Dans le meilleur des mondes possibles

In the best of all possible worlds

2005-12-04T19:37:00.000+04:30

Please click once more to visit the new site:

Dans le meilleur des mondes possibles

Translation: In the best of all possible worlds.

The blog is in English, and has a blogroll of other aid and development bloggers working overseas. Welcome!

To the Oh Really Factor

2005-11-23T08:57:00.000+04:30

[This post refers to a comment made on ORF's blog at http://www.ohreallyfactor.blogspot.com. I felt that it was so off-topic that people were not getting my point, and moved my comments here. Please refer to ORF's blog for the original post and background.]

"you seem to have missed the fact that I was joking when I wrote that comment, pointing to the sheer absurdity of some of the nonsense in the PATRIOT Act."

On the contrary, I totally got it. I think it's amazing that we can joke about things like that and realize how awful it is, and yet- not take the picture. I wanted to point out, not to you in particular, but to everybody, that this is exactly the slippery slope that does lead to facism and dictatorship. I returned to Uzbekistan many times over the four-year slide into total dictatorship, and you'd be surprised how you get trapped into things, when it's all fun and games at first.

You wrote, "I never called the U.S. a dictatorship. Ever."

Exactly my point. How can we get so close to how they lived in the days of the Soviet Union- even to the extent of our own archipelago of secret prisons across in Eastern Europe- and not realize it?

You didn't mention the gulag- you haven't said anything about it. I mentioned it because I felt that our feelings about the USSR are somehow more poignant than those about the fictional Oceana in 1984-which is why, while people are fine with describing the PATRIOT act as quasi-Orwellian, they would never compare it to something Soviet.

"I'm an upstanding citizen. I've never even gotten a speeding ticket, and about the only thing I've ever stolen are office supplies. I don't really feel I personally have anything to worry about,"

People in Russia say this all the time when Americans ask them, "How could you have lived under a dictatorship? How could you stand it?" Stalinism, of course, was one of the darkest periods in human history and I am not comparing what Bush is doing now to that. However we should keep in mind that many people thought just such things to prevent themselves from going crazy with fear. They assumed there was some order to it, that it wasn't state-sponsored terrorism, and therefore, that they were immune.

"aside from all the bloodshed during the Bolshevik Revolution, were that people had to stand in line for six hours to get bread, five years to get a car, and utilities like heat and hot water were never a guarantee."

The bread lines started around Perestroika- though I make no claim to understanding the chain of cause and effect there. Cars were not available but they have amazing public transport. Heat was a guarantee in the cities until recently.

I am not defending the means used to get to these ends, or saying that the most you can expect from society is bread and heating. But it was less awful than one might think- and in some cases, less awful than now- so do not forget how much we can tolerate.

Movin' on up

2005-11-22T16:27:00.000+04:30

Alright loyal readers, the blog has been re-vamped yet again and is now set up for viewing. The bugs are gone and the comments section is open for business (however, if the same bastards that regularly spam Brendan's blog drop by even once, I'm going to institute an approval policy.

Thanks to all who stopped by the first version and gave comments. Extra plugs for my rocking fans:

Karla keeps a bloggin' with great pictures of deadly flesh-eating squirrels.
Brendan has some of the best insights on Afghanistan and expat life (especially his recent kite post).
Shannon continues to provide us with daily insights into naked Germans with their cars.
Qasim is getting all deep on us lately, with a very interesting post on what it's like to be a non-white American in Afghanistan. Czech it out!
Asiyah doesn't have a blog link, but thanks, RBG!

Most of all- don't forget to go back to MY NEW BLOG which is much more sophisticated and attractive than this one, which is basically a failed attempt in DIY, whereas that one is based on lessons learned.

New blog! New blog!

2005-11-19T22:19:00.000+04:30

I've moved, everybody! I'm a gone to a much cooler blog and you are all invited.

I'll be switching my archives bit by bit, but the links are up and the comments are working.

Come visit!

A Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand

2005-11-18T14:55:00.000+04:30

Hi everybody.

I'm re-designing the site and that means experimentation! Sorry for the ugly style at present. I was just checking my CSS skills- as you can see I put the the "er" in "beginner".

You might not believe it but way back in 1995 I had my own website (not a blog, but a bottom-up geocities spot with tables and Photoshop graphics and everything else you aren't supposed to do) and I really do enjoy programming. I'm thinking about getting back into it and spending an hour every evening trying to de-code code.

Happenings:

perso: Yoga classes started up here in the Northeast... well, it's more of a club, but it's beautiful. Finally, rather than straining to look in the mirror while keeping my back straight and at the same time trying to remember whether or not the chin was tucked or head back in the Yoga Journal photo, I have a teacher! Thank God. Even better- she did not have to stop the class to inform me that I had been doing it wrong for the past few months, which is a huge relief. (Brendan, you said it wasn't yoga... well, the yoga teacher said it was, so there.)
roots: Most people cannot place my contaminated expat-American accent with its semi-anglicized consonants and Latinized vowels... especially since I hail from a very unpopulated part of the States and the start accent is not too recognizeable in the first place. But we have a guest at our house and he guessed where I was from in a whole 30 seconds. "Are you from Portland, Oregon?" he asked. Apparently I have the same end-result of an accent as another girl from Portland he knew... bizarre. I have not lived there in a long time but my frequent moves around the west coast must have left my tongue in much the same state as it was when I was a kid. The fact that he didn't immediately ask me whether my parents were from the States puts him in my good book.* But now I feel that my bohemian, Pacific Northwest heritage is somehow validated and strengthened. (When I was in Dublin, I found myself frequenting a coffee shop called West Coast Coffee and an organic-based do-it-yourself sandwich shop owned by a guy from Portland- though I didn't notice the connection until halfway through my visit. I wonder whether it is just coincidence that I was born in the right part of the world, or whether my first 21 years had a greater effect on me than I would have thought...)
teas: My obsessive personality has led me from an unhealthy obsession with coffee (starting with horrible triple-tall almond lattes at 13 and eventually progressing to Turkish made only with coffee ground in Turkey) to an only slightly healther fanatic interest in green, white, and herbal teas. In addition to purchasing a tea set in Dushanbe on the last trip up, I also have been adding to my tea collection (most teas are from Imperial Teas, including the delicious Women's Activitea). It's getting to be too much, but if anyone would like to come up/down/over for tea... you are most welcome.

That's about it for now. I hope that by the next time y'all get to this site, I will have a new theme and you will all just comment like mad because it will be so pleasant to be here.

*All you who were wondering: YES, and so were my grandparents, and basically everyone for the past five generations... except those immigrant Swedes on my grandfather's side.

Cha-cha-cha-CHANGES

2005-11-17T09:44:00.000+04:30

Some of you may have noticed that I am trying to make changes on the site, for better or for worse. Many of these changes involve linking to the outside world, and pasting over-optimistic hippy-dippy bumper stickers across the top.

The Make Poverty History Banner
I am not so keen on the hype of Make Poverty History but I am all too aware of the fact that it is cheesy campaigns like that which get young innocents involved in the right side of politics and give people who otherwise would do nothing, to do something.

We can't all be romantic heros living abroad or giving all our goods to the poor. For some people, that click is their first step towards a more charitable life. This blog is, after all, about optimism in the face of all horrors (that is- hope- second only to love, according to St. Paul) and the determination to do justly and charitably despite the fact that it appears to have no immediate or positive impact whatsoever.

One of the problems of the left is the fact that we are always splintering off in our haughty way. At some point, principled people have just got to give up being perfect and move on.

Re-Branding
I am also re-branding my blog. It will contain more Central Asia and development stories and less politics and personal crap. I have noticed that the blogs I enjoy reading most of the time are such. Like Brendan's, for instance. I am also going to try to improve my postings, and I will put some posts from my old blog here.

Re-Designing
Bit by bit, I'll be re-designing the blog. I may have to update my HTML. What's that, you say? It's practically obsolete? I'm old enough to have an obsolete skill. Good heavens. Anyway, I will update my tags and so on and I hope this will make the site easier to use. However I will also be trying to put in some original things.

Links
I am not one of those people who will ask you to link to my blog, although I might ask for people to update their links. However, in the interest of being a responsible blogger, I will be linking to more similar sites so that people who come here can get more stuff like that.

From now on, you will be able to find links to a number of expat-aid-worker blogs here. I hope I will start to amass them from now on as the word gets out.

NB- The poll was removed as it never came up and the automatic script kept generating errors. Sorry.

Thanks a Ton to the Afghanistan National Football Team

2005-11-13T08:38:00.000+04:30

[N.B. This post has been seriously modified as even I could not stand to read the previous version.]

As some are aware, I had been unable to get a visa into Afghanistan for some time. To tell the story of the visas would be disrespectful to the Afghanistan government which we are trying so hard to support, so suffice it to say, I finally got my visa- or I should say, my colleague got my visa for me- and was on my way.

I felt the misanthropy and pessimism growing as I headed towards the far edge of the FUSSR and towards the fifth-poorest, lowest-HDI country on the planet. I was crossing at Sherkhan Bandar, which is my least favorite of all the borders I have crossed.

It's all dust in the summer and all mud the rest of the time. It's a boat crossing, unlike the nice Friendship Bridge at Hairaton. While that is a really long bridge, especially if you have to carry all your belongings plus a pressure cooker across, somehow I like it better under almost all circumstances than the Sherkhan boat. First of all, it's free, while the Sherkhan ferry service costs $15 a pop. (The 33% increase started right after Eid.) Second of all, sometimes you can catch a ride with the long-haul truckers that drive across it regularly (that is, if you are a young woman or very pretty boy). That shortens the trip considerably.

However, Uzbekistan has made it more and more difficult and less worth it to get transit visas, and now I work in the northeast nearer to Tajikistan, so it's by boat we go.

At least the Kokul boat is a motorboat and romantic in a quixotic way, and the border guards there are so flustered they don't know how to register you. They have a nice little shack (I mean it is boards leaning against one another) and a drug-sniffing dog (I think they switched it with their own dog but don't tell anybody) there.
So I wasn't really excited about the trip. And then, of course, there was the Afghanistan National Football team and their entourage, crossing at the same time. I found out about their presence when I was refused entrance into customs because I wasn't on their list. (It was their own guy blocking the door.)

They were mostly quiet at the beginning, except for one horrible Afghan man (I don't know if he was part of their group) who was totally drunk and came up to me while I was registering at the Sanitation and Hygiene Point and asked me where I was going. Unfortunately the lady at the desk translated for me so I couldn't pretend I didn't understand. I just gave her a funny look and glared at him and he went away. He had vomit bits on his shirt. Technically, you aren't supposed to drink during Eid or actually, ever, but that's what you can expect from people who live in a dry state and then get set loose on freedom.

When we boarded the bus, I wasn't surprised at all to see all the men crowd on first... except for one. One gentleman (an Afghan!) waited and let me board first. It's hard not to have a little hope when you see people like that still alive in the country, with chivalry intact.

Off we went to the riverside, where they dumped us and our things off the bus into the mud. I would describe the bus in detail, but just imagine a 1962 model bus if you took out all the amenities such as windows and seat cushions, replaced them with supplies from a gulag, and then let it sit and rust for about 20 years. That is what happened the bus I was on, so presumably they would look exactly the same.

There I was with a load of six boxes of food for the organization, plus winter clothes for my sister-in-law, plus all my own stuff, when they decide it's time to put the stuff onto the barge which triples as a storeroom for a bunch of Tajikistan carbomide (urea fertilizer), a dock for the little tugboat that transports passengers across the Panj river, and, in its better moments, a real barge.

I started to load my things on to the barge, box by box (they were kind of heavy but not too bad) when finally one of the Afghan National Football Team players decided to help me. I would not have been shocked if they would have let me, a mere woman-donkey, load them all on by myself, but as it turned out, several of them offered to help. Actually now that I look back on it, it may have been people totally unrelated to the Football team that were helping me, but the point is, some men were acting chivalrous and that was very nice.

Later, when the time came to move the boxes from the barge to the tugboat, they all chipped in, darlings. Okay, not all. But more than one, for sure. Then they let me sit in the engine room.

Now, this boat we are in consists totally of an engine room. It's a little tugboat with one place for the captain to sit and then it's just got a front and a back (stern and uh, you'd think I read Moby Dick for nothing). Everybody else is sitting on the top of the boat on the front or back. The engine "room" is actually where you steer the boat and then there's this huge engine at your feet, breathing exhaust straight in your face. It's not as if being in the engine room is a pleasant experience. The seat was a board with a piece of oily foam on it. The foam fell off halfway through. Still, it was nice of them to give me the only seat on the boat.

Finally, we managed to cross the border where another visa-related scandal having to do with bitter low-level civil servants awaited me. However I must at least praise the guy who was sitting at the desk for not slapping me across the face, because I was really upset and it wasn't his fault.

Thanks to the Afghanistan National Football Team for helping me carry my stuff across, and lose the drunk hangers-on.

My New Atlas

2005-11-11T11:13:00.000+04:30

I have new atlas, and I don't mean a map. Look at this!!!

It's me in atlas. I also got another dress made, not of traditional atlas but just of some silky materials. The girl who is doing it is really good. You need to realize that she did not make it out of one huge 3m2 piece. This material came in strips 40cm wide (the pattern goes lengthwise) so she had to match it all up to make it look nice.

I'm really excited. Anybody who has been to Muslim Asia can tell you how comfy these clothes are. It's all mumu I know, but lawd is it comfortable.

The headgear, by the way, is the Tajikistan post-Basmachi way of wearing the traditional Muslim head covering. Usually women wear any kind of scarf, provided it is extremely colorful and ideally if it has some kind of sparkly on it, either glued on or stitched in. I found one cotton one with the traditional atlas pattern in a matching red and white.

By the way, so the reader is not confused: in Tajikistan, this is not a costume. People wear it every day. Not everyone, and they have other patterns so usually nobody is going to wear atlas more than once a week, but they do wear it to the office, if not frequently in Dushanbe then certainly more often in the southern cities of Kulob and Qurghon-Teppa.

If Chris tells me how to put music on this blog, I will post a nice song here as well.

Jordan, France, and Neil Diamond

2005-11-10T13:33:00.000+04:30

Jordan is actually the name of one of my cousins. It is also the name of a country where some asshole decided, "Gee, what better way to glorify the Name of God and show submission than to blow up a bunch of youth at a wedding."

I mean, do these so-called jihadis get extra points if they slaughter Muslim virgins? Sure, a wedding in the east is not the same "happiest-day-of-your-life" for both parties (in Tajikistan the girl is supposed to shed a tear or two at the thought of leaving her parents' house) but you know that these are city kids, they probably knew one another, probably she was a nice young lady from a nice family, maybe he was on the way to a nice government job or with an NGO, maybe to take up a post in his dad's business... they were in this hotel, it was the beginning of a new life, the guests are dancing to their traditional music, maybe some of the young people take it upon themselves to insert some modern grooves onto the scene, cha-cha-cha, the sheep is slaughtered and there are beautifully marinated hunks of meat on every plate, Ramadhan just finished and this is like an extension of Eid for everybody, the prayers have been said and they've rented fancy cars to sit outside...

BOOM, end of your lives, end of your happiness. Blood on the wedding dress, the groom's hat is blown off his head. Glass in the eyes of the guests. They say over 50 died, may they rest in peace...

Just because a bunch of sexually frustrated teenage boys from some Muslim society have decided that the real cause of their problems and is the fact that the United States has attacked Iraq or something like that, it's never very clear what the exact issue is, and therefore they must kill Jordanian civilians.

I mean it's all so obvious that in order to solve the world's problems, what you need to do is bomb a wedding party.

I hope everyone who reads this will observe a moment of silence or say a prayer for the families of the dead in the slaughters in Jordan and Iraq today.

And to the youth in the French banlieues- STICK TO CARS, PEOPLE, STICK TO CARS. Thank you.

(On a side note- isn't it so French for them to do the classic 80s riot instead of organizing a proper suicide bombing? I can just imagine it:

"Ouais, on va terroriser les parents, on va casser les flics, on va brûler les voitures..."
"Mais en Angleterre ils ont bombardé leurs voisins..."
"Les anglais, ils sont des barbares. Tu sais qu'ils payent pour leurs grands écoles? C'est chien la-bas. Ils ont envoyé les soldats à l'Irak! Mais nous, nous sont civilisés. Nous faisons grèves et tout ça."
"Donc on va faire grève?"
"Nous sommes les chômeurs."
"Ah ouais. ON VA BRULER LES VOITURES! OUAIS!")

Finally, I have just started to download Neil Diamond onto my computer. Neil Young may be the godfather of grunge, which is actually just the depressive part of often-manic heavy metal but whatever, and yet I am torn. If I were stuck on a desert island, would it be Young or Diamond? Sedaka of course is out of the question. I mean if you could have everything they've ever done, which means of course Young's tour with NIИ and Diamond's Song-Sung-Blue duet with The Fonz and the rest of the "Live at the Acropolis" album, certainly one thing that I could listen to a million times- which would you choose?

I would ask my loyal readership their opinion but I think I know how it's going to go:

Shannon is torn, because she likes Neil Young better but Neil Diamond has more kitch value;
Brendan, if he knows of either one of the Neils, will definitely choose Neil Young, having now realized that Diamond is of kitch value, though I can tell he is already hoping he will never have to make this choice;
Karla is a Neil Young woman, I can just tell;
All the non-Americans are going for Neil Young because they have heard of him and nobody outside of North America has heard of Diamond except old French ladies;
Does Barbara read my blog? She may not have heard of Neil Diamond but I think there is a small chance she would choose him over Young. She is Belgian, after all;
RBG and Chris are here for the Central Asia posts, not the politics, but if somehow I acquired this terrible power over them and could FORCE them to choose- I don't know them well enough, but based on the music Chris put on his blog, I'd say he's a Neil Young man.

Hm. Readers, defend yourselves.

V goste, serendipitously

2005-11-08T17:54:00.000+04:30

Today I wanted to get some atlas sewn into some traditional Tajikistan pants and dress. My sweet husband bought me this semi-retro/so-coming-back material atlas. Atlas itself never really went out of style, but for a while it got kind of big and blocky and flourescent. Now we're getting back to deep earthy tones and finer edges.

Of course I couldn't go to just any tailor. I was invited to go to the daughter-in-law of one of the men who works at our office, since she is apparently especially good, or at least especially related to someone I work with. We drove all the way across town- literally, I mean we were at the airport, practically- into an tree-lined neighbourhood of the capital only to find the young woman gone all the way to the other end of town, to her aunt-in-law's house, in Vodonososnaya, where we live.

"Maybe it's my sister's birthday," said my colleague. "I remember they were saying something about the eighth." I knew what that meant. It meant I was going to have to eat at least ten pieces of cake and have plov.

Sure enough, when we finally arrived at the house, there were a whole bunch of ladies standing around a beautifully set dastarkhaan (kind of like the one my sister-in-law prepared for Eid above, only with more on it since she had just started to set hers) and talking in that bouncy Samarkandi-Uzbek of theirs. They were pleased to have a guest and I was pleased not to have to prepare dinner for myself (it was 5:00 p.m. by the time we got there) and I got my measurements taken and had:

1 pumpkin sambusa- I've had strawberry mantu but never squash sambusa! (Actually in Uzbek it's samosa but I like the Tajik word better.)
1 piece of layer cake- which is not like our layer cake. It's made of about 20 layers 1 mm thick each, with butter in-between.
1 piece of store-bought cake with 1 cubic inch of sugar on top, just sitting there to crunch on.
1 bowl of mutton soup with rice and chickpeas (osh).
1 piece breaded cauliflower, deep-fried.
Half a plate of salat oliv'ye, or Russian potato salad
2 cups tea
2 cups apricot juice
several bites homemade cherry jam with homemade lepyoshka. God I miss lepyoshka. Some people like Afghan naan better but not me.

Fortunately I was not subjected to plov- they had saved it for later and I was keeping our driver overtime, so I had an excuse to cut and run. This after three days of being force-fed for all of Eid. But the ladies were just so sweet I had to try them all. Before I left a little girl spoke to me in English. She said, "Hello, what is your name?" I told her, and asked her name. She answered into her chest and I couldn't understand at first. Then I told her, "Very NICE to MEET you," over-intoning, hoping that it would help. It didn't, and we finished in Russian, since my Uzbek is confined to one word: yoq, which means, "no." I was impressed at her effort, however.

Sadly I found out there was not enough material so tomorrow I'm going back to get some more. Maybe I'll have two sewn. I can tell you one thing- there is nothing to compete with atlas in all the worlds' traditional costumes. Oh, sure, the sari may be sexy, and the rings those African girls wear all over may be impressive- you may enjoy looking at the Russian women in their long multi-colored dreamcoats like cakes, or you might find Moroccan robes elegant. But there is nothing that screams LOOK OVER HERE, GUYS like psychadelic, tie-dyed-esque, rainbow-festive, wear-me-year-round-with-everything atlas.

Is Robbie Williams a Gay Icon and I Didn't Know It?

2005-11-05T17:40:00.001+04:30

Well, today I was engaged in my new favorite hobby: downloading mp3s. Those who know me can imagine my choices: from obscure Stray Cats albums to Robbie Williams' new song, Tripping, and cringe. Fine with me, I'm not bothered about having poor musical taste.

When I brought up "Intensive Care" to get to Tripping, the service's "similar album" recommendations appeared below. The similar albums included:

Judy Garland, "A Portrait of Judy Garland"
Barbara Streisand, "One Voice"
George Gershwin, "The Very Best of Gershwin"
Liza Minnelli, "Liza's Back"
Classic Disney Vol. II
Sammy Davis Jr., "That Old Black Magic"
Shirley Bassey, "The Power of Love"
and, last but certainly not least, Luciano Pavoratti, "Carreras Domingo Pavoratti in Concert"

<8-\>Is Robbie Williams a gay icon, and I didn't know it, or is this all because of one song on his album which is entitled "Your Gay Friend"? If it is the latter- did they really tag Judy Garland with the word "gay"? And Pavoratti and Gershwin? Was my friend Rachel right when she said I was a gay man trapped in a woman's body?

Tojikistoni Vatani Man

2005-11-04T10:20:00.000+04:30

Ah, lovely Tajikistan. Land where you can go out in a miniskirt and tank top, or in full Islamic dress (however no Iranian chadors or burqas, please) and nobody blinks an eye. Land of night-clubs, Alexander's last stand at a pristine mountain lake, the national tea-strengthener mehri gioh, and frustrated opposition leaders. Land of respect for women mixed with lovely tea traditions, holidays, and just a little bit of corruption bureaucracy and forced-patriotism in the form of idiotic holidays woven in.

This year, Eid-al-Fitr falls on a Thursday. Constitution Day, which is separate from Independence Day and 9 May, has been switched from the 7th to the 6th- nobody knows why- so it falls on a Sunday. The government has decreed that you can move a day off to after a national holiday, but not before. So, for example, if a holiday is on Tuesday, you can move the day off to the coming Friday, but not the preceding Monday.

That is why, instead of moving the holiday from Sunday to Friday and giving everybody a four-day weekend, they have moved it to Monday, which means that everyone has Thursday off, works Friday, and then has Saturday through Monday off.

However no complaints here. I'm on Afghanistan time, meaning I get three whole days off for Eid. Bwah hah hah.

The appearance of so-called "Islamic" wimples on the streets of Istanbul and Dushanbe does concern me a bit. While Tajikistani traditional dress does lend itself more to an "Islamic" dressing up, you still do see girls with their whole forearms showing, but a wimple that must have taken more time to put on than it would to just put your hair in a ponytail. What drives me nuts is the whole focus on the external. People are obsessed with sex. And I don't only mean Muslims. Fundamentalist charismatic and Catholic Christians are also obsessed.

Why is it that when fundamentalist Muslims come to popularity in a relatively traditionally Muslim society, the first visible change is not that the bars empty, or that men stop whistling at young ladies (even modestly dressed ones), or that charitable donations go up, or that their are more communal activities? You don't see much of that with an increase of fundamentalists. What you see are more girls with the hijab.

And when the "fundies" start their morality campaigns in the States, you never see billboards saying, "Do not lie," or "Honor your parents," or "Love is not proud, it does not envy, it does not boast". Instead they feel the need to post pictures of aborted babies around the side of the road. Thanks, some of us eat in the car. Occasionally they will post a perfect-looking family with a slogan intended to reduce divorce through increasing prayer.

Why is it that Muslim fundamentalists make a big deal over foreheads showing in towns where you can buy booze on a Friday and where mosques are not exactly full?

Why do Christian fundamentalists prefer to target prostitution over venality, gluttony, dishonesty, selfishness, pride, and impatience, when we all know that fewer than 1% of the population suffer from the first, whereas about 99.9% of us are basically wallowing in the latter six?

Even homosexuals admit that they comprise only around 10% of the population, while a good 100% of us have probably failed to give to a poor beggar when we knew we should have. But you never see the fundies talking about that on the God channel or whatever they have. Why?

I will tell you why. Because these are not fundamentalist campaigns. It is a public relations coup that the so-called "fundies" have pulled off in labelling themselves as such. In reality, these are populist campaigns that rely on strong emotions to gain converts and thus, political power or money or both. Because thinking of sex, even indirectly through thinking about it as a sin, arouses all of us, it gets us emotional. Because we are so easily confused between unrequieted desire and hate and love- we are really unsophisticated animals when it comes right down to it- we bubble up in the frenzied fanatic boil of "religious fervor".

Only it's not really religious fervor, it's confused sexual frustration, that energizes those who get swept up. They target teenagers and unemployed men because they have more pent-up energy just waiting to get released. They engage older men and women by appealing to their fear of their children's imminent corruption and the rape of their daughters (which is why, rather than calmly explaining why Islam and Christianity simply have some different metaphysical and physical propositions and you have to decide which you believe, some fundie preachers have decided to accuse Mohammed of pedophilia).

While they engage in their "fundamentalist" "religious" campaigns, however, the people of the world goes on lying, bribing, hating, gossiping, and generally engaging in a host of sins which contribute to incalculably more unhappiness than prostitution, pretty virgins, or homosexuality, if only because they are much more widespread and frequently practiced.

Okay, my readers, discuss.

Good Parties and Good Music and a Good Rant

2005-10-30T10:57:00.000+04:30

Back to optimism, I'd like to use this space to thank Fran and Eliot for their great efforts at partifying Kabul to an exceptional degree last weekend. Thanks also to Barbara who I know played a significant role in the organization of Fran's birthday bash.

Here is a picture of Fran and me, obscured by the bonfire. I took one with the camera's night-vision function but that is less mysterious and sexy.

And then of course Eliot... I considered putting up one of those flattering posters that the girls put up in the toilets, but decided against.

Great parties, people. Great DJ-ing, Jimmy.

However may I recommend Russian technology and approach to copyright laws to enhance the collection? It's true the artists don't see the money. I am prepared to buy online at full price directly from Sony. Only SONY DOESN'T OFFER IT. I would have bought directly from Missy Elliott's website. Only she directs you to some website where they actually ship you the disc. You see, music purveyors, a lot of us living in the third world would be willing to pay higher prices for music. But you know what? You don't want to sell us stuff. You can't mail pricey items to rural China, and you can't find a Blockbuster there either. What is a music-lover to do when trapped in Afghanistan, without a single legitimate purveyor of music CDs within, oh, maybe 2,000 kilometers (if that- I think the nearest ones might be Islamabad, but if not, we're talking Almaty, Beijing, or Dubai)? Just wait and then spend my entire vacation shopping? And I have the chance to go abroad. Many people don't. If you want to combat piracy, you need to make things available at a reasonable price in at least all of the world capitals, and allow people to set up shop in some other places. And sell online. Don't criminalize necessity or the love of music.

How am I supposed to download music at high prices if they are not selling it? Until then, I'm doing business with the Russians. I would like to note that I also bought my phone in Dublin from a small Russian family business, almost certainly roofed by the mafia, because they were the only ones to sell non-subscribed ("unlocked") phones at a reasonable price. A Vodafone employee actually went so far as to threaten me with a lawsuit if I went abroad and unlocked my phone. They also said that Nokias bought in Asia are made in Asia (not true), that's why Asian phones are twice as cheap. I told the salesperson he had been lied to. Who are the mafia in this scenario, I ask you? At least the Russians provide a SERVICE.

And they say Russian people have a hard time adjusting to capitalism. What a load of crap. It's big multinationals that have a hard time adjusting to family businesses and fair deals.

Pictures on the blog!

2005-10-27T12:50:00.000+04:30

I finally figured out how to put a picture on my blog. But if I can't download Picasa, how can I put it on the template? It's not a very good picture but it's basically what the people I supervise see every time they come into my office.

Which Muppet Are You Quiz Results

2005-10-25T18:32:00.000+04:30

You are Beaker.You are very tense, stressed and paranoid. You hate
furthering the cause of science, as it tends to
get you blown up.
SPECIAL TALENTS:Scientific assistant, Victim
LAST BOOK READ:"1001 Meeps to a Bigger Vocabulary"
FAVORITE MOVIE:"Run Silent, Run Meep"
QUOTE:"Meep! Meep! Meep!"
NEVER LEAVES HOME WITHOUT:Medical Coverage

What Muppet are you?

Honestly I think I got this result because I am feeling so beat down. From now on I know what kind of self-image I am projecting.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

2005-10-25T17:30:00.000+04:30

It has finally happened- I have been uninvited to Afghanistan. Strictly speaking, they just gave me such visa troubles that nobody would stand for it but me, however I take it as their way of saying, "Get the hell out." I mean, one expects that from the Taliban and unemployed teenage returnees in Kabul (hey AREU, how about a Venn diagramme of those two groups...). However, I have now gotten it hard from three separate government officials (twice it was so bad I had to call the main office) from no fewer than three separate ministries and I've had it.

Or at least, I had had it. Then, while sitting here contemplating the merits of quitting a rewarding job with a good organization just to satisfy my pride, our chawkidaar came in. The word used for "guard" in Dari is chawkidaar, meaning, "The One with the Chair". It comes from the school guard position. There is another word for guard, but amongst NGOs all the staff call guards chawkidaars. This may be the source of considerable misunderstanding between expatriate and local staff regarding the purpose of the chawkidaar.

So here I am, late in the office since a certain official decided to jerk me around for six hours straight and wasted all that precious daytime, blogging to avoid real work which is piling up. And the chawkidaar comes in and says, "Mariam [my Afghanistan name, since my real name means "Ali's Seargant"], come join us for iftaar." Bless them. We all sat together for bulaani and tea and had a lovely conversation about freedom of religion in Tajikistan.

Just when you begin to feel that Afghanistan is the least hospitable country in the world, they come back and prove that even if that were the case, which is probably isn't, well, the people can be pretty sweet after all.

I still don't have a visa, but insha'Allah I will get one in Kabul so that I can get out of the country if I need to. Which I do.

Ramazan

2005-10-25T07:45:00.000+04:30

Ramazan is an interesting time here in Afghanistan. Unlike in some Muslim countries, it does not look particularly festive and there's not much of an air of commercialism. Unlike in other Muslim countries (or rather, I should say, in my province, unlike in other Muslim regions), there is not the cool I-might-be-fasting-I-might-not-it's-between-me-and-God-and-nothing-to-brag-about. Basically, it seems that in this area, the main idea is to use the fast as an excuse not to work.

I would like to emphasize that this is not really normal behaviour, at least according to my experience and according to the words of other Muslims living here.

Do the construction workers act weak in front of a foreigner and say, weakly with a cough, "We are fasting... we cannot work"? Yes. When it is suggested that the pay is saved for another time, so that the wages are not wasted and the project is finished on time, they balked. (The suggestion was that each man worked a half day and would split the pay with the man who worked the other half.)

Does the staff question working 30 minutes after hours (hours have been cut down to account for no lunch time) saying, "But... it's Ramazan..." even if they are being asked to make up work they should have done in the first place? In this province they do.

Does everybody, around three o'clock, start complaining about how tired and hungry they are? Well, not everybody. But some do.

It's really shocking.

Nice Is Boring

2005-10-23T09:38:00.000+04:30

Well, if this blog doesn't confirm it for all eternity, nice is boring and moreover, rare. In the spirit of spreading the love, I will press on, but in a more Candide-esque fashion. This will be my last totally boring post.

Basically I just want to thank this guy Ahmed, who rescued my luggage from the Qatar Airlines storage area in the Islamabad International Airport. How it got there, you can ask of British Airways, since it is all their fault. I mean "fault" in an intention-bearing way. I lost my luggage exactly one week before the Big One struck Kashmir and NWFP with its fury, which means that by the time I had sent all the documents to Ahmed to get it back on a UN flight to Kabul, Ahmed was, by the grace of God, trying to save his countrymen and women from starving to death while being crushed by huge chunks of concrete or, at best, large mud bricks.

However, Ahmed still managed to find time to get to I.I.A. and to get my bag and book it to Kabul, where it subsequently took our staff a week to get it from Kabul to Kunduz. They sent it with a man who was coming for a job interview. He had to carry my 31-kilo bag (that's about 50 pounds, folks) all the way from Qalai Fatullah to the airport and then off the plane. What a trooper. He doesn't even know me.

Lessons Learned

2005-10-12T16:47:00.000+04:30

I know this blog is about nice acts but I can't help the occasional obligatory Afghanistan post. It seems that there were a lot of lessons learned during the parliamentary elections. For example, take our colleague, S*. S* decided to get closer to her constituents during the election by posting her mobile number on her campaign posters. Like everyone else, she plastered posters in every available space around the province, including in a number of district centers like Rustaq and Farkhar and the provincial center, Taloqan. Now she keeps getting anonymous text messages saying things like, "I love you more than life itself" and "You are the most beautiful woman alive- marry me."

Another colleague quit his job in anticipation of his wife's winning one of the three spots reserved for women. There was a time that many thought that no women would dare run. In the northeast, that time passed very quickly as all the major parties decided to put women up for the guaranteed spots and soon the number of women candidates nearly equalled the number of men candidates. Our colleague's wife, who was not sponsored by a large party, seems to have lost, and now he wants his job back. Only it was already filled.

Live and learn, as they say.

Mehmon budam...

2005-10-08T15:52:00.000+04:30

Zeyaadah (or Ziyodah, in Tajiki Persian) is my kind person of the week. She invited us to break the fast at her house last night, and cooked us up a right feast including:

mantu (Persian-Turkic ravioli eaten with sour cream, like pel'meni only bigger)
bulaani (imagine you have a tortilla (raw, white-flour) and you put mashed potato and spices on one side, fold the other side over, and deep fry it... or you could put in spinach, or meat- that's bulaani)
fresh pears from their orchard
home-conserved dates
one enormous salad per person
pilaw
mutton biryani or something similar
three kulcha, Badakhshaani biscuits each for my colleague, my husband and me- these are not really biscuits- they soda-less flour-and-salt cakes the size of a fist and a half (or one man's fist, I guess) made to last about a year while you are riding on the back of a donkey from Faizaabaad to Mecca or something
a special peppery "pickle" (not American pickle, a sub-continent-Union-Jack-type pickle, or sauce made of preserved veggies) sauce for the bulaai and the mantu

Well, Z, this post goes out to you, for inviting us over and preparing the best Ramazan dinner I've had yet. It's a good hour and a half until azan and my mouth is already watering for a Badakhshaani kulcha.

Nice Acts of the Week

2005-10-04T14:13:00.000+04:30

We haven't had net access here, folks, for some time, and I've been in and out of the field daily. So here are some nice acts that were done to me, or at least near me:

My colleague from Islamabad has been super-helpful with my luggage, taking calls before and after work from me as I'm on the road to the field. Did I mention it was lost? No, because that would be a bad thing. But now it's found... I just have to find a way to mail a letter to Islamabad from a country that has no postal system. Well, practically none.
I was amazed to see several villages in the district of W* present 12 singing girls, practically in full chador but over the age of nine in any case, for part of a ceremony we had. One of the girls had the voice of an angel, singing in that kind of clear, clarinet voice that children have. They sang songs about the virtues of education for the governor and other officials. These are the same kids that were taught to yell "Allah-u akbar!" after their teacher's cue on the same day. You shouldn't have to be grateful for schoolchildren singing but there you go.

It's sad that in a whole week I can't think of a third exceptionally nice thing that was done... except people's kind sympathy and patience with me as I mourned my lost luggage and stolen phone.

Nothing Nice to Say

2005-09-26T17:37:00.000+04:30

This blog is all about saying nice things about people and companies. Which is why I have nothing whatsoever to say about British Airways.

Generous Irish

2005-09-22T19:20:00.000+04:30

I go to one cafe here which sells- no joke- kosher+halal+organic+fair trade herbal and green teas. It's called West Coast Coffee (I should have known they would be good people based on the name ALONE). Well, let me tell you what these people do for me. Since I really, really love their Numi kosher+halal+organic+fair trade green gunpowder and jasmine teas and I can't find where to buy them by the box (I mean, near my hotel and open until 19:00), I've been buying a cup every morning, plus four or five bags to have later in the day when I don't have time to run to the shop.

Well, I know that fancy teas are not cheap. But because they are saving on the service, cup, and utilities, they are giving me the teabags two for the price of one. Bless 'em!

Also, one of the guys here at induction has invited to bring his external hard drive to the office to let me copy all of his music. Music lovers of the world, unite. If that does not sound extraordinary to some of my readers, his alternative was not to offer at all, and he wouldn't lose face. But people truly want to do nice things for one another sometimes. Remarkable.

Marriage and Everyday Kindness

2005-09-20T22:05:00.000+04:30

My husband called me all the way from Tajikistan... he's so sweet. I guess it's not an extraordinary act of kindness since he's my husband, but loving someone and being married to them in my opinion is one of the most amazing things someone can do for someone else. It should also be mentioned that my husband is one of the kindest people I know and a very patient and forgiving person (obviously, as he has not annulled our marriage or anything yet). The very fact that people do get married is amazing. We get all amazed about swans, penguins, and other animals that mate for life, but I think it's much more awe-inspiring that people, who have a choice, still do it. Especially when it involves me, personally.

Also, another random act of kindness by a future colleague who is at my induction with me: brought me tea (well, hot water for my tea) from the cafeteria. He just asked us if we wanted any and then carried three cups up three flights of stairs. That definitely deserves a mention.

Anonymous Posting Allowed

2005-09-20T21:53:00.000+04:30

I've decided to allow anonymous posting. That will be discontinued should our friends herpxesrid2005 or onl1neg4mbl1ng decide to start their spamming, but until then, welcome one and all. Brendan, that means you.