A Pakistan Vacation?
I've not posted for a spell. That is not for want of venom, vehemence, or vitriol. It might have something to do with the season as well as the domestic scene, where yardwork, in particular weeding, pruning (fruit trees, etc., etc.), and planting of vegetables in both seed and seedling forms can become pretty all-consuming. And that can lead to various anatomical discomforts that, especially added to long-standing wrist/carpal discomfort, can unconsciously lead to a certain standoffishness about the keyboard and mouse.
That may or may not be part of it. No mas. We're here now.
And, in the interim, I did just recently put up a post on my reading habits that I started months ago, should you be interested. As Blogger works, I guess, it shows up dated when I first saved a draft of that post, i.e., December or so.
There is so much going on both in terms of the politics and the time of year that I find it hard to focus (you too, perhaps?). I'm going here now on the single topic of my friend Sarah's wild journalistic adventure (with two compadres) to Pakistan. I flagged the courageous Common Language Project (CLP) work that Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, and Jessica Partnow were involved in a while back in Southeast Asia, though am enfeebled when it comes to finding link. I'm pretty certain I catapulted it your way.
These particular Musketeers returned to the States after that saga (I think I had a personal encounter or two), Sarah and Alex got married (not to get too personal - but I did not get an invite!), and they are enjoying Pulitzer funding for their current courageous visit to Pakistan! (Actually, if memory serves, there was at least one more trip to the Middle East somewhere in there, non-journalistic, and possibly another work-driven, as well.) I'm fully into boosterism from this end - their efforts are invaluable in helping improve our understanding of the reality on the ground - if their work gets any decent amount of attention. But, frankly, I'm fully gripped up at the idea that they are where they are.
I'm going to leave it to you to follow up on links here. I have three CLP Pakistan posts to share, but you owe it to your political education to check out the CLP home page as well as the Pakistan Hearts and Minds sub-page. This is vibrant on-the-scene reporting involving genuine human interaction of a sort completely unlike the increasingly crappy "journalism" we have been having to learn to ignore. Truly gripping stories of real people interacting across what often these days seem to be widening cultural crevasses.
Please bookmark if you are so inclined and consider a donation to CLP - a great project furthering the cause of actual journalism, in stark contrast to the sorry state of our mainstream corporate "journalism." Further dissemination strongly encouraged! I am posting only early post portions - do follow links for the full story. There is some terrific pictorial coverage to be found there also, courtesy of Alex and possibly others. The pictures are very evocative, needless to say.
"Letting the Terrorists Win" (4/17/09) starts like this:
It’s late in the day. Nearing evening actually, and I’m nervously checking the clock on our taxi’s dashboard as we bounce on the rocky dirt road past the crumbled mud remains of Afghan homes, the last refugees that occupied this forgotten feeling landscape. We don’t have permission to be here and had promised ourselves we’ll be back on the road to Islamabad by 5 pm. Which was now fifteen minutes ago.
Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
But the pathetically underreported reality, the human toll of this violence, the humanitarian crisis that is weighing heavier and heavier on the already stooped shoulders of this overburdened nation, cannot be expressed at gentle dinner parties in suburban compounds.
My head is covered; I’ve wrapped a large powder blue scarf tightly around my face and body so as not to publicize the arrival of American journalists in this region considered dangerous for any foreigners. But our new car is attracting attention and it seems that I’m making direct eye contact with every person in the crowd as we lumber through a busy evening market.
“Um, how safe do you think this is?” I ask our guide.
This is a ridiculous question to ask at this point and I laugh at myself. Everyone back home said it was too dangerous to travel to Pakistan, everyone in Karachi said it was too dangerous to travel to Peshawar, and our contacts in Peshawar melted away at the mention of this visit to Jellozai, instead keeping us cosseted in their offices for hours trying to describe the realities we couldn’t see for ourselves just miles away.
It is dangerous to be here. I know it, my colleagues know it, and the cab driver clearly knows it as his eyes flicker meaningfully at me in the review mirror.
Full of bluster, a quality that is not particularly reassuring in situations like this, our guide announces, “If you will be killed, I will be killed first, okay?”
-clip-
If I worked at it, I could probably name a few places around the globe that would equal Peshawar in terms of "where I don't want to be right now." I am in awe over the CLP boots-on-the-ground, here documented under title "Caught in Pakistan's Crossfire":
The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
Beginning last summer, intensified clashes between Taliban militants and the Pakistani military — as well as U.S. drone attacks — have created chaos in the ungoverned tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
As civilians find themselves caught between Taliban violence and Pakistan and American military strikes, 600,000 refugees have fled to the relative safety of camps like this one, or taken refuge with family members living in Pakistan’s urban centers.
Tahseen Ullah Khan, Chief Coordinator of the National Resource & Development Foundation, a Peshawar-based nonprofit, has become sadly familiar with the realities of that human toll as he’s begun to gather data about civilian causalities, injuries and displacement in northwestern Pakistan.
“When the military comes into these areas, they bring the war machine,” Khan says over an avalanche of grizzly photos and handwritten testimonials of death and displacement spilling over the top of his desk, “And everything is destroyed behind it.”
One way to understand that destruction is to visit Jellozai, Pakistan’s largest camp for internally displaced people. Here 7,000 families are housed in less than one square mile — though there are plans to expand the camp again — amidst the recent mud and clay ruins of the Afghan refugee camp that stood here until just one year ago.
“I come from Bajaur Agency,” says Pervez, a young man who has spent seven months in Jellozai — largely populated with refugees from Bajaur.
“There is so much violence, people are shooting and being slaughtered,” he shouts over a crowd of men and boys, dressed in the traditional long vests and wool caps of Pashtuns, who have gathered in the main road leading into the camp.
“My parents were injured in Bajaur,” he continues, explaining that people in the area he fled have become victims of fighting between the military and the militants.
“I brought them to Islamabad and they died there, they were old people in their sixties.”
-clip-
I'm trying to work a pretend that Karachi is safer than Peshawar. I doubt if the limited data support me. Sarah et al have this entitled "Karachi Nights," but somehow it ain't quite the same as California Nights:
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
Hawks come out against the dirty pink sunset, their wide ragged wings stretched against the salty wind rising from the clanging port. The yellow street lights buzz on, their harsh glow smeared in the heavy humid air. Children, barefoot and bored, poke their lazy limbs through wrought iron bars that cage apartment balconies.
And then all at once the rising night floods in with the call of a hundred muezzins layering like rounds until one last cry to God falls back to earth as a lonely prayer, settling somewhere among 14 million people, all jostling against each other for some small piece of economic opportunity in this explosive city.
If Lahore is this country’s soul, and Islamabad its mind, then Karachi—in all its scrappy glory—is Pakistan’s guts.
Karachi doesn’t make the list of destination international cities for most travelers. The few foreigners that still venture to Pakistan, despite nearly daily reports of a country on the brink, don’t spend much time here. Karachi can’t boast the cool self-important avenues of Islamabad or the Mogul romance of Lahore; it isn’t a pretty city—most that come here will remember it for its heat and tangled traffic, its cement block buildings and regular blackouts.
The Lonely Planet, final word in travel destinations, allots this city—spread over a thousand square miles just west of the mouth of The Indus River—a measly two pages worth of activities.
I had no intention of getting to know Karachi. My original plan, like that of most journalists in Pakistan, was to head immediately to the violence and tumult of the tribal areas, to the political talking heads of the capitol.
But Karachi immediately grabbed me by the collar and it wouldn’t let me go. And an ever shifting security situation in the north made it easy to delay plans to leave, as I extended my stay a few days at a time, armed with thin arguments about meetings and appointments that were keeping me here, in the city that was shaping my impressions of Pakistan.
As the Taliban crept into Buner and heads of state pouted their way through diplomatic meetings, I was spending my days wandering through the industrial suburbs of Sher Shah, home to the mechanics, small time machinists and child laborers that make up this stumbling country’s economic engine.
Here I talked to a father and son pulling apart discarded electronics from Dubai for the valuable metals and plastics that would make their way to smelters across the city.
I followed a sixteen year old laborer beginning a daily routine that lurched from 6am morning prayers to a shift at a bolt making factory to a few evening hours at a children’s learning center where he’s hoping to become literate and help his family out of the poverty that binds him and his nine year old brother to the whirring machines they bend over ten hours a day.
-clip-
Jessica, Alex, and Sarah: please continue to be cool and careful and thus who you are. Love and grace be with you.
That may or may not be part of it. No mas. We're here now.
And, in the interim, I did just recently put up a post on my reading habits that I started months ago, should you be interested. As Blogger works, I guess, it shows up dated when I first saved a draft of that post, i.e., December or so.
There is so much going on both in terms of the politics and the time of year that I find it hard to focus (you too, perhaps?). I'm going here now on the single topic of my friend Sarah's wild journalistic adventure (with two compadres) to Pakistan. I flagged the courageous Common Language Project (CLP) work that Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, and Jessica Partnow were involved in a while back in Southeast Asia, though am enfeebled when it comes to finding link. I'm pretty certain I catapulted it your way.
These particular Musketeers returned to the States after that saga (I think I had a personal encounter or two), Sarah and Alex got married (not to get too personal - but I did not get an invite!), and they are enjoying Pulitzer funding for their current courageous visit to Pakistan! (Actually, if memory serves, there was at least one more trip to the Middle East somewhere in there, non-journalistic, and possibly another work-driven, as well.) I'm fully into boosterism from this end - their efforts are invaluable in helping improve our understanding of the reality on the ground - if their work gets any decent amount of attention. But, frankly, I'm fully gripped up at the idea that they are where they are.
I'm going to leave it to you to follow up on links here. I have three CLP Pakistan posts to share, but you owe it to your political education to check out the CLP home page as well as the Pakistan Hearts and Minds sub-page. This is vibrant on-the-scene reporting involving genuine human interaction of a sort completely unlike the increasingly crappy "journalism" we have been having to learn to ignore. Truly gripping stories of real people interacting across what often these days seem to be widening cultural crevasses.
Please bookmark if you are so inclined and consider a donation to CLP - a great project furthering the cause of actual journalism, in stark contrast to the sorry state of our mainstream corporate "journalism." Further dissemination strongly encouraged! I am posting only early post portions - do follow links for the full story. There is some terrific pictorial coverage to be found there also, courtesy of Alex and possibly others. The pictures are very evocative, needless to say.
"Letting the Terrorists Win" (4/17/09) starts like this:
It’s late in the day. Nearing evening actually, and I’m nervously checking the clock on our taxi’s dashboard as we bounce on the rocky dirt road past the crumbled mud remains of Afghan homes, the last refugees that occupied this forgotten feeling landscape. We don’t have permission to be here and had promised ourselves we’ll be back on the road to Islamabad by 5 pm. Which was now fifteen minutes ago.
Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
But the pathetically underreported reality, the human toll of this violence, the humanitarian crisis that is weighing heavier and heavier on the already stooped shoulders of this overburdened nation, cannot be expressed at gentle dinner parties in suburban compounds.
My head is covered; I’ve wrapped a large powder blue scarf tightly around my face and body so as not to publicize the arrival of American journalists in this region considered dangerous for any foreigners. But our new car is attracting attention and it seems that I’m making direct eye contact with every person in the crowd as we lumber through a busy evening market.
“Um, how safe do you think this is?” I ask our guide.
This is a ridiculous question to ask at this point and I laugh at myself. Everyone back home said it was too dangerous to travel to Pakistan, everyone in Karachi said it was too dangerous to travel to Peshawar, and our contacts in Peshawar melted away at the mention of this visit to Jellozai, instead keeping us cosseted in their offices for hours trying to describe the realities we couldn’t see for ourselves just miles away.
It is dangerous to be here. I know it, my colleagues know it, and the cab driver clearly knows it as his eyes flicker meaningfully at me in the review mirror.
Full of bluster, a quality that is not particularly reassuring in situations like this, our guide announces, “If you will be killed, I will be killed first, okay?”
-clip-
If I worked at it, I could probably name a few places around the globe that would equal Peshawar in terms of "where I don't want to be right now." I am in awe over the CLP boots-on-the-ground, here documented under title "Caught in Pakistan's Crossfire":
The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
Beginning last summer, intensified clashes between Taliban militants and the Pakistani military — as well as U.S. drone attacks — have created chaos in the ungoverned tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
As civilians find themselves caught between Taliban violence and Pakistan and American military strikes, 600,000 refugees have fled to the relative safety of camps like this one, or taken refuge with family members living in Pakistan’s urban centers.
Tahseen Ullah Khan, Chief Coordinator of the National Resource & Development Foundation, a Peshawar-based nonprofit, has become sadly familiar with the realities of that human toll as he’s begun to gather data about civilian causalities, injuries and displacement in northwestern Pakistan.
“When the military comes into these areas, they bring the war machine,” Khan says over an avalanche of grizzly photos and handwritten testimonials of death and displacement spilling over the top of his desk, “And everything is destroyed behind it.”
One way to understand that destruction is to visit Jellozai, Pakistan’s largest camp for internally displaced people. Here 7,000 families are housed in less than one square mile — though there are plans to expand the camp again — amidst the recent mud and clay ruins of the Afghan refugee camp that stood here until just one year ago.
“I come from Bajaur Agency,” says Pervez, a young man who has spent seven months in Jellozai — largely populated with refugees from Bajaur.
“There is so much violence, people are shooting and being slaughtered,” he shouts over a crowd of men and boys, dressed in the traditional long vests and wool caps of Pashtuns, who have gathered in the main road leading into the camp.
“My parents were injured in Bajaur,” he continues, explaining that people in the area he fled have become victims of fighting between the military and the militants.
“I brought them to Islamabad and they died there, they were old people in their sixties.”
-clip-
I'm trying to work a pretend that Karachi is safer than Peshawar. I doubt if the limited data support me. Sarah et al have this entitled "Karachi Nights," but somehow it ain't quite the same as California Nights:
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
Hawks come out against the dirty pink sunset, their wide ragged wings stretched against the salty wind rising from the clanging port. The yellow street lights buzz on, their harsh glow smeared in the heavy humid air. Children, barefoot and bored, poke their lazy limbs through wrought iron bars that cage apartment balconies.
And then all at once the rising night floods in with the call of a hundred muezzins layering like rounds until one last cry to God falls back to earth as a lonely prayer, settling somewhere among 14 million people, all jostling against each other for some small piece of economic opportunity in this explosive city.
If Lahore is this country’s soul, and Islamabad its mind, then Karachi—in all its scrappy glory—is Pakistan’s guts.
Karachi doesn’t make the list of destination international cities for most travelers. The few foreigners that still venture to Pakistan, despite nearly daily reports of a country on the brink, don’t spend much time here. Karachi can’t boast the cool self-important avenues of Islamabad or the Mogul romance of Lahore; it isn’t a pretty city—most that come here will remember it for its heat and tangled traffic, its cement block buildings and regular blackouts.
The Lonely Planet, final word in travel destinations, allots this city—spread over a thousand square miles just west of the mouth of The Indus River—a measly two pages worth of activities.
I had no intention of getting to know Karachi. My original plan, like that of most journalists in Pakistan, was to head immediately to the violence and tumult of the tribal areas, to the political talking heads of the capitol.
But Karachi immediately grabbed me by the collar and it wouldn’t let me go. And an ever shifting security situation in the north made it easy to delay plans to leave, as I extended my stay a few days at a time, armed with thin arguments about meetings and appointments that were keeping me here, in the city that was shaping my impressions of Pakistan.
As the Taliban crept into Buner and heads of state pouted their way through diplomatic meetings, I was spending my days wandering through the industrial suburbs of Sher Shah, home to the mechanics, small time machinists and child laborers that make up this stumbling country’s economic engine.
Here I talked to a father and son pulling apart discarded electronics from Dubai for the valuable metals and plastics that would make their way to smelters across the city.
I followed a sixteen year old laborer beginning a daily routine that lurched from 6am morning prayers to a shift at a bolt making factory to a few evening hours at a children’s learning center where he’s hoping to become literate and help his family out of the poverty that binds him and his nine year old brother to the whirring machines they bend over ten hours a day.
-clip-
Jessica, Alex, and Sarah: please continue to be cool and careful and thus who you are. Love and grace be with you.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:48 PM
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