by me I could consult about my needs, and I'd only want to talk to my family who don't live near me. The second thing is that I visit all the women of my group on a regular basis, we have become like one family.

In general, we have been sharing a lot of traditions and customs among members of the group, especially since most members come from different tribes. First, we learned folk dances, and then also we have exchanged cuisine traditions such as the number of food dishes with tomatoes that you cook with water from the watermelon and different spices. One time, one of the group members took a watermelon and brought a whole plate of the dish to the group members. Some of the other women brought different dishes such as one with leaves from a watercress tree, and onion tree leaves, and also radishes and chilli leaves with spices as well. The members all take part in all of it. Members also shared seedlings with each other.

Our house was lacking some of the things that my husband can't provide me, but by saving I was able to set up my house. The most important thing is that my daughter is in peace. She had left school because of her father's inability to pay tuition fees, and thank God, with the savings, I was able to pay for her and she sat for the final exam, and everyone in the house was happy. We didn't lose a whole year for her because of tuition fees. So you see, the savings group has provided each family member with some benefit, thank God.
Sharing this today with the lovely group of people over at Emily's Imperfect Prose

my take on it

2011-05-03T18:40:00.002+01:00

This morning in a local English-language newspaper, there was a photo of people dancing on the streets in D.C., next to a quote from a local bloke saying that he can't help but feel a bittersweet sadness about the whole thing.

Osama Bin Laden's demise has been the watercooler topic of choice today in my office, at least among the internationals! All of us seasoned expat aid workers with Middle East experience had roughly the same reaction: we are not mourning per se, but we don't like the image of partying either. In general, my colleagues feel that celebration makes Americans look like barbarians, takes away whatever credibility or global solidarity we may have merited, and illustrates what's wrong with the U.S.'s image in the world. They pointed out that celebrating death today has invalidated our righteous indignation when Palestinians partied after 9/11, and now it is we who deserve the resentment of victims who have lost loved ones.

(Palestinians, it might be argued, have suffered a proportion of wrongs that greatly outshadow any wrongs suffered by Americans at the hands of terrorists - but whose counting? After all, death is death and it is always a bad thing. Parties about death = always bad. In my humble opinion.)

One colleague took it a step further and pointed out that this was a well-timed political move on the part of the U.S. administration. I might take it yet another step further and recall the Postmodern theory behind the film Wag the Dog. Click that link: that book will totally mess with your mind if you haven't heard about it before. A bit sensationalist it may be, but in tale of the Hunt for Bin Laden, it makes resonates to me. Are we sure he really died two nights ago? It wasn't a look alike? He was not a young guy and he lived in caves; does no one but me wonder if he didn't really die of old age 5 years ago? Either way, I pray for mercy and I pray for the grace to pray for his friends and loved ones, and for the others who died in that raid.

Furthermore, I find myself wondering, does his death really matter, in the historical sense? Has al-Qaeda been defeated? Has justice been done? I fear that we may just have further fanned the flames of global hatred. Some groups are already declaring revenge for the famed leader's death. So do we really think that, when all was said and done, killing this famed terrorist will have been worth it for the West, particularly the U.S.A.? What if his death inspires more terrorists to take more lives?

From the very beginning, I believe 9/11 could have been an opportunity for the U.S.A. to show the world how to turn the other cheek, the Ghandian and MLK teachings (teachings they learned from Jesus!) about the power of nonviolent resistance. When I read about nonviolence, I read of something very difficult to do but very powerful in its impact: in this case, it would mean defeating war by declaring peace.

I tried hard not to offend anyone in writing this, and if I did, I apologise. I'd love to hear your thoughts and think it through together.

laundry man, passionate about ironing

2011-05-01T10:41:00.000+01:00

I walked up to the unlabeled store front and he was standing in the same position he'd been the last couple of times I'd come by: behind an ironing board, furiously pressing clothing with a very hot iron that let out noises of a steam engine.

He looked up at me through his bottleneck glasses and said, "Maybe tomorrow?" But just as I was starting to get irritated with him and protest that tomorrow all stores would be closed, he started laughing. He was proud of his little funny joke which fully defused the tension from the fact my clothes had not been ready when I'd come by earlier on my lunch break.

He reached to a hook and pulled down my bag full of clean and pressed laundry: 3 skirts in the loose sense of the word (trousers, a dress, etc.) and 10 tops in the loose sense of the word (blouses, pyjamas, cardigans). I started to count them and he started to be offended. I tried to convince him that it wasn't out of mistrust of him so much as mistrust of myself, and he obliged me even though he kept telling me it was all there. And it was.

So then I asked him if he could write a receipt. "To get reimbursed?" he asked. "It's worth a try!" I replied.

He opened an ancient diary and pulled out one of two receipt slips tucked in the back. Even though it had been laid flat in a book, he proceeded to iron the receipt. Once it was starchly pressed, he filled it out, slowly and thoughtfully. He totaled the amount in Arabic numbers then wanted to rewrite the total in English numbers, presumably so my boss could understand. The price was 74 (that's about 12 USD), and in Arabic they write numbers from the smallest denomination to the largest. So he wrote out the '4' with the painstaking care of a first-grade student. Then he started the '7'. He stared at the sheet and twisted up his face as he tried to figure out what to do. He drew a curve and felt something was missing. A bit more staring and he nailed it, although the '7' as he wrote it fell well below the '4', creating a rather uneven number. So he wrote it again on the other side of the sheet, like a student practising his numbers. Then he wrote it again in the 'grand total' space at the bottom of the sheet and proudly handed it over. I felt like clapping at the same time as my heart sank in pity.

Next I handed him a 100 note and he called out to his friend, who had been watching the entire exchange from the street, to give him 26 in change. His friend handed him a 10 and a 5 note, and he proceeded to iron them. Then his friend produced another 10, and he ironed that. Still missing one, they started digging in their pockets and I insisted not to worry about it. Finally convinced, he handed me two crisp, like brand new, notes of 10 and a matching note of 5.

I thanked them and promised repeat business then left, feeling incredibly guilty as I folded up my pressed change and crammed it into my little change purse. It sure feels good to have clean clothes, though!

14,000 pills

2011-04-29T14:53:00.002+01:00

There is a display at the British Museum, created by a group called Pharmacopoeia (sounds like a pharmaceutical company to me!), that illustrates the medical life of an average person. One side of the display is the life of a man and the other side is the life of a woman.

Each side presents a timeline of the different medical experiences in the person's life, starting with birth and going right up to death. Items listed include vaccinations, appendix surgery, heartburn, lung cancer, and the like: notable moments, medically speaking. Photos, certificates of life and death and the like, and handwritten notes, are added on to the timeline to illustrate the person's life.

Overlying it all is a web full of pills. They vary in shape and size and colour and apparently represent the pills that the person has taken over the course of his or her life. The label tells me that there an average person takes 14,000 prescription pills during his/her lifetime, in addition to about 40,000 over-the-counter pills.

I was horrified by this number but I just did the math and realised that if I include my vitamins, I'm probably batting about 90,000. Ouch! (But since I live in countries where I can get just about any drug without prescription, I'll probably take no more than 100 prescribed pills in my lifetime. I imagine that's not something to be proud of.)

What caught my attention was that the connection between pills and a timeline-of-life gave the impression that a person depends on that many pills to make it to a full-length happy life. But would the person have dropped dead at the age of 1 with no pills? It's very possible, of course, what with infant and early child mortality decreasing greatly with basic immunizations. Would the person have passed on at 30 without the heartburn medications? That's less likely. Did the pills extend a person's life from 70 to 80? Well, good medical care has certainly been connected with higher average death rates, but is it really the pills? In fact, the vast majority of those prescription pills are taken during the last decade of life, when it's probably too late to invest in good health. And surely we pay a price for injecting man-concocted chemicals into our bodies at such intense rates!

And all of this was just a tad disturbing to me when I noticed that the display was sponsored by some guys who refer to themselves as pharma-something. Was this art, or education, or propaganda?

Inspired by Giving People

2011-04-27T14:45:00.003+01:00

A brief tribute to lovely people I know.

My lifestyle breeds selfishness. From where a lot of my friends stand, watching me from afar, countries away, they only see the sacrifices I make. They see that I move around a lot and don't have a home, and I miss out on family celebrations and the like. They might think this makes me a selfless person.

If only it were so. The truth is, that the big things I've given up have granted me free reign to allow myself everything I might want in terms of the little things. My employer encourages it, too: they like being able to hold on to their employees for as long as possible so they make sure we get our holidays and comfortable hotel rooms.

I am well aware of this fact and keep telling myself to not get sucked in by the sense that I deserve any and all comfort for myself that I might want. But the truth is that I probably do depend on those little self-indulgences in order to keep going at what is in fact a very stressful work and life style.

And I've become horridly awful at being a giving person. I forget most people's birthdays and anniversaries and don't think about Christmas cards until it's too late to bother. I write prayer lists to pray for people I love and then forget to pray. I occasionally brainstorm creative gifts I can order on Amazon to send to people but never actually get to it. I don't give food to people I pass on the streets or cook meals for friends who are sick. It's a big deal if I postpone a meal or stay a little longer at the breakfast table to keep a colleague company!

So this self-absorbed blog is actually intended as a tribute to my lovely friends who I saw this past weekend, who reminded me that my life is not normal. Having a heart is closer to normal. I spent time with people who actually arranged their schedules around my convenience, who picked me up and dropped me off and stopped everything to spend time together. And not only were they kind to me, but I saw them being kind to other people, both strangers and other friends. They didn't base all decisions around themselves.

I want to learn from you, my friends. A little bit goes a long way.

Unwanted Gift

2011-04-26T22:20:00.002+01:00

You know those girls who gather up all their Christmas gifts on Boxing Day and head down to High Street or the nearest Mall to exchange everything for the items that they actually want? I have always been of the impression that those girls were not an example to emulate. A gift is a gift, and whenever possible we should enjoy and appreciate what we've been given, out of appreciation for the giver. Right? Right?

But apparently that level of NON-appreciation is hardly worthy of notice. The other day I was walking down the street in Bristol and passed this:

Perhaps by "gift" they meant it was a prize won on a tele challenge? Perhaps the person who gave it to them mail-ordered it from Timbuktu?

Otherwise, what are the odds that the giver wouldn't see this sign? Actually, I assume the odds were quite high, or else it'd have been a bit too cheeky. BUT... what about a friend of the giver? Word could get back. Or what about a friend of the recipient? I'd be kind of embarassed for my friends to see me attempt something like that.

Can honesty go too far?

The Cairo University Professor

2011-04-25T22:40:00.001+01:00

She walked in and we exchanged names, positions and selection of coffee or tea. Then we sat down, and she lost little time in expressing her frustration with the meeting which had just barely begun. She complained that she wanted to hear from us, but we seemed determined to ask questions of her. Which, to be fair, we did - there was a lot that we wanted to understand.

But then she wouldn't stop talking! Finally she did ask a question and my colleague started to answer. My poor mate never got a full 10 words out of her mouth before the good doctor would either express her agreement by explaining, in depth, her point of view, or she would interrupt saying that my colleague had just reminded her of something else that she and her think-tank were good at. This was a fundraising visit for her so I guess she wanted to impress us. She does so much, she commented mid-sentence, that it is hard to remember it all, and as we talked, she remembered more and more!

She also told us that she knows about 75% of the old-school intellectuals in this fine country - an ironic claim considering that we were talking about youth-centred work. She also mentioned that she's up for promotion: an academic promotion that would pull her away from the project we were discussing. Good to know.

One highlight of the visit was when our boss walked by so we introduced him to her. She said, "You may remember me if you read my articles in the paper. My photos are there, I'm a well-known face!" She said this as she framed her face with her hands. "Keep reading, anyway," she continued as our boss just nodded vaguely. "I have an article next week that you'll enjoy!" How did she know his taste in journalism, I wonder? He smiled and nodded and stifled a snicker. But those of us who know the office, we saw it.

Another moment in the conversation was when she wanted to refer to a small group of people but instead said that there were 'a little bitch' in the group.

And she was sure to leave us with a fine farewell. As we said our goodbyes, she apologised that she has a slight cold so we didn't have the opportunity to enjoy her usually lovely voice during this meeting.

Lent Fast Lessons Learned

2011-04-18T18:49:00.004+01:00

What did you give up for Lent? Do you have the tradition of doing Lent? Or did you add something? ...as a friend of mine pointed out, often it's a better spiritual discipline to decide to DO something than to NOT DO something.

It's been a few years since I have 'celebrated' Lent. My best Lent memories will always be the minimum-wage challenge shared with my friends in Bristol. But since those days I have been moving around so much that adding any specific discipline seemed like little more than additional unnecessary stress.

Nonetheless, after half a decade of consistent transition, I've developed a bit of routine in the upheaval. Things like my computer (nicknamed "maridinho" in Portuguese), my ipod and speakers, and my yoga mat, go just about everywhere with me, offering a slight sense of continuity in my constantly-changing surroundings.

One routine on which I've become frighteningly dependent is coffee. My travel coffee press, a gift from my sister-in-law and nephew (and by default my brother even though he wasn't at the store when it was procured), goes just about everywhere with me. Horror of horrors, it almost did not make it out of the Dar alive. My accompanying Starbucks mug didn't survive, but at least the coffee press did. That item will always find a spot in my suitcase, along with some good coffee, preferably Kenyan (I know, I know, I'm a very bad Brasilian. Me perdoem, irmāos!). Everywhere I go, if nothing else, I can count on my morning coffee.

So this year, my mom casually asked if I thought I'd ever give up coffee. It was an offhanded remark and I don't think she meant anything by it. But it got me to thinking, and I realised that I truly have become dependent. An addict, if you will.

So I decided that for Lent 2011, I would give up coffee. This applies to all coffee drinks but not to other coffee products (for example, coffee ice cream is OK, so when I accidentally ordered a mocha frappaccino at S'bucks instead of plain chocolate, I decided that that was not an infracture). And since Friday is the day-off in these parts, I take Friday off and drink a cup or two. I'll do an extra week after Easter so the total number of days evens out, k?

So here is what I have discovered:

I am not addicted to coffee! No headaches or caffeine withdrawals ensued. And, I'd say, only 4 out of every 5 days would find me yawning or glazing over from sleepiness. Not bad.
I AM addicted to the routine. Sometimes in the morning I wander around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do to get moving.
While for years and years and years, I hated the smell of coffee, apparently I love it now. Smelling a colleague's coffee - especially Nescafé, strangely enough - is pure torture.
The thing I most miss is the texture of the drink. Strange, eh? But tea, even tea with milk, is too watery. Hot chocolate is too creamy. Coffee is thick but not too thick. I haven't found a suitable replacement for the texture of coffee.
I miss going to coffee shops. Sure, I still stop by occasionally for an iced tea or a hot chocolate, but it's not the same. I think I'm reading and writing less as a result.
Even though I can't really point to any specific benefits of my coffee fast, I'm very glad I've done it. Discipline is always a good thing, even in these little tiny ways.

I'd love to hear other Lent stories - tell me what you did! tell me what you've learned!

the surreal world in which I live

2011-04-15T15:51:00.002+01:00

Today brought a few interesting moments.

As I was walking to church on the almost-deserted streets this morning, I passed some young guys. High school or so. As I walked by, one of them said, in Arabic, "You're old but even so, you're beautiful." Would he have said that if he knew I understood? If so, was it intended as a compliment or an insult?

This afternoon I decided to take advantage of the full amenities of my posh hotel. After a jog on the treadmill overlooking the Nile, I went to the spa where I got a go in the jacuzzi and then the steam room. The Filipino woman showed me my locker in the all-women's section and pointed to a little plastic packet. "Those are some underwears for you if you would like to use them?" Seriously? I asked her if I needed to use them and she said it was optional. But after she left I took a sneak peek. They looked like disposable jock straps. That's what rich women wear? Ick.

As I walked around town today I saw a bunch of police dressed in formal whites. I wondered if they were hosting some kind of dignitary or something. But by the end of my walk I realised that all police, even the one who monitors our hotel entrance, are dressed in whites. I'm guessing that that's what police do on Fridays here?

Living Common Good

2011-04-13T18:54:00.004+01:00

It's funny how things sometimes come full-circle.

My job placement is in the Dar. The Dar, as I like to call it, is famous for being very troubled. After having lived there, I can also say that it is probably the closest thing to the 'end of the world' you will ever find. The town I lived in was a state capital which boasted a grand total of 2 paved roads. Surrounded by desert and wide open spaces on all sides, the only way to get there was by plane, helicopter or a 2 day drive. And, I repeat, it is the state capital. My house was nice as far as local accommodation went - we had tiled floors and that is saying a lot! Nonetheless, the rats and hedgehogs were our constant companions, the electricity was on and off and on and off, the Internet was slow as molasses (I might wait as much as an hour to load up an Imperfect Prose blog and could rarely check out photos of my nephew online). For a bathroom we had cold water, except at the end of the afternoon when the water tank was sun-heated, dry pit latrines, and outdoor sinks.

Guest House Four, my home in the Dar, was comfortable enough. We had nice mattresses, a TV and decent food. And floors. This is much more than our neighbours had.

Then something bad happened. I've written on this blog about my emotions when it happened but I can't tell you what happened, not on this blog at least. But because of what happened I had to leave the Dar. Several months of waiting brought me to a new short-term assignment. I'm in Egypt right now doing a new project. And I'm staying at a five-star hotel.

The other night I was brushing my teeth in my marbled bathroom, looking into the backlit mirror and thinking about the contrast between where I am and where I was supposed to be right now. From Guest House Four to Five Star Hotel... because something bad happened. Oh the irony, the unfairness of it all.

But I took comfort in the fact that I am working hard, very hard, here in Egypt. "At least I'm working for it", I thought. And then I immediately was struck by the fact that so many people work as hard as, harder than, me. Fifteen hours a day of breaking their backs kind of work. And they go home to a house in a slum which makes Guest House Four seem palatial at the very least. So effort has nothing to do with it.

Today with some colleagues we had a discussion about what it means to work towards the "common good". Theoretically that is a main goal of my career, and yet how do I reconcile the common good with the strange surreal life that I live?

first night in the Kempinski hotel

2011-04-06T21:16:00.002+01:00

Kempinski hotels are supposed to be among the absolute best in the world, and I am in one of them. How did a lowly aid worker come to rest in the Kempinski? Well, it's a question of location, convenience, and colleagues who made a very good business deal.

I must say, however, that my first night here has been utterly exhausting. Here are a few of the highlights:

- I decided to escape briefly to the gym before moving on with my evening. This gym is on the top floor overlooking the Nile. Oh yeah! BUT... in a stroke of irony, the machines all have fancy little televisions mounted so you can watch and jog at the same time. And those little TVs blocked my view of the Nile. I call that: two perks canceling each other out.

- When I got back from the gym, I found that my butler. Yes, I'll write that again: my BUTLER. My butler... my butler had rearranged my stuff to turn down the room for the night. I'd pulled out my clothes in a rush to find my running gear and had put a pile on the bed and a pile on the chair. He'd then moved those to the closet. And he'd rearranged my shoes and stuff. This made me feel very very awkward. So I locked the door with the deadbolt and put up the do-not-disturb sign (a hanging made of leather that says "shhh").

- After my shower, I had a skype date with my lovely sister-in-law but, low and behold, the Internet had stopped working. I was connected to the network just not the Internet. Ick. So I got dressed to go down to the lobby to ask about this little inconvenience.

- I tried to open the door but nothing. Nada. That dead bolt wasn't going ANYWHERE. So I had no choice but to call my butler (with whom I have bonded in the last few hours, after all). He came and asked me to undo the deadbolt and it took me a while to explain to him that therein was the problem! After 45 minutes of four men banging and wiggling from the outside, a custodian jumped in over the balcony and opened it with ease. Stupid me - all that wiggling had loosened it up but I hadn't thought to try it again!

- The hotel manager was with the men in the hallway and when he entered, he said something along the lines of, "Yes, I guess that bolt might be a bit hard for some LADIES to turn." Oh, he got an earful from me! He offered me dinner on the house and I might have accepted but I asked to change rooms anyway and that took another two hours. I'm too tired for free dinner.

- Yes, it took two hours for them to change my room and I'm so so tired. During those two hours, fortunately, the guy did get my internet fixed - apparently my computer had to be "approved" on their system or something like that. And I called the butler once or twice to see what was going on and made a trip to the lobby to remind them I exist.

- In the new room, the first thing I did was test the deadbolt. And it was TIGHT! Not as bad as the first room, but it had that potential. So we called maintenance.

- I called room service and begged for a hamburger, nothing but a hamburger, medium instead of well-done because I'm tired. I'm waiting for that hamburger right now.

- Then I turned on the TV. It didn't work. I called the butler again. My butler has gone off duty and another guy showed up to activate my TV. He wanted to give me the whole tour of the room, which proved a bit helpful. It turns out that my movies-on-demand and my drinks in the frigobar are complimentary. Booyah. Or I could just go to sleep.

And here I am, feeling like an extremely demanding and prissy rich woman.

Dear Imperfect Prose friends, I so enjoy our community and am loving feeling that you're my friends I meet up with once a week. I know this isn't the deep sharing I try to do on Thursdays but I hope you accept it anyway. If you're wondering how many times a girl can move in a year, watch this space. This year is proving impressive. I think I'll be here in Egypt for a month.

p.s. my hamburger just came. On its own white-clothed and rose-ornamented ROLLING TABLE. I can't handle this elegance. Where's the street food?!

restaurant review: Bread Brown

2011-04-03T19:55:00.003+01:00

or is it Bread & Brown? the logo wasn't very clear. The poor grammar and/or misguided logo should have tipped us off from the start. I'd give this restaurant 1.5 stars out of 5:

* + *

This restaurant is in a quaint and lovely location, in the ancient souq by the seaside in the Lebanese tourist town of Jounieh. The street was quiet in the mid-afternoon hours: most of the shops were open but not bustling, creating a relaxing anbiance. All of the houses were of whitish-pinkish stone, a signature of Lebanese architecture. After every five establishments or so, there was a crack in the buildings where you could catch a glimpse of the sea beyond.

The Bread Brown is right at one of those cracks. It offers indoor seating with a pub ambiance, and outdoor café-style seating. When sitting outside you see the traditional style souq and catch a waft of sea breeze.

You also have little to no hope of getting served, because the waitress is most likely flirting with the cook or the busboy. One waitress for a restaurant of this size would only be sufficient if she were incredibly efficient: well-trained, clever and hardworking. As far as we could tell, she had none of these qualities. What she did know how to do was flirt.

After about five minutes, my friend went inside to get the menus. Five minutes later we'd made our choices but she still hadn't appeared. I poked my head in the front window and found her leaning over the bar smiling into the eyes of the cook. I caught his eye and he eventually sent her out.

Our drinks didn't come and I went in to personally collect the ice I'd requested. The food came reasonably quickly but was mediocre at best. One friend ordered the chicken burger, which she liked although it was drippy and bland. My other friend ordered the chili burger which she described as a "cooked meal in bread" and nothing at all like a burger. As for myself, I ordered fettucini alfredo and a rocca-with-mushroom salad. The rocca leaves were large and crispy and slightly sandy, which meant they'd be good as long as they had a good dressing. But the dressing was not good, it was a yellowy vinagrette. The fettucini was not good nor bad, just average, with a regular white sauce not entirely deserving of the title 'alfredo.' All in all, the meal was passable. Perhaps if our service had been good, we would have appreciated it. But it needed to be accompanied by good service.

I will say this: once the drinks finally came, my lemonade was DE-li-cious!

When we went to pay the bill, my friend said we should absolutely not tip the girl - we even had to collect our own check! So my other friend went in and a minute later came out giggling so hard - sure enough, she said, the waitress had been flirting over the espresso machine with the busboy. A few minutes later, I went in to take our payment, and there she was again, chatting it up with the busboy.

As we walked away, we figured the waitress might be smarter than we figured: she might not get tipped but at the rate she's going, she'll have a husband soon enough and he'll just pay her bills for her.

making the best... of everything

2011-03-31T07:07:00.001+01:00

"Here in Lebanon, the government does nothing for us. We don't have water, we don't have electricity, we don't have good healthcare. Ah... but we live a very good life. Do you want to know why? I'll tell you why."

Tummy full from a feast of all the best Arab foods - taboule, stuffed cabbage leaves, mujadera, mutabbel, kibbe sanieh, kibbe nayeh, rocket salad, fried potatoes, etc - we were sitting around the dinner table watching the men sink deep into an impassioned discussion of politics. It sounded to me like one of those treatments of the topic in which the men just wanted to argue. Well, at least one of the men had some stuff he really wanted to say.

Us women rolled our eyes and wondered if we should start our own conversation or clear the table. Then our hostess, my friend's aunt, looked me straight in the eyes and told me she was going to tell me why Lebanon is so great.

So I nodded and asked her to go on. You can't visit Lebanon and fail to notice that that even the wealthiest houses have problems accessing drinking water and electricity and Internet service providers. And sure, poverty is widespread. Even so, life in Lebanon is good! Good food, good restaurants and cafes, luxury all around.

She continued with a gleam of pride in her eyes: "It's because we help each other and we help ourselves. Our electricity cuts off several hours a day, so what do I do? I sign up for a shared generator with my neighbours. Sure, we pay a lot for that generator use, but that's what I put my money into; don't think I'm going to pay the government very much at all for the few hours of electricity they give me...

"Someone in the family is sick. We're not going to go to a public hospital and wait to get treated. No, we take them to private healthcare.

"A government employee's salary is, say, 350. But to rent a house large enough for a family of five or six people will cost 600. What do we do? Well, we go out and get other jobs! Work two or three jobs if you need to. Don't sit back and complain."

This was probably the first time in my life that I'd heard someone speak with contentment about lack of outside support. She was proud because she could make her own way - she and her family and her neighbours. It's not suffering, it's an opportunity.

Exerting control

2011-03-22T12:56:00.003Z

I need to premise this story by pointing out that I really did have a lot of luggage, and I own up to that fact.

So.

Today when I checked in to my flight, they found I was 15 kilos overweight. This was more than I'd expected, but not a lot more. After all, I was checking in with my whole life in three bags. The attendant said she'd have to charge me extra luggage, but would figure out some kind of discount. First she needed to weigh my carry-on, which came to a whopping 15 kilos in and of itself (more than double the allowed amount)! I don't know how that happened, except to recognise I did kind of put all the heavy stuff in there.

She said they have a very strict policy against heavy carry-ons, so I'd have to check some of that or leave some of it behind. Ouch! This is my life we're talking about! And while I did have bags inside of bags and could have just decreased my weight by ditching the suitcase, it was my best carry-on-sized case. In summary, after a bit of repacking, she said she'd charge me for only 20 kilos overweight instead of the 24 I should pay. I said that was not fair. I'd pay the 15 for checked bags but I had not received fair warning about the carry-on, and plus a little flexibility on the part of the airline was to be expected in a situation like this: I'd already paid ahead to take some extra luggage but it wasn't enough.

I pleaded her boss, who was the most unwavering Arab man I have EVER met.

So I pleaded with the poor girl again, and she was becoming a bit hard-nosed herself. She said that the rules are for my own safety and that's the most important thing.

How do you argue with that? Well, here's how.

I asked her how much time I had until the counter closed. She said 20 minutes, so I had to move fast. I proceeded to unpack and rearrange all of my stuff. All of it. One of my suitcases was banged up and ready for a new owner anyway, so I unpacked it and squeezed its contents into my carry-on and a backpack that was in my carry-on. Getting rid of the junked suitcase saved me 4+ kilos on its own. Also, using a backpack as a carry-on meant that they'd let me get away with more stuff - it doesn't look as heavy as a carry-on suitcase. The airline staff were shocked that I would forego the suitcase and offered to check it empty. (Huh?)

Here was the logic floating through my mind as I took over the check-in area floor: After all, this was for my own safety, so I should rearrange my stuff so as to keep myself and my fellow passengers safe, right?

In the end, I came down to the wire and was the last passenger checked in. By the end, the stubborn man was gone and only the women were left, and I was one of the club. They charged me for 10 kg instead of 20 and, yeah, offered to check the empty suitcase. They bode me farewells with smiles and encouraging words. I think maybe they were just scared of the man. Or they honoured my attempts to look out for safety.

Then! Once I was in the boarding lounge, one of these airline women came up to me and handed me a wad of coins. I'd forgotten I'd left some USD coins in a pocket of the bag. The porter who claimed the discarded suitcase had found them and turned them in! Wow!! She asked me what country they were from, how much they were worth, etc. I said she should keep some for her children and give the porter the rest to give to their children. What a beautiful last picture of Sue Dan to take with me.

As I pondered my own belligerence, I realised it was my little attempt to take control. Everything in my life seems to be spiralling, but don't even think of messing with my luggage allowance! It felt stupid, but it also felt good. And I saved 80 bucks. And bonded with the women.

Back to roots

2011-03-16T21:27:00.003Z

I've hung photos of my family on the wall behind my computer, so as I sit here typing I see their beautiful faces. We aren't a large family, but I think there's a lot of love among us. We don't see each other very often or do very much together, but I know that one of the greatest gifts in my life is the knowledge that I can count on them.

When I open my facebook, I see many beautiful friends, old and new. But some of them are like family, too... the ones I've known through family, or friends who became a part of my life during my student years, or people who God has thrown into my life at random moments and who have been faithful enough to stick around (even though I usually don't). Yes, these are my family.

I'm in a phase of transition - again - and I've set as my mantra that I won't live somewhere that I haven't lived before. I say this with some trepidation, because there's a big wide world out there to be found, and in my job, there are a lot of people to be helped in that big wide world.

But when I see the photos of my nephew and his parents, and my parents, and of my friends' children on the other side of the world, I remember that this is why. Relationships are like trees, growing on a foundation of strong roots. The more places I go and see, the more adventures I live... it's like I can almost see those roots shriveling up and withering away. I need to get back to those trees before their roots are gone entirely.

And as I sit here writing this, it hits me: my mantra is not as selfish as I have often feared it is. I often think that the needs of the world are so great: who am I to decide when I will and will not respond to those needs? But the tree analogy reminds me that fruit grows on trees. Good roots makes good fruit.

So I have said it before and now am putting it in writing: by God's grace, it's time to move back to somewhere I have lived before.

practical mercy

2011-03-14T18:33:00.002Z

Yesterday's Sunday service was lovely, full of touching music and a thoughtful message.

It was also a special Sunday because it was the farewell for a family from the South that was returning home. Nowadays, families are returning South on a daily basis, but this family had lived here for more than 30 years. The husband has his projects, but this little ceremony was mostly in honour of the wife, who has volunteered tirelessly with hospitality, translation and all kinds of help. After other people gave their thanks and said their prayers for the departing family, they said their thanks back to the community. As the four of them stood there, tall and regal husband and wife, with sharp-looking preteen son and a baby granddaughter, we couldn't help but be inspired. I don't even know them and I feel like my heart is going with them, and I'm excited about the amazing things they will do back in their hometown.

The thing is, in the middle of their farewell, a man in his twenties or thirties wandered in off the street. The meeting area is airy and the doors are always open. Anyone on the street can see in, and anyone can come in. So this man wandered in to the front of the room, to the space in between the group and the family saying their goodbyes.

He held his hands up close to his face and wore the most pitiful expression you can imagine. It looked both well-trained and absolutely authentic. It looked like he had just seen a ghost and was crying out in pain. And it also told us that we wanted money - because he needed it.

Two men stood up and walked to the front. As the Southern couple continued their lovely words in front, the men gently tried to lead the man out of the building. He didn't move so they pushed and nudged and embraced him as they gently walked to the door. They left and talked with him on the street. I don't know what they said, but somehow I trust they said the right thing.

How do you come together, a congregation of people worshiping God, praying for friends and raising special collections for people in distress... and then dismiss a man who walks in and says he needs help?

I so admire those men for stepping up and talking to the intruder, but I don't wish it was me. And I really, really wonder what was said. How did they show God's love in a situation like that?

Practicing Writing Case Studies: The Wedding Story

2011-03-13T21:10:00.006Z

Last week I promised to write about my colleague's wedding. It was quite an affair, albeit very different from my neighbour's wedding the week before.

The report writing which has taken up most of my fingers' energies is nearing an end, but it's not there yet. Today at work, I took a break from reports to develop a format for writing case studies. The case studies will be about women and youth and community leaders who make a difference in improving their communities. But I wanted an example to show my team how to fill out the form, and the first thing that came to mind was the wedding. So here is the completed case study about the wedding...

Who is this story about?
This is a story about Ali's wedding. Ali is 30 years old and he is a company driver. He is from the capital city. He has a large family - at the wedding we met 1 brother and 3 sisters and they mentioned others. We also met an older man who said he was Ali's father and an old woman who said she was Ali's mother. At the wedding there were a couple hundred of people. 4 cars full of company people - around 30 people from the company.

Where did this story happen?
The wedding was at his house. His house is in Hay Z, on the other side of the Nile. The houses are all brick and the roads are mostly sandy. His house was spacious. We sat in the two living rooms - one for men and one for women. They had some tents set up outside his house. They were basically coverings for the road outside his house. There was one for men and one for women, but most people were not covered by the tents.

What is the project?
I first met Ali when he picked me up at the airport on my VERY FIRST arrival in the capital city. He didn't meet me in the airport, he was outside. I saw him because of the company logo on the landcruiser. He was friendly and said he didn't come in because it was Iftar (Ramadan) and he wanted to have some water first.
Five days later he took me to the airport to leave for The Gen. He was very kind - gave me a going-away gift of a calabash bowl. He explained that that is what Sue dan ese use for drinking water or for eating food. It's waterproof and very sturdy. It was a touching gift as I departed into the unknown wild west of the Dar.
He is a friendly and helpful driver. Always has a smile on his face. I guess all of the staff know him and love him. At the wedding everyone was very happy for him and he was grinning the entire time as he danced around with everyone. He liked all the attention he got.

Describe the project strategy

Goal: Fit in at a Sue dan ese Wedding
Objectives: Congratulate Ali, Wear Sue dan ese clothing, Dance, Spend the afternoon with colleagues
Our partners were the rest of the company staff. We met at the office and drove together to the wedding, and we all sat together inside his house (everyone else was outside under the tents)
The beneficiaries were everyone in the wedding. A couple of hundred people.
We thought the wedding was the 4th but it ended up being on the 11th of March.

Why are you writing this case study?
Well, the most obvious change is that Ali got married. But we don't actually know that. We never met the bride. She would only come to his house for the nighttime portion of the wedding. So for all we know she doesn't actually exist.
I know that Ali spent a lot of time setting up a house for his bride, because I asked him about that. They were engaged for a long time. I'm not sure how long, and I'm not sure if he was previously engaged to someone else, but I know for sure that he has been wanting to get married for years.
He will not come to work for several weeks. I think Susie said it will be 5 weeks before he comes back. I guess that means I might not see him for a long time if I'm leaving for a while. I guess that also means I might not meet his wife for a long time, if ever.
His sisters seemed very proud. They seem to be a family of high achievers. At least one sister speaks English and her daughters are university, I guess.

Tell the story of the CHANGE.
I wonder if his bride was nervous or excited?
My three housemates all went out and bought Sue dan ese Taubes to wear to the wedding. I didn't know they were buying taubes and so I didn't go shopping with them. But it's ok, because they spent a lot of money and I had a culturally-appropriate dress to wear already. They didn't like my joke, but I said that I was a Sue dan ese girl with my three mothers, because my dress looked more like what the young women wear and theirs looked more like what the older women wear.
We had gone to a wedding the week before - our neighbour got married. I'm not sure if it was the bride or the groom who was our neighbour. I think maybe it was the groom. Anyway, that meant we already had a sense of what to expect and knew that women dress UP. On the other hand, this time we were going for the afternoon (food :) ) portion, and last week we went for the evening (dancing and Bride-Groom TOGETHER) portion. So I guess it's fair to say we were very overdressed this time.
All of us really wanted to celebrate a wedding with a colleague at some point during our time here. I was sad because I will miss my team member's wedding. We thought we would be gone before Ali's wedding but we weren't. He probably felt very special having so many company staff with him, since most of the Dar staff, including a dozen khawajas (foreigners), went.
So this is important because it is the first experience we had of a Sue dan ese wedding - of someone we knew. And we attended WITH people we knew. And it was a very home-grown wedding, in the community of the community.

Quote from an individual participating in the project.
"I danced and danced and danced!" said Ali, M, 30 years old. It was his wedding.

What did you LEARN that helped you succeed?
Community factors: He clearly had a very loving family. The women all bunched around us to dance with the khawaja girls. This made me feel like they were proud and humble and energetic, all at the same time.
Cultural factors: He was waving a gun around during part of the time he was dancing. We were all very glad he didn't actually shoot the gun. We've heard of people dying at weddings here.
Individual/group influences: Ali was very eager to get married, and very happy on his wedding day. The last few times I saw him at work he was wearing galabeya, and men here seem to wear their galabeyas if they see great fun on the horizon. So this was a big celebration for him and I'm sure he fought hard to make sure it happened.
Outside factors: Having his company family, including the expat staff, in his house must have affected the wedding. It made them look good? Or it added to the excitement of the day? Or it proved he had an employer with money? Or not. We were probably the most significant external factor, actually.
Most valuable part of project: Probably the actual marriage, which happened after we left.

Quote from a different community member who watched the project.
"I think our taubes were a hit!" One of the company girls, age XX, who attended the wedding.
"This is the first time - I don't think there will ever be a second time!" XXX, age XX, who attended the wedding from the company.
"Dance! Get up and Dance!" Ali's mother, age XX, who was the mother of the groom

What are areas where you want to improve?
The taube-wearing project needs to improve, since they were falling off all the time. I think probably wearing a taube for the first time to a wedding wasn't the best idea; it would have been better to practice on some other occasion. But I don't know what other occasion because they really are quite some thing to look at.
We didn't get to meet the bride. I think we should have tried to connive a way to meet the bride. It didn't fully feel like a wedding without a bride. However, our Sue dan ese colleagues were with us and they felt this was appropriate so I must accept their approach.

Describe photo 1
C.H. took the photo. Ali is dancing with a gun. It was taken at the wedding. It shows how happy he was, and the way they celebrate a wedding.

a boy and his little sister

2011-03-11T16:12:00.003Z

A boy and a girl, brother and sister, around 12 years old and 9 years old. They were walking home from the market each with a bag of food in one hand. On this quiet weekend morning they seemed to be enjoying the wind and the sun, and each other.

As we walked down the deserted street, approaching each other, the three of us heard a painful screeching sound. Yelp! Yelp! Yelp! ... Yelp! Yelp! Yelp!

Our eyes followed the sound and landed on the sight of a little tiny black puppy, so bedraggled, wet and miserable looking that I'm not entirely sure it really was a puppy, clutching a mound of sand that was poking out from a puddle of water, like a tiny tropical island on a scale appropriate to a baby puppy.

The boy handed his bag to his little sister, walked over to the sand and the puddle and gently took the screaming pup into his two hands, then carried it over to the nearest solid ground he could find: a neighbour's driveway. He laid it down gently and rejoined his sister on the street.

The puppy resumed its yelping. Louder this time, perhaps. I am not an animal person; in fact, I may be the opposite. But my heart was twisting and turning and churning and shuddering with the pain expressed in the voice of this little creature.

Maybe something was wrong with his legs? He started walking, but excruciatingly slowly, and he kept screeching. Maybe he had almost drowned and was still in shock from pulling up out of the puddle of water?

Whatever it was, the boy's heartstrings were tugging too. In this land where dogs are nothing more than freakish street mongrels that bark at night and sleep all day, where animal rights is not even a phrase in people's vocabulary, I was in awe of this boy determined to be the cavalier, determined to save the day by helping a frightened little puppy.

He and his sister discussed options and I stared at the whole scene in silence. He decided to go find help. But at this time in the morning on a Friday, everyone is either asleep or at mosque so he found noone. There was nothing to be done but to come back, pick up the little critter, soaking wet and covered in sandy mud, and carry it home cradled in his arms.

As they headed home with their new pet, I went on my way and decided that I want to be inspired by this girl and her big brother. To stop and respond to needs, even if there is no logic to explain those needs. To let the heartstrings of my heart have a say in the actions taken by my brain.

the man with the sewing machine

2011-03-10T10:32:00.003Z

He is a black man. A very black man. When you look at him, the first thing you might notice is just how black he is. The reason his blackness is so striking is because his clothes are so white. He wears a full-length galabeya robe that is whiter than the brightest fluorescent light, and a pure white knit cap on his head.

How he keeps that galabeya so clean is a mystery to me every time that I walk past him with a scarf on my head, gripping it with one hand holding my skirt down with the other hend to fend off the sand and dust that swirls in the wind around me.

Whenever I walk past his corner, I see him there, sitting behind his pedal pump cast-iron sewing machine that is about as old as he is - very. Bags of white galabeyas and zippers sit piled behind him, along with a box of assorted bits of fabric and sewing supplies.

But I never actually talked to him until yesterday, when my friend wanted her taube... her bright-coloured woman's party robe... hemmed at the edges. She asked me to translate her instructions, but no translation was needed. With barely a glance, he took out the white zipper he was mending and replaced the white thread in the machine for red. He charged a fair price and was done in ten minutes. We sat on plastic coke bottle racks and watched him as he sewed a flawless straight line.

He didn't react at two foreign girls. He didn't try to take advantage of us. He didn't expect us to wait. He just got the job done.

As I write this for Imperfect Prose this week, I want to look to the man with the sewing machine as an example. Will I take what life brings me without reaction? Will I take pleasure in the things I do without seeking to eek out a little more for myself? Will I attend to the needs of others promptly? Will I care enough to get the job done with the kind of humble pride that drives a person to keep his clothes white against all odds?

Thank you, Imperfect Prose friends, for striving with me to be, humbly, the best we can be.

my fingers hurt...

2011-03-06T20:52:00.003Z

...particularly my right index and middle fingers, to be specific. Those are the fingers that hit the h, y, n, m, j, u, k, i and comma on the keyboard. I'm not sure why those are the ones getting the most worn out, but they are.

This weekend, I was going to tell a great story about my first local wedding. Our neighbour got married and the wedding took place in a tent that was put up in the empty sandy lot right outside our house. The tent was complete with rugs, satiny walls and ceilings, air conditioning and... wait for it... wait for it... yes! Chandeliers!

But, alas, I have three reports to write this week. Three major reports requiring a lot of brain activity and pounding of fingers to keyboard. So, interesting stories on the blog are getting pushed down the priority list.

If I finish my reports quickly, though, great news! We have another wedding coming up this weekend so I can write a blog about my SECOND local wedding.

Tuk Tuk

2011-02-27T05:36:00.004Z

There's a lot going on in our world right now. High level things which will take up their own chapters in the next generation's history textbooks. Many of these events are happening within a stone's throw of where I sit, involving people that I know. There could be a whole shelf in your local library dedicated to the things happening on one side of where I am, and at least a shelf dedicated to the things happening on the other side. And things are far from boring here where I stand!

However.

Last week there was a major protest on the highway near where we live. We use this highway for two purposes: going to our favourite Syrian restaurant, and going to the Nile to walk by the river. So we know this highway well, as do most people in this fine town. It has many, many lanes (I don't know how many - there are no lines to define them) and it's never too busy but it's always got a lot of movement.

As you enter the highway, there is a sign announcing that TukTuks are not allowed. I wish I had a photo to share with you, it's adorable. A TukTuk is a type of rickshaw: a three passenger little buggy hanging over a motorcycle engine. The driver sits up front, and two people can bounce along in the back. It can't go very fast, and I doubt the drivers attended TukTuk driving school, so it's fair to say they are a safety hazard, especially on a major highway. The sign has a picture of a TukTuk with a line drawn through it. That seems pretty clear, right?

Except this has never seemed to stop the TukTuks from driving on the highway, and they do often get tangled up with cars. So last Thursday morning, apparently there was a major accident involving a TukTuk and fatalities, and apparently such accidents are not uncommon.

So in response, a crowd a thousand strong swarmed to the highway to protest TukTuks and traffic safety. It became a major event, I'm told, and when we tried to get to the Nile on Thursday afternoon, traffic was stopped and there was a feel that something major had just gone down. In response to the protests, workers had started fixing some median strips and putting up poles for more traffic lights.

Now, I must say that TukTuks truly are a headache. They are noisy, they share the road with cars that drive three times their speed, and because they have no doors the drivers are always pulling up next to me when I walk, trying to give me a lift. They often wait at the end of the street I'm walking on and even follow me for a few metres in the desperate hope I will avail of their services. But, of course, this is a sign that TukTuk drivers are working for their survival; their lives cannot be easy. And THEY were the target of the big protest of the year.

a bit of introspective mulling

2011-02-23T15:44:00.003Z

I love a good walk, and walking to work in the morning generally is the perfect bit of brilliance for starting off the day with a fresh perspective and a smile.

This morning, for the first time, I was ready to leave at the same time as my housemates. Four people piled into a vehicle with the driver, and they could have squeezed some room for me. But I declined and agreed to walk - there was still time to get to the office before our meetings started! They shut the car doors, then I had an afterthought: "But do you think you could take my bag for me?" And I handed my computer bag to a colleague before setting off on my own.

Why did this bother me? Because I got what I wanted. And in crazy guest-house living, we need to bend over backwards to help each other out, just so that we are all reasonably content at the end of each day.

So during the fifteen minute walk to the office, I found myself praying for grace, for help, for mercy that I can share with others. By the time I was a hundred metres away, I felt ready. I was walking into the office with a smile on my face, a smile to share.

So then I remembered how last night I was feeling so worn down and worn out, and that I had nothing left to share. And, flashing forward... Sure enough, by the time I'd been in the office a mere half-hour, my ability to give had been spent. And only by grace did I get that smile back on my face and keep it there for most of the day.

why I blog

2011-02-21T21:14:00.002Z

Today I was walking my typical route to work, zig-zagging through the neighbourhood, and as I walked, my thoughts chanced upon my blog. Here's what I thought:
It's been a few days since I wrote a blog. I should write a blog tonight. I wonder what I should write about... I don't know... I guess I'd better start paying attention to the people and scenery while I'm walking right now, so I have something to write about!

Yup, I need my blog

Nubian wrestling and the loo

2011-02-19T06:55:00.002Z

This is the week of catching up on local cultural activities. We don't know how much longer we'll be here, so we'd better get out and see this town!

Yesterday, four of us girls piled into a Landcruiser and asked the driver where the Nubian wrestling was. It took a while to figure out what that meant in Arabic, and then for him to figure out where it happens, but we made it. Next to an outdoor furniture market, an arena had been constructed out of two-meter poles spaced at a two-meter distance, with tent walls hanging between them. So we had to buy a ticket to see what was going on inside. It was not expensive.

I won't get into the fighting itself, you can see it in action thanks to youtube.

But here are some of my observations:

There were exactly ten women in the crowd, in comparison to perhaps 500 men. Only two of the women were Sudanese. We were all ushered to the only covered bit where we'd be safely segregated from the men. But we didn't get chairs.
The wrestling teams were tribally defined. You fight for your family-slash-village. Each team had jerseys: green and white, purple and white, yellow and blue. But they took their jerseys off when they were in the ring, so I could never figure out who was from what team.
Most wrestlers rolled up one of their pants-legs to make it super super short. Why?
An Egyptian wrestler was in attendance and really wanted to get into the ring. Out of what appeared to me to be hospitality, they let him have a go, but it really was a joke. They didn't seem to be wrestling very seriously, and his competitor was about twice his height and twice his weight.
One wrestler didn't make it into the ring because his team's time ran out before he got his turn. He was so upset he almost caused a riot!
Older, distinguished looking men, would give cash prizes to the winners by counting bills on their foreheads: Five, ten, fifteen, twenty... take it it's yours!
There was an old man there who played the role of mascot, saying enthusiastic unintelligible things. He took a cut of the winners' prizes.
More often than not, the defeated wrestler was chuckling on the ground, and his victor would reach an arm down to help him up - often ending it with a friendly embrace. In fact, there was a lot of laughter all around. I like the happiness of this culture.

When it ended, we headed back to our landcruiser that we'd parked by a very long bright-green wall (I guess the other side of the wall was a row of shops). And this was the most memorable scene of the day for me... About 30 men, maybe more, were squatted facing the wall. Not standing, squatting. There were so many of them all lined up with maybe no more than a meter separating them! I think one or two of them were even doing Number Two. We couldn't help but watch since they were RIGHT in front of our vehicle.

A grin that heals

2011-02-16T17:14:00.004Z

Today was one of those days that felt productive and interesting, but it was a day that just. would. not. end. I even made myself a cup of coffee at 5 p.m. so I could keep going.

So when I was ready to leave the office, I opted for walking. It was nearing sundown and I'd forgotten to bring a scarf or cardigan, props I generally use to feel more culturally appropriate when I walk. So I earned a tiny bit of verbal harassment, but the sky was beautiful and it was still precisely a good way to end the day.

After greeting the guest-house-mates, I headed up to my room and set about doing some yoga. This was a day that begged for a good yoga workout. And so I did my balance poses, my flows and my breathing on the purple yoga mat in a little nook by the balcony. I was facing my bed.

Next to my bed I have taped two photos courtesy of my sister-in-law. One is of my parents, brother, sis-in-law and nephew. The other one is of me with my nephew. The grin he sports in this photo screams that this is a happy boy who knows he's loved. Yes, he is. And so, with every readjustment of my tired limbs, I'd start counting the breaths and feel my soul rejuvenate as I absorbed the cheery-faced image of a two-year old who I love very very dearly.

Valentines Day

2011-02-14T20:48:00.000Z

I'm not a huge celebrator of Valentines day. I'm not a hater or anything like that. It's just never been a big deal in my world. Life goes on.

Well, as the details of life would unfold, we scheduled a team workshop for this week, with me facilitating. My housemates reminded me that the first day of the workshop was Valentines Day and if I was going to make them sit in a room and think on the Holiday of Love, the least I could do was bring chocolate.

And so I did. And then one of them came up with the brilliant idea of starting the day with asking for a participant or two to share stories about a good Valentines Day memory. A few people did so over the course of the morning, and it served as a cheesy joke that kept us moving. Good thing I had chocolate to give to those brave souls who shared! And then there was chocolate for everyone.

I'd forgotten that V'day is a good excuse for chocolate.

But then it got better. The internationals on our team are currently 5 men and 4 women, split between two guesthouses. One guesthouse is in the same building as our office and home to 3 men, one of whom is our boss. So as us girls were leaving the office for home, we stopped by their guesthouse to drop off our used cups. Brilliantly, one of the girls said as we walked out, "So you guys are taking us out for dinner for Valentines Day tonight? Great. Pick us up at 8."

(By the way, all five of the men on our team are married with families back home.)

As we drove home we chatted about what us girls would do this evening. Since the next day is a holiday, we figured we should at least go out for dinner or something. When 8pm rolled around, I was finishing my shower after going to the gym and the next girl was heading into the shower. Two girls had not yet returned from playing tennis. (wow, we actually do life a pretty nice life here in exile!)

At 8:00 sharp, there was a knock on the door. It was the guys... all five of them, three from the other guesthouse and two from our guesthouse... asking us if we were ready to go? Well, it took us about half an hour to round up the girls and get us all ready to go, which come to think of it made it feel even more like a date. Even if it was five married guys treating four single girls.

We (the girls) chose a Syrian restaurant that had just opened this week (not the guys' first choice but they gallantly respected our preference). The restaurant made quite a few mistakes with our order, which was to be expected of a restaurant that has just opened up, and since we didn't have work the following day we weren't too, too bothered.

But to make it up to us, the restaurant provided tea and desert, on the house. The desert was fruit crepes with chocolate and strawberry sauce on top. So VALENTINESY. And then when the bill came, the guys wouldn't let us girls pay, and I realised this really was a Valentines to remember.

scent

2011-02-11T14:56:00.002Z

I walked down the driveway and through the gate, and set foot on the yellow sand that covers our street. It hit me. As I turned right and started walking towards the office, it accompanied me for a good 200 metres or more.

Sandalwood. I've been told that that is the base scent for the best Sue Dan ese perfumes: homemade scented oils made with Sandalwood. It's beautiful, but its lustre has been lost on me.

It's also used in incense, which often burns in front of homes, at the entrances to stores, on the tea-making stands by the river.

As a matter of fact, there are countless dozens and dozens and dozens of scents here, all home-made. Apparently if you have a baby you need to have 24 different scented oils and colognes and flavours of incense ready to perfume the newborn and the space in which he or she lives. A married woman will regularly stand over the smoke of incense for long stretches of time in order to absorb its beauty.

They are beautiful scents, this sandalwood + dozens of other combinations. But they've lost their lustre for me. It seems odd to walk on the street to the office and feel like a woman from the Dar is walking alongside me because her scent is exuding from the street, or maybe it's coming from the houses that line the street.

I'm generally pretty sensitive to smell - I remember last year when something outside the house smelled icky and my housemate emptied out a bottle of air freshener to mask that smell and I thought I was going to die because two scents were most certainly worse than one, even if the second was not as awful as the first.

And smell evokes MAD emotions in me - I remember when I left Sue Dan for my first vacation in early December. The airplane was full of scented woman. Sandalwood. And it ruined the flight: I felt like I was back in the stresses of the workplace I had just left. The smell is now inevitably associated with a very difficult and challenging job.

It's too bad the supermarket we shopped in today had this smell. It's too bad the ladies making tea by the river fill their stalls with this smell. It's too bad my colleagues from the Dar are covered in this smell. Because it's a good smell, but it's lost its ability to please my world.

Hope... Women on display...

2011-02-09T17:44:00.004Z

This evening God did an amazing thing. He created a display of the women of this land, in their vast array of bright colours and strong scents, and set it out for my heart to see.

As I walked up and down the Nile Corniche right before sunset, I realised that all the tea-makers setting up their plastic chairs and washing their cups and glasses, they were all women. Many of the socialisers were women, and women were manning the random food stall halfway down the road. They made the sandy beach into a garden with their bright clothes of turquoise, green, yellow, red, blue, and every combination of bright colours you might think of.

Some women were focused, frighteningly so, on arranging the jars of different types of tea leaves, sugar, spices, and incense on their two-foot-tall tables. Others were chatting with friends. Some looked like grandmothers, or older. Others looked like they may have been studying at school all day before they came to work in the evening. One young lady smiled at me every time I walked by, as if I were a good friend.

Have you ever tried to keep a scarf loosely covering your head while you lifted boxes and moved chairs in the riverside breeze? Maintained a small business in the evening hours while caring for your family at home and very possibly going to school or holding down another job during the day? These ladies are amazing.

As I walked and saw pairs of teenage girls chatting, mothers walking with one child's hand in each of hers, fully and decently covered women exercising in faux-'converse' walking shoes, I was struck with the deep needs of the women in this land. They work so hard and earn so little respect. Though they hold their community together, they are kept in their place by little things like the fact that it was always the men driving. They are strong but they don't believe in their own value. They might even know they are amazing but they don't imagine that anyone else might realises how just how amazing they are.

This picture below is of what is surely one of my few treasured posessions, a painting given to me by my parents. The woman portrayed is not Sue Dan ese; she's Nubian (from a small ethnic group in Egypt). But she could be from here. Her scarf, the henna (all good wives here maintain henna on their hands), her breathtaking beauty... she could be here. But if she were here, her clothes might be orange with pink flowers or something equally dazzling.
This painting stole my heart because of the look in her face. Expectation, hope for freedom and for a future.

So as these sights, and the scent of the women's traditional perfumes, and the memory of my Nubian woman, overtook me... as the sun set and the music in my ipod crooned and the breeze wafted... I began to remember why I came here in the first place. And to ask: what difficulties am I ready to face in order to help these women? No one said it was easy, but surely it a woman should be reminded of how valuable she is.

Imperfect Prose friends, thank you for your kind words and comments during the last few weeks. My circumstances haven't changed and I still feel a bit paralised, but I am so grateful that at least I've found a few words to write. And grateful for this community - I looking forward to reading your words tomorrow!

stolen mirrors

2011-02-08T19:13:00.003Z

Currently, only one of the residents of the guesthouse where I live has the right to drive company cars. We try not to depend too heavily on her good graces, but it's inevitable that she ends up doing her fair share of driving around. She's very gracious about the whole thing.

She also has a bit more of an active lifestyle than the rest of us, who are still wallowing around trying to figure out what to do with our lives. So one day last week, she went out in the morning while the rest of us stayed holed up in bed. She went to church. The rest of us slept. In our defense, things are very tough for us right now and a small level of social depression feels very appropriate.

She got home, we sat around and ate lunch and chatted and chilled. As the heat of the afternoon passed, she suggested a jog by the Nile, and us other three women of the house eagerly agreed. We threw on our best shoes (which in the case of one housemate is Tiva sandals because she has been tragically separated from her running shoes, just like I'm separated from my shampoo and duvet) and followed our driving mate out to the car.

As we piled in, she said something about mirrors. So I looked at the side mirror and saw that it was gone. "Did it fall off again?" They have a history of falling off. "They were stolen," she replied. Sure enough, I looked over to the driver's seat and saw that the mirror was gone from there too. "I've heard this happens. People sell mirrors for this car type in the market downtown... But in the middle of the afternoon, right outside our house?"

We agreed that at least no one would blame her since it was the afternoon right outside our house. It's not like she parked on the street at night, right? But now she must brave our narrow driveway every time she comes or goes. For, what will they take next... headlamps, bumper, break the window and go for the stereo that would sell for about 2 dollars in the market?

The next morning, when she fessed up to our admin manager, we learned that the nearest market is in fact right around the block from our guesthouse. We could have just bought her mirrors back the same day. Great.

the cleaning lady and her daughter

2011-02-05T20:40:00.002Z

This morning I awoke to the sound of the big fight scene in Braveheart wafting up the stairs from the TV salon below. I'm currently sharing a guesthouse with 5 other people, but none of them are likely to be up and about at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. If they are awake, they tend to be doing something more wholesome than watching Braveheart.

I wandered down the stairs, bleary-eyed and inappropriately dressed considering the mixed company of our house. I discovered what I'd expected: the cleaning lady and her daughter had arrived, and junior had turned on the TV. She was helping her mom in another room, though, so I turned the television off even though I knew I was done sleeping for today.

This wasn't the first time, nor the last, that our lovely Eritrean cleaning lady brings her daughter to work with her. The day I moved in to this house, the bi-generational team was here, television on, and they welcomed me with an almost fierce hospitality, insisting on carrying my light carry-on suitcase up the stairs for me. The girl is about 16 years old and out of school. She speaks good English and is eager to practice it with us. Her mother speaks only a little bit of English and even less Arabic.

I'm convinced they were of an elite class back in Eritrea, and they fled here for some gender-related reason. Ababa, the mother, is a dear woman, who keeps the house impeccably clean and spends much of her day wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what she's supposed to do to make our lives more comfortable.

The daughter, who comes two or three times a week, seems to spend the entire day cleaning the salon with the TV in it, while she watches the TV. One day, I came home from work to grab my lunch. She was cleaning the TV area and watching Eritrean news. By the time I'd finished heating my food, she'd taken a seat and switched to the English-language film channel, so I sat down on the sofa and joined her. She asked me if I wanted to choose a channel and I waved so as to say "this is fine." I guess my hand gesture language is different from hers, because she took that as leave to switch back to Eritrean TV. Which she proudly explained to me was the channel of her country. Of which I understood not a word and invited a feeling of boredom as I stared blankly and ate my food as quickly as I could.

I don't have a lot of experience with house help, and even less experience with women who bring their daughters to work. In principle, I don't mind the girl enjoying herself while she's in our house. She probably doesn't have a television here in her new city and she must really miss watching TV like she did back home.

But this afternoon, as the four female of the residents of the house sat at the dining table and worked, something just seemed odd about the girl, and for a while her mother as well, watching the rerun of Braveheart in the next room over. As the sounds of the film wafted into our workspace some of us relished the soundtrack, some got distracted from our work and wandered in to watch a bit, and some didn't even notice.

I really don't know what to think.

ponderings from yet another temporary abode

2011-02-04T13:25:00.003Z

I remember when I bought my first car. It was a small-ish car, definitely on the cheaper side, but it was brand new and it was the one I wanted, and I paid for it with money I'd earned. For the first few months I was in awe of the fact that I owned this thing that took up a whole parking space! I'd park in my assigned spot at work and look at my green Toyota and feel a little proud and quite overwhelmed that something this big was mine.

Then I wondered what it would feel like to own an entire house! Surely that would not be a good feeling, even though it was the natural course of life. It seemed strange to own something that was bigger than me.

That was more than ten years ago. Since then I've sold the car and given away a house's worth of other things. I now own little of value other than a macbook, ipod, e-reader, coffee press, and some brilliant portable speakers. It can all fit in my purse and a carry-on, and it frequently does. My less-valuable possessions fill another suitcase or two.

Last year I was reading a blog by a journalist in Indonesia right after the West Sumatra earthquake. She mentioned how at the end of a busy day, there was nowhere safe for her to stay, so she found an empty dry corner in a warehouse where all the aid workers were staying, pulled her jacket over her as a blanket and went to sleep. I moved there and left the lovely four-bedroom house that my job had rented for me to go help re-build shelters for families who lost houses in that earthquake. In Indonesia, unlike the journalist, I did get a room to myself!

Living in Sue Dan, I learn daily of people travelling from north to south. If they can pack up their entire houses, they do. Usually, they have a little bag with them, and it's sadly not uncommon for their slight belongings to be lost on the journey.

Currently, my world consists of a bed, two nightstands, my carry-on suitcase, and my macbook. I'm comfortable and happy, but I don't even sleep in a room with a door - the bed is in the hallway. I don't know what to make of this. Am I infinitely privileged in my flexibility? Or am I missing out because, with just a few key decisions, I could actually own something?

a jumble of jumbled thoughts

2011-02-01T18:43:00.002Z

I have started at least half a dozen blogs in my mind during the last week, if not more. These are interesting times! So I think... This is an interesting person, how would I describe him? That is an odd dilemma, how would I unpack it? There is a bit of true irony, and I know just how to narrate it!

And yet here I am with nothing to write, except for the lyrics to the song "When you say nothing at all" passing through my mind: You say it best when you say nothing at all. (go on, click the link and watch the video which will hopefully load MUCH faster for you than it did for me. It soothes the heart even though it's absolutely random with regards to this blog post)

Am I saying it best by not saying it? I probably am because there's a reason all of those mentally drafted blogs never made it to the typepad. If I were smart I would have written them but not posted them, but I'm not smart that way. I post because I have to write, not because the story needs to be put out there. This time the story can't be put out there, so can't be posted, so I don't write.

Clearly this is not as it should be. How awful that I can't explain here why I can't post because then I'd be giving hints into what I'd be writing about that I can't post. And, of course I don't mean it but feel like this is when I should say 'but then I'd have to kill you'. Seriously, have I already said too much? As I write this I don't know whether these words will actually make it onto the blog.

Should I be looking for things around me that are cuter, more mundane? Looking for the tiny flickers of lovely joy in the midst of the desert of disaster? If you know what part of the world I'm in and have turned on the international news anytime in the last few weeks, you know that no small things are going on around me. It seems petty to look for the little things. But as I write this I realise that probably they are the answer. The secret hidden writing is all well and good, but instead this may be a moment for returning to the reason I started blogging regularly in the first place: finding the value in this itsybitsy things, drawing little pictures with words.

I'm afraid, once again, this is the best I can do. Putting the "im" in Imperfect Prose! In fact, this is all I've managed to write all week. Here's hoping the words come back soon...

Staying put? Are you kidding?

2011-01-26T20:57:00.003Z

Have you ever been a refugee? Or in a situation in which you lost everything - or thought you had lost everything? Have you ever been uprooted forever? Over and over and over again?

There are so many people in this world for whom this is a daily reality. I think official statistics report that there are 6 million refugees globally, but that is a small fraction of the women and men, girls and boys who have traveled across borders without anyone taking notice. It also does not include internally displaced people, those who fled their homes, often in the blink of an eye. Some of these people live mere miles from their homes but can't go back. And let's not forget the homeless, the landless, the unemployed.

And then there's me. I live a gilded life: I travel the world on someone else's dime. I have a great job in which I actually feel like I'm helping people. I generally have a pillow for my head, and a shower for my sanity. And I almost always have a room to sleep in. I have a clever laptop and several little trinkets that make each destination feel like home. But I feel like in some small way, God has given me sympathy for the plight of the refugee. How many times in the past half-dozen years have I almost lost everything, had to move in the blink of an eye, been told that those things I'd counted on were no more?

That's where I am right now, and so was dishearted to read today's entry in My Utmost for His HIghest, which I'm attempting to follow in 2011:

"Consider the lilies of the field" - they grow where they are put. Many of us refuse to grow where we are put, consequently we take root nowhere. Jesus says that if we obey the life God has given us, He will look after all the other things.

I'd love to stay put, but God keeps uprooting me. In my world up is down, and down is up - I read this and conclude the life God has given us is a life of transition and I must accept that. My only roots can be in him. But I'd very often rather take root in a more visible way.

But then I wonder how a refugee, or an at-risk poor person, would read this: do they feel shame in the life of displacement?

This is my first week back at Imperfect Prose since the holidays. Every Wednesday night, the Thursday, has come and gone, in a different city each week, a new dramatic scene unfolding in the lives of people I love. The dust is settling now but very, painfully, slowly, and I'm sorry I have nothing more creative to contribute here today, but I needed to do the discipline for myself, so I thank you for being willing to join me in this journey. I have missed you all my blogging friends.

radio silence

2011-01-25T21:44:00.002Z

I came on here thinking I might come up with a creative way to explain my prolonged absence from this beloved venue. But I simply don't have the juice in me, and I simply can't just come out and tell you.

So please pray, if you would, for any and all of the people you've been introduced to through this blog. They really need it today. In so many different countries, as a matter of fact - have you checked out the news lately? It's a painful month.

As for me, things are actually looking up! So hopefully I'll be back to my usual blabbering soon enough.

In the meantime, here's an amusing link. Some of it I'm embarrassed to say reflects myself. Other bits make me ashamed on behalf of my friends. And a few are just plain old funny.
http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/

Four couples

2011-01-15T15:52:00.002Z

For some reason beyond my capacity for logic, the flight from Kht to Cai left at 5 a.m. That means we left for the airport at 2:30 a.m. and, since I had lots of work to get done before leaving, it meant I could sleep a maximum of 1 hour before heading for the airport. I opted not to sleep at all.

So at 4:45 a.m. I was in a sleepy daze in the airport, sitting in the waiting room with my fellow passengers. We were waiting together to board the flight, and at that time of night, no one was in a good mood!

So my observations were not the most acute ever, but I nonetheless found myself taken by four couples travelling with me.

Couple Number One: Elite Man with European Wife Who Most Likely Converted to Islam. Two things grabbed me about this family. Their utterly gorgeous six-ish-year-old son. And the woman's fabulous sense of fashion that was nonetheless appropriate for a good Muslim woman. She also had a safety seat for her son, a good giveaway that she was not from Sudan. They were probably visiting Dad's family in Sudan and heading back home now. But she definitely looked like she owned her new religious identity.

Couple Number Two: in start contrast to couple number one, Awkward Newlyweds Still in Their Wedding Garb. I first noticed the tiara in the woman's hair. Then the inch-thick makeup on her face and the faux diamond earrings the size of my fist. She was wearing a furry manteau over a very very long purple dress. He was pacing around her as she sat timidly - or bored - on a bench. She seemed to want to exert her self-confidence but deferred to him. They chatted and joked some, but mostly walked silently side-by-side. I can't even start to imagine how awkward it would be to together with a new spouse who one hardly knows at all!

Couple Number Three: They Have Been Travelling Together Their Whole Lives. A gray-haired couple with very practical travel gear and little concern for fashion sat quietly together, patiently waiting for the very-late flight, hardly phased by any of the commotion around them.

Couple Number Four: French Backpackers Raising a Hippie Daughter. At least that was my best guess as to the modus operendi of a mixed-race man with miles-long dreds and his actress-gorgeous wife, carrying homemade baskets and backpacks stuffed full of souvenirs wrapped in newspaper, who were leaving Sue Dan, of all places, with a friendly-looking ten year girl. They sat behind me on the plane and I heard them speaking French. As I peeked glances their way they looked like a very happy family full of fun and jokes and tenderness, too.

Should this moment be shared?

2011-01-10T20:51:00.002Z

(Me? Lonely? Nah, I'm actually content happy little me adjusting to life after R&R. Right?)

Thank you to those of you who responded to my last blog with little words of reassurances, to those of you who are here with me in this wired and wireless universe, to those of you who are willing to share moments with me in this quirked up way.

So here's another one, which actually happened in the very same supermarket during the very same weekend.

I was only buying one or two things. I can't remember what they were but it was a small and cheap order, something to go with dinner. I found myself on the checkout queue behind a simple looking woman in a dirty black robe who was holding a toddler in one arm and held a small wad of crumpled cash in her other hand. Slight, school-aged children with mussed hair and faded clothes flanked her either side and fiddled with the candies by the cashier as her mother went about her purchases.

When the cashier was done ringing things up, the woman was concerned and surprised by the bill. It had come to 21. Did she only have 20 in that wad of cash, or did she need to budget for something else? She quietly questioned the clerk, went over the list of items in detail, confirmed the price of the can of powdered milk and other items. She couldn't decide what to do, it seemed: which item should she forgo today?

As it was taking her a while, the cashier went ahead and rang up my small purchase. I quickly paid. I think mine came to 7.50 and I gave a bill of 10. I received 2 in change and, to make up for the difference, was handed a candy from the display. I returned the candy, took my 2 and walked out of the store.

Immediately the light bulb of guilt flashed on. Why didn't I give one of those wide-eyed children my candy? Why didn't I offer to buy the can of powdered milk for the woman? Instead, I jumped ahead of her in the queue and gave the candy back to the supermarket owner, who I am quite sure is a Chinese businessman. Just call me Scrooge.

So... this moment... should it have been shared?

Had I not been alone, would I and my companion inspired each other to good deeds and done right by the woman?

Or would a companion have distracted me, such that the woman and her family would go entirely unnoticed and ignored?

moments should be shared

2011-01-08T16:09:00.003Z

I'm back in the great Sue Dan... it's quite a week for this land and it's a privilege to be here. Although, as is often true during the most historic events, life around me seems - if anything - more normal than usual.

This afternoon I headed down the block to the supermarket. We were out of milk. But as I was very very sleepy, and not particularly pressed for time, I browsed the three aisles at a leisurely pace, wondering if any other "needs" would emerge. The cereal section caught my eye. I was taken by the variety of prices, ranging from expensive (USD$ 4 per box) to absurd (USD$ 15 per box). I started studying the boxes more closely, to see if any of the varieties available might possibly entice me enough to consider shelling out such cash.

Then I noticed the strangest thing. One type of cereal, a local variety, was repeated several times. I'm not saying a row was dedicated entirely to this brand of cornflakes, nor that there were a lot of them bunched together. The exact same variety of cornflakes popped up in between the kelloggs cornflakes and the off-brand cheerios. Then again in the health section next to the Special K. Though it contains no chocolate, it held two separate spots on the row mostly dedicated to chocolate cereals. I think it was displayed about ten times, each with its own price label neatly displayed on the rack! So so random.

And I know that you who are still reading this are probably not impressed. It's hard to picture what I tried to describe above without seeing it, and much much harder to see the irony or humour in it. So I was inclined not to blog it at all, but the thing is, this is how I share moments. I don't know who I'm sharing them with - sure, I know my family reads this and a few other facebook friends take a look.

But you know that feeling when you have an "aha!" moment, or a "that's so funny!" moment? You want to share it.

This last month, I've been privileged to be sharing moments with dear friends around the world. It was fabulous. But now I guess it's time to shut down the emotions once again, because maybe it's better not to have moments at all, than not to have anyone to share them with.

But for those moments I have, I thank you, my blog reader, for being my friend.

Seven cities in 23 hours

2011-01-01T18:19:00.003Z

Some highlights of each city I hit during my day-long adventure in trying to find a little town on the Rwandan-Congolese border, complete with two rerouted flights and a lost suitcase, in which I received kind support by airport attendants in half a dozen countries and from which I currently have no regrets...

1. Beirut. The most interesting thing that happened here was probably discovering I was sharing a flight with 8 deportees to Egypt. They were all working-class looking men, varying in age from very young to very weathered. Rather than looking upset at being kicked out of Lebanon, I sensed that they were excited to be returning home. Also impressive was the throng of irritated passengers mobbing the counter because we were an hour late. What else did you expect in a surprise downpour of rain?

2. Cairo. Between unfriendly EgyptAir representatives who didn't listen to me - an infuriating attitude that cost me the safe and prompt arrival of my luggage - my heart went out to the young man who attended me at the transfers desk and printed out my rebooking. He wasn't the most efficient guy in the world, but he still didn't deserve the berating he received by his supervisor (on my account) as the three of us half-sprinted to bus stop where I caught a minibus to my new terminal. Maybe I shouldn't sympathise with him that much, though, because in addition to losing my luggage he also failed to inform me that I was being rebooked. The urgency in his (and his supervisor's) treatment had led me to believe they'd held the original flight for me, not booked a new flight.

3. Khartoum. I'm in the last week of my R&R from Sue Dan. I had no desire or plan to stop by for a visit in the middle. What a shock when I sat down on the plane and the Sudanese gentleman next to me asked if I was going to Khartoum. No! I want to go to Nairobi! He proceeded to lecture me on the inefficiencies of the humanitarian sector - in other words, of my people. I know all this. But prefer not to think about it while on vacation.

4. Nairobi. Of course we were delayed in Khartoum! Because the computers were down so everyone had to be checked in by hand. So typical. And so of course when I arrived in Nairobi I missed my connection. The second time around I had dared to hope but not to expect I'd make it in time. So I waited for upwards of an hour and a half as they argued back and forth whether to reroute me on the morning flight or if I'd have to wait til the evening flight. On New Years Eve!

5. Bujumbura. I was very glad the finally gave me a seat on the morning flight, and could only chuckle when I learned we'd be stopping in Burundi. Thankfully, at this point, I was so exhausted from a night of three 2.5-hour flights and 1.5 hour layovers that I slept straight through Bujumbura. But seriously... to be rerouted TWICE, and BOTH times to be rerouted on flights with surprise stopovers? To use a favourite Brasilian saying, NINGUÉM MERECE

6. Kigali. Kigali was the town of lost luggage and fully-booked buses. A lovely little capital city which suggests the beginning of a season of economic development and prosperity. Colourful houses and bustling businesses. And, in the airport, there was what appeared to me to be a high rate of lost luggage - I was not alone in the little luggage office, and there were piles of unclaimed bags in the foyer. Then, though everyone had said that catching a bus to Gisenyi would be easy and fast, my taxi driver and I drove around the city centre for half an hour before ascertaining that there were no spaces on buses to Gisenyi on New Years Eve. He agreed to drive me personally, for a hefty but reasonable fee considering the distance. So together we walked into a major supermarket and chose snacks from the deli counter. Together we went through the check-out queue and I paid for our snacks. Then together we set off across the gorgeous Rwandan countryside.

7. Gisenyi. is beautiful. A lake nestled in mountains with a volcano peeking up from behind the driveway where I'm staying. Old colonial houses and faux-colonial hotels. Greenery of all sorts with flowers of all colours. And very dear friends with whom to share a couple of luxurious New Years' days. Worth the trip.

Lessons learned from arranging a surprise for someone else

2010-12-29T11:04:00.000Z

For Christmas, this year, on a whim, I discovered I could travel to the UK to spend the holiday with my parents. We had already agreed that we'd spend Christmas on different continents and that-was-that, so when I found out I could get the ticket to London, I didn't feel the need to inform them of my changed plans. It's a rare treat that such a surprise offers itself so conveniently.

I really didn't put much effort at all into planning the trip which lasted just under four days including travel time. But there was some temptation to soupe up the surprise, add some flair, some extra special moments. I wondered if it would be possible to connive a way to get them to a restaurant in central London where I could be waiting for them. Or perhaps ask my co-conspirator friends to create a diversion that landed them at the train station at the exact same time as I'd be coming off the train. But it was so easy to just make my own way to their house at a time I'd knew they'd be there (because my mother had already shared with me her plans for the holiday weekend, broken down by activity). So that is what I did. Nonetheless, with as little planning as I'd invested, the experience still taught me a thing or two:

- Simpler really is often the best. No tricks or games, just the surprise itself. My mother told the story of my arrival on her doorstep about a dozen times in the three days I was with her. I didn't really need to do any more than that.

- To surprise someone you need to know what they want. To surprise them with your own presence, it sure helps a lot to be absolutely confident of their love. This only really worked because I know my parents love me and are always happy to see me.

- Likewise, it helps to know them well. I could be confident that when my mother said she was serving dinner at 8 p.m. on Friday evening that meant the family would be home on Friday evening, barring a serious emergency. I know I can depend on them that way. (unlike myself – if anyone wants to surprise me, I will certainly be a moving target)

- My mother always says that she dislikes surprises, so I was worried she'd be upset I didn't let her know. But she didn't seem to mind. In fact, having the story to tell seemed compensate nicely for the preparation she normally would have done for my arrival. I don't think I like surprises either, but who knows maybe I actually do

- To get the ticket I used frequent flyer miles and with the miles I had to return business class. There's something about being treated as the elite, a smaller group of people with a curtain binding us together and separating us from everyone else, and knowing that we're the elite... that just added a bit of confidence and spring to my steps yesterday as I dealt with security, immigration and other officers paid to stall us.

posting thoughts from Christmas Eve

2010-12-28T10:49:00.002Z

Seeing people
watching people
entire cultures of... people

An hour and a half on the train passes so quickly, especially when there are many other passengers, and especially when it is Christmas Eve and all are travelling in family

A couple of hours in a Beiruti mall are also fascinating times during Christmas season, when everyone has a little bit of a chance to let loose, just a little bit

Yesterday a Beiruti mall
Today an English train

Families out and about, going to and from fun things, similar in so many ways but intimately different

On the surface, the colours. The train is so bright: white, sky blue, red, pink, purple, green and yellow are just a few of the colours in one quick glance about me. The Mall was a rather pure, unquestioning matching up of brown and black. Sure, there were other colours, just not many.

But the lights, oh the lights! In Beirut we saw little Christmas lights everywhere, here and around. Creating shapes of sleighs, angels and bells. The lights were white and blue and yellow. The Christmas lights were contrasted against green and purple spotlights. No effort was spared on a dazzling display of beauty in Beirut. Meanwhile, the Christmas decorations in this Christmasyest of most Christmasy countries are sparse and spare.

What tells me the most, though, are the people. In front of me, an immigrant woman speaking a combination of English and her native tongue, travelling with her university-aged daughter who speaks in a perfect London accent. They are talking about deep issues like inter-family marriage, and also catching up on family gossip and covering many topics in between. Across from them are four women. Or is it three women and a man? I'm really not sure what the gender is of the heavyset figure in white. But he, or she, seems to be a very kind and friendly person, a loving and entertaining mentor to the two young women perhaps better labeled 'girls' travelling with her – or him – and a motherly woman dressed in a blue sweater. Next up is a family of three: silent father, mentorly mother and engaged young-adult son.

In Beirut, there were families, sure. Everyone was there with family. Mothers chasing babies, big sisters taking little sisters shopping, fathers snapping photos of their sons on Santa's lap, couples staring at each other over coffeecups. But it was all staged, and much of it marked by a sense of the need to be a family and get it over with. Because this is what we do.

Perhaps I should have recorded the people more diligently in Beirut. The women's boots, in and of themselves, joined together to tell a fascinating story. Cowboy boots, hipster leather boots, kneehigh socks in plaid under boots, boots with leggings and boots with leg warmers, high high heel boots, flat boots with fuzzy tops and boots that looked like homemade knitting. How much time and energy went into the primping for the average Lebanese woman's afternoon doing some last-minute shopping at the mall? How much time did the women around me prepare for spending a day on the town in London or to take the train down to the south coast to be with family? Is it possible, just possible, that the women here used the time saved to save their love of just being with people? Or is it just because it's Christmas.

Starbucks cutie

2010-12-18T17:23:00.003Z

As I sat typing away in Starbucks today, in a posture I've taken most days of my vacation this month, I was facing the serving counter.

I looked up to see a boy a little shorter than the counter, say just under three feet tall, walk in from the mall and march up to where the barista was serving a customer. If you are prone to giving Starbucks business, you know that in front of the cash register there is always a selection of candies and chocolates on offer. At this particular Starbucks the selection consisted of a variety of hard candies wrapped in Fall colours (red, orange, yellow), and a few candies wrapped in blue.

The boy reached up and pulled out a pretty blue-wrapped candy. Then we walked back out of the store.

The barista continued serving his grown-up client, never even noticing the boy's existence, much less that he walked up to the counter and shoplifted.

I couldn't bring myself to say anything, after all, the boy was too young to know that what he'd done was against the rules.

Immediately, though, the boy walked back in, ushered by his father. They went up to the barista who was just finishing with the other guy. The father explained what happened and paid, and then walked back out of the store with the little guy in tow.

With this little anecdote, I may be saying farewell for the holidays. Maybe, if I have something I need to say, I'll post. But most likely I'll be gone from here until 2011! Happy Christmas and an even Happier New Year!

Feeling Fear

2010-12-13T08:10:00.000Z

I'm back in Starbucks across the street from the Sea. I just got cajoled into ordering a ridiculously overpriced Christmas drink: "toffee nut latte". It's nowhere near worth its price, but it does in fact taste Christmasy, somehow. And I suppose that's what one does on vacation - let oneself be cajoled into doing things we might not otherwise feel justified in doing. I often fear being taken advantage of, and fear is never good, so perhaps fighting the fear justifies my overpriced toffee nut latte.

Really, though, that's neither here nor there in the midst of the awe surrounding me. The last two days have seen the first major storm of the winter in Lebanon. The high mountains are now covered in snow. The low mountains where I'm staying were slippery with hail and frozen rain this morning. But I braved that fear to drive down to the city where things are just plain old wet.

And sit in the Starbucks across the street from the sea, which is as fear-inspiring a Biblical tales like Jonah and the Whale, or Paul's shipwreck on Cyprus - which was not far from here. The waves have already calmed down, but they're still spitting several metres into the air and showering the few leisure walkers on the corniche. I know they have calmed down because there's a stretch where the metal grating meant to protect pedestrians has been torn down by the sheer force of the water.

I think fear of the power of water is a healthy fear. It reminds us of the power of God. I want to be wise: for example, drive slowly on wet mountains and avoid swimming in the Mediterranean this week. I want to remember that God keeps me safe and has given me a warm bed and house and a car to drive so I don't get wet in the rain. And he's provided me with the luxury of access to Christmas drinks at Starbucks which make me feel like I'm in a theatre watching God's greatest show of waves yet.

On the horizon I see a brighter light. I think the storm is passing and peace is coming.