11/26/11

crossfit

I hate it. But no one cares that I hate it. I need to remind myself of the latter sentence more often. There. Is. No. Point. In. Arguing. With. People. About. Something. To. Which. They. Are. Completely. Devoted.

All that accomplishes is getting my heart rate and blood pressure up. Relax, Luke. Relax.

al jazeera english

A perk of living in DC is that I can watch Al Jazeera here. It's a crime (seriously, there has to be some kind of criminal conspiracy) that it's not more widely available in the US.

Want coverage of things going on outside the US media narrative? Sure, here's a report on the release of political prisoners in Burma with a nuanced examination of the effects of sanctions on Burma's politics and economy. Want critique of the media? Oh, well, you could watch this piece on the recent alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US and the gross inadequacy of reporting on mainstream channels here. Want honest debate by people who know what they're talking about? Here are a few people who have spent their whole lives studying economics trying to get at what went wrong.

Want a news and commentary channel with something approaching a liberal bent as opposed to run-of-the-mill lap-doggery?

Want a news channel with no ads?

Down with CNN, down with Fox News, down with MSNBC. Up with AJE.

to-read list

This is my to-read list now. Same as old list, with some books removed because I finished or attempted (Devils) them and other books added because they make up Donald Barthelme's syllabus, which I just found out about (numbered ones at the end, some deleted because I've read them already).

History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The Tanakh plus Jonah, Isaiah and Job and I and II Samuel
The Nature of Things, by Lucretius
Confessions, by Augustine
Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, I Corinthians, Romans
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Meditations, by Rene Descartes
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Theologico-Political Treatise, by Baruch Spinoza
Discourse on Metaphysics, by Gottfried Liebniz
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Benito Cereno, by John Melville
Histories, by Herodotus
The Violent Bear it Away, by Flannery O'Connor
The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of Right, by GWF Hegel
Between Past and Future, by Hannah Arendt
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Faust, by Goethe
Go Down Moses, by William Faulkner
Three Tales, by Gustave Flaubert
Psychological Types, by Carl Jung
Rimbaud
Genet
Bartleby, the Scriver, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebhur
The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam
Levels of the Game, by John McPhee
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Great House, by Nicole Krauss
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas
The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebhur
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sabato
1. At Swim Two Birds - Flann O'Brien

3. Collected Short Stories - Isaac Babel
4. Labyrinths - Borges
5. Other Inquisitions - Borges
6. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
7. Correction - Thomas Bernhard
8. Nog - Rudy Wurlitzer
9. Gimpel The Fool - Isaac B. Singer
10. The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
11. The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud


13. Under The Volcano - Malcom Lowry
14. Entire - Samuel Beckett (In other words, everything!)
15. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
16. I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
17. Man In The Holocene - Max Frisch
18. Seven Gothic Tales - Dineson
19. Gogol's Wife - Tommaso Landolfi
20. V - Thomas Pynchon
21. The Lime Twig - John Hawkes
22. Blood Oranges - John Hawkes
23. Little Disturbances Of Man - Grace Paley
24. I, Etc., - Susan Sontag
25. Tell Me A Riddle - Tillie Olson
26. Hero With A Thousand Faces - Campbell


28. The Coup - John Updike
29. Rabbit, Run - John Updike
30. The Paris Review Interviews - Various
31. How We Live - ed, Rust Hills
32. Superfiction - ed, Joe David Bellamy
33. Pushcart Prize Anthologies (no specific years given!)
34. The Writer On Her Work - ed, Sternburg
35. Manifestos Of Surrealism - Andre Breton
36. Documents Of Modern Art - ed, Motherwell
37. Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
38. A Homemade World - Hugh Kenner
39. Letters - Flaubert
40. Sexual Perversity In Chicago - Mamet
41. The Changeling - Joy Williams
42. The New Fiction - ed, Joe David Bellamy
43. Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
44. The Palm-Wine Drunkard - Amos Tutola
45. Searching For Caleb - Ann Tyler
46. Thank You - Kenneth Koch
47. Collected Poems - Frank O'Hara
48. Rivers And Mountains - John Ashbery
49. Tragic Magic - Wesley Brown
50. Mythologies - Roland Barthes
51. The Pleasure Of The Text - Barthes
52. For A New Novel - Robbe-Grillet
53. Falling In Place - Ann Beattie
54. In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country - William Gass
55. Fiction And The Figures Of Life - Gass
56. The World Within The Word - Gass
57. Advertisements For Myself - Mailer

59. Journey To The End Of The Night - Celine
60. The Box Man - Kobo Abe
61. Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
62. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke
63. Kaspar And Other Plays - Peter Handke
64. Nadja - Andre Breton
65. Chimera - John Barth
66. Lost In The Funhouse - John Barth
67. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
68. Black Tickets - Jayne Anne Phillips
69. Collected Stories - Peter Taylor
70. The Pure And The Impure - Colette
71. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please - Carver
72. Collected Stories - John Cheever
73. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could - Leonard Michaels
74. Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
75. The Oranging Of America - Max Apple
76. Collected Stories - Flannery O'Connor
77. Mumbo Jumbo - Ishmael Reed
78. Song Of Solomon - Toni Morrison
79. The Death Of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
80. The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting - Milan Kundera
81. The Rhetoric Of Fiction - Wayne C. Booth

possible ambien side effect

Increased irritability with respect to stupid fucking things over which I have no control. For example, the Transportation Safety Administration and the useless sign in West Hyattsville Metro, which keeps repeating the same service advisori es about West Falls Church over and over without a break to tell me something worthwhile like when the next train is coming. Felt similar sense of stupid impotent petty rage in the hotel in Maputo. Probably just general tiredness but maybe the ambien didn't help. Who knows. Don't feel any other side effects, fwiw.

chao maputo, ate logo

Writing this from my gate at OR Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg. The day started with a wee hangover thanks to a late night, first for a really fun dinner at Emma and her husband's place, with Aman, Padran (sp?), who runs the handicrafts project in Pemba and another couple that Emma and Gary are friends with. Cuttlefish stew and caprese salad with lots and lots of wine.

Gary is a big-time African music enthusiast and even saw Fela Kuti play a number of times. Apparently he was drugged out of his mind (Fela, that is) so the shows weren't that great. Oh well. But he shared a bunch of CD's with me, which I've now burned and am looking forward to listening to on the way home. The first one I put in, by Franco and TP OK Jazz, is awesome.

Aman, Padran and I went out after that to a bar that's open at night in the main train station. It was a good time. They are both very funny and interesting and we mostly just stood around and chatted. Got back to the hotel around 3 and drank a bottle of water.

This morning I went with Aman down to the annual national craft fair, held in part in an old colonial fort in downtown Maputo. There were some lovely things and some ugly things, and I think some genuine ivory carving, which may or not have been legal or ethically obtained. It's true that the hassling here isn't as persistent as elsewhere. People come up to you and try to sell you their shitty magnets or whatever but if you say no they go away. Other places I've been, people are a lot more insistent about stuff like that.

The AKF-wide rural development director, Tom, was on my flight from Maputo to Johannesburg this afternoon, so I had a chance to talk with him for quite a while. He had been in town for the AKAM Mozambique board meeting, which was this week. It's very refreshing to meet someone who's been in development a long time but isn't at all cynical about it. My cynicism is sometimes just knee-jerk at this point, probably in large part because Washington is such a cynical town, so speaking to someone in the same business but with a different attitude gave me pause. Cynicism is easy and sometimes right, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be taking a look at the things I feel that way about. God that's an ugly sentence. Tom also told me straight-up he could get me a job in Afghanistan or Tanzania tomorrow: the overt poaching Jo is always warning me about when I travel. I'm not ready to go yet but it's nice to get such a blatant offer.

Alright, think that'll do for now. Busy, short week, now gonna start a relaxed, long plane ride. Here's hoping for a couple of seats to myself again.

cesaria evora

What a voice.





Aman and I were talking about her today. The morning has been pretty quiet. Hanif, Aman and I went over the budget template, which is a little confusing but really more so for us than them. This is thanks to USDA's mind-bogglingly, insanely, pathetically convoluted and inefficient application system. AKF Moz won't have to touch the system, so no problems for them, but it does mean we need the budget to be in a very specific format when we get it from them. Hanif reiterated his desire to see the AKF Mali USDA budget, finally explaining that he's really most interested in seeing the personnel for that project. AKF Moz has never done a USDA project before, so they're not sure what the organigram should look like. Leanne has been very reluctant to share it with them so I've repeatedly said no to Hanif, but I just asked her again because I really don't understand what her resistance is.

Otherwise, things have been relaxed. Most everyone is out at meetings so it's just been Aman and me in the conference room. I've been answering some emails from the last couple of days and chatting. Aman is cool.

The real work starts up again at 2, when Jake from TechnoServe comes back to finish up the project frameworks and set next steps. TBC...

j. press

Bought a pair of nice khakis from there in May. On sale but still not cheap. The stitching is wearing apart along the bottom of the front pockets, one of the belt loops is totally worn out, and holes appeared today on the front right pocket and in the crotch. Poor, poor showing from what's supposed to be a nice brand. Gonna try to get my money back or at least exchange them when I get home, although my hopes are not high.

sweet elevator

I forgot to mention before that the hotel has a fantastic open elevator, a version of which I'm sure was original to the building, one of those where you open the door as if stepping into an ordinary room when the elevator gets to your floor and the walls are mostly just an iron grate. It's beautiful.

Today was more of the same. Aman, Emma and I went to a little Italian restaurant for lunch. We sat outside at a picnic table and enjoyed our pasta and Cokes. My Coke can was noticeably sturdier than your average US can. Lunch was fun, we cracked each other up quite about talking about everything from Aman's youthful love of Jean-Claude Van Damme -- and confusion when he didn't win any Oscars! -- to how Mozambique is "Africa lite" compared to places like Addis Ababa and Abuja. That is, Mozambicans leave you alone when you walk down the street, crime is low, it's not horribly hot, etc. That sounds like an insensitive, essentializing comment, but from what I've heard and from what Aman and Emma said, it's true.

After getting back to the hotel I talked with Leanne, did some more email-type stuff and went to the gym before ordering room service again. It's expensive but not as expensive as the @*!# buffet. I'm not paying for it either way, of course, but jeez.

Tomorrow will be work all the way through, as we finally do the workshop, but I will try to take at least part of Friday off. The next time I come here I am definitely going to try to get to Swaziland. The Hlane National Park is only about 60 miles from Maputo and if you can join a group it's not so expensive to take a day trip out there. Lions and elephants and giraffes, oh my! I probably won't even get to swim in the ocean this time around. But that's finer than it would be in an ordinary week because I was just at the beach last week.

Last thing before sleep: This hotel, for all its niceness, kind of sucks. The food is insanely expensive and barely good and they don't have outlet adapters or shaving cream. What? Surely I'm not the first American to stay here and forget either of those things at home. Plus the staff don't speak enough English to understand what shaving cream IS, so when I asked for it (once and then again an hour later), two separate people brought me a shitty safety razor. Call it whining but for as much as AKF is spending for me to stay here, that's a pretty pathetic showing.

maisha

Means "life" in Swahili. The more you know...

day 2, morning 2

Yesterday was busy-busy. Woke up at 4:20 or so, tossed and turned for a while, gave up, watched Al Jazeera, ordered breakfast -- much more reasonable than my dinner the night before, although I found out this morning that that's because it was actually, um, free and all I paid for was the room service fee -- and came into the office. The AKDN office here is one block from the Serena; you can see them from each other. The office is an attractive old one-story building with wood floors and a pretty garden in front. Both buildings are on Avenida Julius Nyerere, which is Maputo's main drag.

Work got going pretty much from when I walked in. We went until 6:15 or so. In the morning it was the AKF Moz team and me plus a market development consultant, Raphael. In the afternoon we were joined by the country director for one of our potential partners. Lots and lots of discussion around which crops we should work with and how. For lunch Emma, Aman and I went to a little restaurant down the block. I had spaghetti with salmon and a Coke. Pretty tasty. The later afternoon dragged quite a bit thanks to lack of sleep and jet lag.

Back at the hotel, I talked with Caryn and Leanne about how things are going. They kept telling me to take a break and eat or relax or whatever but it's really preferable to just knock everything out and THEN have dinner and so on. Hard to focus on relaxing if I'm thinking at the back of my mind about getting back to my computer for Skype speaking purpose.

After that I found my way through to the gym, which is tucked away in the spa. When I say "tucked away," I really mean it. There's no signage for it and when I asked at the front desk, the lady just told one of the random helpers they have standing around to lead me there. It would have taken me ten minutes at least to find it on my own. All the exercise equipment is the same brand as the Islamabad Serena and the spa has the same name: Maisha. Wasn't much of a workout but I was glad to get the juices flowing a bit and stretch well.

By the time I had showered and eaten my room service dinner (grilled chicken burger with grilled pineapple and fries), I was too tired to process written words. So I took an Ambien* flipped on the boob tube and vegged to random sports -- South African rugby, the Tour of Spain and Chelsea football TV commentary, anyone? -- until I conked out.

*The stuff works. I slept like a baby until 7:30 and feel good today. Won't be any need to take another one tonight. Duly noted.

que horas son en mozambique?

Well, right now son las 10:20 PM. Just got back from dinner at the outrageously (repeat: outrageously) overpriced buffet restaurant in the hotel here and I'm Skyping with Caryn. The flight from DC to Johannesburg via Dakar (no disembarkation, we just sat there for an hour or so) was long but smooth. I slept in a few chunks, thanks in part to my new friend Ambien and also in part to the fact that the flight wasn't near full, so I had at least two seats to myself the whole time. Somehow the trip felt shorter than going to Dubai, maybe just because it didn't feel like it could possibly have been one continuous stretch. I watched "The Hangover" early on, but that feels like days ago. Also, "Michael Clayton." Such a good movie.

Anyway, the Polana Serena, where I'm booked for the next four nights, is elegant in a way the Islamabad and Kabul Serenas aren't. The building is about 90 years old, for one thing, and built on a more human scale than those two. Beautiful furniture and decor, of course. Less ostentatious and I didn't have to fight to carry my own blanking bags up the stairs after I checked in.

I didn't check my work email but once at the beach but I just found out the workshop doesn't start until Wednesday, so I'll have tomorrow to catch up and hopefully see some of Maputo. Weather is supposed to be great -- 80-85 and sunny -- and it'd be nice to take advantage of being in a foreign land where an expat can actually walk around. Yeah, that's worth mentioning: This is my first night traveling overseas for AKF where there was no guard screening visitors at the hotel/guest house. No wall.

With that, I'm getting a bit tired and need to shower. Tomorrow I'll need to see about getting a plug adapter because the hotel doesn't have one that converts to US-style plugs. Wack.

More tomorrow

running book list 2011 - bump

So I don't have to go looking for it.

EDIT 1/31/2011: Worth noting that my pace for January has been slow because The Wire has taken up large chunks of time that would otherwise have been devoted to reading. One season to go...

EDIT 3/1/2011: Finished The Wire. Counting it as literature.

1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon
2. Virgil, The Aeneid
3. David Simon, The Wire
4. Patti Smith, Just Kids
5. Plato, The Apology of Socrates and Crito
6. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
7. Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
8. Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
9. Anton Chekhov, The Duel
10. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (shut up, it's a classic, plus I needed a break from Devils)
11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils
11. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
12. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
13. John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy
14. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
15. Robert Alter (translation and commentary), Genesis 
16. John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra 
17. Steven Mitchell (translation and commentary), Job (twice in a row)
18. William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style
19. Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly 
20. Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

i just ran into kelly

I'm sitting on the ground in the terminal with my computer plugged into the wall. I look up and who should be passing by on the conveyor belt but Kelly, the emergency response preparedness consultant I just spent a week with in Pul-i-Khumri. I called out to him and he made his way back here after getting to the end of the belt. He's now gone on to make his connection to Dushanbe, where he'll be for a week before heading back to DC. I should head toward my gate in a minute, myself, but couldn't not put that up. Too funny.

Also, I made it out into Dubai today, on the metro. Saw the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall. For the time being, I'll just say, wow.

food

Forgot to mention another highlight from yesterday: Eating lunch with a good chunk of the board of AKRSP. Apparently it's Izhar's (the director's) last week, so a bunch of board members converged on the Serena. I got invited because I'm attached to Karim N, who used to be, if not the head, then at least very high up in AKRSP. Anyway, most of the conversation was in Urdglish, so I couldn't really follow a lot of it, but I did get to chat for a while with the woman to my right, Samssa, who's the director of AKES Pakistan and also on the AKRSP board. She was very nice. The food was the normal buffet food: blah.

And then, tonight, I finally broke out of the mold and went to Al-Maghreb, the Lebanese-Moroccan place in the hotel. I am stuffed and content. I had an eggplant thing (not baba ganouj, something else) with fresh bread and harissa, a ridiculously good filet mignon, especially for the price, and a cup of decaf. Everything was good except the potato wedges that came with the steak. But the steak was wonderful. And it only cost 0.000000000016% of US federal tax revenue. Roughly.

Now I'm fading and it's time for sleep.

reallocation

It's been raining here! Last night there was another thunderstorm. The lightning was very dramatic, very Fantasia-esque, flashing out of sight below the buildings to the east. It looked like some enormous person was hard at work welding the earth back together. After five (count 'em, five) attempts that turned out blurry, I took a video. Stupid camera.

Yesterday, Karim and I met with Mark the OFDA guy (I'm all about epithets today). The meeting went well, we cleared up once and for all the blanking shelter issues. He took another trip up north to see our sites last month and was very pleased. I think he likes us as a semi-local partner. Did other stuff, too, but that was the highlight.

Spent all day today with Faisal and the AKPBS guys, Nadeem the AKF finance guy and Athar the AKRSP guy. Our mission: Figure out how to reallocate the various savings and shortfalls within the flood relief project budget. Mission accomplished. Now, the next mission: Get a grant modification from OFDA allowing us to do that. The total amount of shuffling around exceeds 10% of the overall project budget, so my next month or so is gonna be taken up trying to extract a formal modification out of OFDA. Next week's meeting with Margo, my contact at OFDA, will be interesting.

So a good day in all: I really like Faisal and Nadeem and the new AKPBS guys were also friendly. Faisal and I spent most of lunch talking about Islamic and Christian history and the religions' historical attitudes toward each other, among other things. Most enlightening. I learned that ancient-Greek-style man-boy love is commonplace in some Pashto areas. Apparently, there are places in western Pakistan where, in late afternoon, men parade around the market hand-in-hand with their young boys and compete to see whose boy is the most beautiful. This is apparently set to music or drumming of some kind. Faisal said he didn't believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. Mind blown straight out the back of my head.

I also didn't know that Muslims think that Adam and Eve were Muslim, as were Abraham and all the other biblical prophets. The prophets' message was to bring the Jews back to Islam, from which they'd strayed. Jesus is included in this lineage, which I guess I knew, but hadn't processed that to Muslims, Jesus wasn't just a prophet of God, he was a Muslim prophet. Muslims believe that Jesus never died -- not that he's divine, but he was taken to heaven by Michael and Gabriel and a guard was given his appearance and executed in his place. At the end time, he'll come back, wet and clean as though he'd just gotten out of a bath, and join a congregation at prayer. The imam (in the Quran the imam of all Jews; how this will work in contemporary Islam is unclear), recognizing him, will offer for Jesus to lead the congregation in his stead, but Jesus will refuse. Once the imam dies a natural death, Jesus will take over the congregation. Fascinating.

Wrapping things up with a few emails here and then I'll mosey back on over to the Serena for my last night in five-star-land. On the menu: a workout, a meal at one of the sit-down restaurants (NOT the buffet), and Jane Jacobs. Tomorrow I'll come into the office in the morning, just for an hour or so. My flight leaves at one so I'll probably head out of the hotel around 10:30 or 11. And then, airplanes.

Oh, I've resolved to do the tour bus thing in Dubai. Decided it'd be ridiculous to spend nine hours in the airport DURING THE DAY. Can't wait to see what that's like.

hat tip to andrew

My friend Andrew sent me an email with this quotation:

NPR: The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.

Good lord, I can't stop giggling over here. That's just too fucked up and twisted to wrap my mind around. Jesus.

EDIT: There is no way that's accurate. No way. Total direct spending on both wars is ~$170 billion. It's inconceivable that 12% of that would go just for A/C. But it's interesting that my automatic reaction was to believe it.

sweet lassi

My favorite Pakistani foodstuff, for sure, is sweet lassi.

Thought I was going to the office today because Afghanistan's weekend is Friday-Saturday and for some reason I remembered it being that way here, too. I spent 10 minutes with the beshotgunned guard of the Serena Business Complex, waiting for him to talk to the right person to figure out what the f I was doing there. Then I realized there was no one in the office and he realized that I hadn't understood that before. So instead I bopped around, worked out twice (jumping and lifting in the morning, light jogging core and stretching in the evening) and hung out by the now-open pool (next time I will remember my bathing suit).

Just had dinner in the buffet place. I'm not sure I'd ever sent food back before, but the guy at the pasta station made the exact opposite of what I asked for -- only olives instead of everything but olives. I repeated myself several times, pointed at the various ingredients. All the staff here speak English, although this guy obviously not well enough to understand an order. The fact that I was so irritated about it is kind of embarrassing. Ties into the whole discomfort I talked about the last time I was here with the staff-as-servants thing that I guess comes with that fifth star.

matadjem yinmixan

This song has been blowing my mind for going on five years:

shave

Just got a hair cut and a real wet shave -- my first. I feel so manly and adult. Plus the haircut looks very sharp. And even in this five-star hotel, the whole thing plus tip cost $14.

coffee

Woke up at 5 AM and packed the rest of my stuff. Karimbaksh got there at 5:30, right on time and we drove to the airport. Good LORD is there a lot of security. They frisked us and checked in our carry-ons while were boarding the plane. What, you mean the three x-ray checks, metal detectors and various (3 or 4) pat-downs on the way to the plane weren't enough? Sheesh.

Flight was in a little turboprop. I was in the front row, all by myself, so I got to stretch out, which was nice. The whole thing took a bit more than an hour. There was no one at immigration so I sailed through, and because I wasn't declaring anything I didn't have to go through customs. Strong controls there, Pakistan. The driver was waiting for me and we sailed on to the hotel.

Hadn't eaten yet so as soon as I checked in and got my room, I went down to the sandwich place and got a spicy-beef-and-cheddar sandwich and a POT OF FRESHLY BREWED COFFEE.

Let me say that again:


A POT OF FRESHLY BREWED COFFEE.

Not quite as earth-shaking as the famous pot from my last first day at the Serena, but pretty damn delicious and on a totally different planet from god-damn should-be-illegal Nescafe.

The only other customers, if you could call them that, in the sandwich place were the guy I took to be the GM of the Serena, Peter Hill, and a couple of other hotel management types. I eavesdropped a bit: they were talking about all kinds of plans, for a new staff break room and whether there should be separate rooms for men and women -- evidently they were going to seek guidance from the staff on this, for a new restaurant, for renovations to the gym(s). Twas interesting. The older white guy, who I think was Hill, was wearing beautiful shoes.

Now it's just about noon and because it's Saturday and I haven't heard from Karim, I think I'm at loose ends for the rest of the day. Will definitely visit the gym later. For now, I'll enjoy the just-right temperature in the room.

kabul serena

All other internet options having failed (well, guest house, Focus office, Serena lobby wifi), I'm at the Serena business center. Might grab some dinner here while I'm at it, especially if I can rope some people into joining me.

Today was very uneventful. Turned out Noor had a wedding to go to so no call with Tameeza. That plus difficulty getting online after the power went out around 10:30 AM meant low productivity. But that's okay. I got up around 8:30, stretched and did mobility stuff for an hour, then practiced doing handstands and did various jumping exercises for another hour. Watched a little TV, went and ate breakfast, watched some more TV, ate lunch and chatted with Christine and Shafiq (the formerly nameless taciturn fellow, who it turns out is not taciturn but actually pretty nice: he just invited me to poker night with some other Americans) and Hanif. Read some, watched some more dumb TV and some great TV (the original "The Italian Job," which I've not seen and will need to watch in full when I get home). Then got fed up with the lack of internet and began a three-hour-long odyssey to find some access.

So yeah, pretty boring day.

Anyway, I'm glad I did finally get online, if only to keep my head above water with work emails. Driver leaves for the airport at 5:30 tomorrow morning and then it'll be bye-bye Afghanistan for the near future.

Still no word on the heli, which is a bad sign. Oh well. Next time, Gilgit, next time.

a few photos

Just a little teaser. Most of my photos from this trip suck because, well, this camera sucks. I'm no great shakes as a photographer but by golly I'm better than the bulk of what I've taken here. Click to see bigger versions.


A guy washing his bus at a roadside stand


View from the AKF livestock training center where we had day 1 of the ERP workshop


Jamshid translates Kelly's presentation

back in kabul

Yesterday morning at 8:40, I climbed into the Focus Hilux, driven by Akhtar. Here are my favorite Focus drivers, in order of preference:

Karimbaksh
Hakim
Haji Ahmad
Nabi
(Blank)
(Blank)
(Blank)
(Blank)
Akhtar.

The guy drove like a freaking pansy, I couldn't even count how many beat-up Corollas passed us or how many times we got stuck behind a truck doing 30 kph because he wouldn't pass. Then he kept asking if it was okay to get lunch, to which my thought was, No, we're already going to be late, plus there's no way in hell I'm eating from some roadside restaurant. My bowels have done quite well on this trip despite earlier warnings to the contrary and I had no desire to see that change. Finally, I just said okay. Turns out that meant a stop at a place where you sit down and they bring you food, not the carry-out I was expecting. This pissed me off. Then the guy who was sweeping up after people (eating took place on a raised concrete ledge covered by a long carpet, which was covered by a plastic tablecloth) kept trying to ask me what I liked to eat. I kept saying, Sure I like rice but I don't want to eat anything right now. The guy just kept asking and finally I snapped at him and he stopped. In case it's not obvious, I was not in a good mood.

Had I not been in a hurry to get back to Kabul and had we not already been running late, the drive would have been quite nice. And actually, all complaining aside, it was okay. The road, as I mentioned before, is very good by Afghan standards. We didn't have to wait at all to go through the Salang. The scenery is interesting on the Pul-i-Khumri side of the mountains and actually pretty on the Kabul side.

Of course, once we got to Kabul, the final strike against Akhtar: He got lost and couldn't find the office. Bah. Anyway, had to push my meeting at AKF back, which turned out to be fine. We got to the office around 3, instead of 1:30. Beth and I did some work on the M&E stuff, they brought me a pizza, which I surprisingly ate in its entirety, I went to AKF, I came back, I did some more work, I went back to the guesthouse, I went out for dinner and a beer with Beth and Noor at the Lebanese place, I went home, I fell asleep.

Salman Rushdie, in his Moth piece about going to the civil war in Nicaragua, says a wonderful thing. He describes how this particular woman was the most hated person in the country, despite the fact that she hadn't yet done the thing for which she most deserved to be hated. He says that proves that Nicaraguans have "a very elastic sense of time." Something about that turn of phrase delights me.

Now I'm back in the office, working on M&E stuff and catching up on emails. Tomorrow's the weekend I think Tameeza mentioned that she wanted to do brunch at the Serena as soon as she and Kelly get back from Pul-i-Khumri.

One last thing, very sad, which has been gnawing at me. Two days ago a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the governor's compound in Charikar, the capital of Parwan. I drove through Charikar yesterday and, actually, that's where we stopped for lunch. The suicide bomber was trying to kill the governor and some of his guards. Instead, he killed a little girl and a woman who were nearby. And himself, of course. People die violently all the time in this country. ISAF soldiers have killed plenty of civilians, mostly unintentionally but sometimes carelessly and sometimes, I'm sure, on purpose. Fuck anyone who does that. In particular, fuck the guy who, two days ago, decided that the best way he could fight for his cause was to kill a schoolgirl and a woman who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in a po-dunk provincial capital. It almost goes without saying that none of the people the guy tried to kill actually died. There's nothing like proximity to an event to drive the point home that war fucking blows and that killing civilians blows most of all.

On that cheerful note, I should get back to work.

computer about to die

And I'm really enjoying sitting outside, so this'll be quick. It's lovely outside right now: warm, light breeze, crickets chirping away, the occasional cell phone ring from one of the guards and outburst of Hindi from the TV in the room behind me. The concertina wire glows softly in the lamplight.

Today was very full. This morning we kicked off the workshop with great success. A gentleman recited some verses from the Quran to get everything started. The provincial Director of Finance came to get us started, lend credibility to the proceedings, thank us for what we're doing and offer his support. Kohzad, the provincial head ANDMA, introduced everything and also lent his support. There were a camera crew and reporter from the local news!

Anyway, not gonna bore you with too many details but long story short, Kelly and Jamshid, then Ali seemed to be doing a good job keeping everyone interested in the introduction and then facilitating a lively discussion. Kelly's obviously done this many times. Tameeza and I left at lunchtime to go back to the office. We spent the afternoon going over the work plan and budget, which was a bit tedious but absolutely had to be done while I'm here. I think we both felt better after finishing. We also just chatted for some time. She's very easy to get along with, although I think she intimidates the people who work for her a bit. We see eye to eye on a lot of things about the Network but bring different perspectives on it, so we were both surprising each other.

Came back to the guest house and did some more work, now I'm doing this. And now I'm being told it's dinner time, right as the muezzin starts calling.

dunning-kruger

I mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect a few posts ago in the context of my ongoing professional self-worth issue but it's something I keep coming back to when thinking about myself and other people. I first heard about it on Lyle McDonald's forum (not the regular one, the other one), probably when someone was hating on some really idiotic stuff that Gary Taubes or Loren Cordain or someone like that had written.

The idea is that incompetent people are likely to make poor decisions or draw incorrect conclusions, but their own incompetence deprives them of the ability to be aware that they've reached the wrong conclusion or made the wrong decision. Therefore, they are likely to overestimate their own ability and knowledge. The flip side is that competent people are likely to make good decisions or draw correct conclusions, but their competence leads them to believe (falsely) that all others are equally or more competent. To quote Wikipedia quoting Dunning and Kruger, "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Now, this is obviously an appealing concept to me in the context of my professional life, for obvious reasons. It's nice to think that my constant second-guessing and lack of self-confidence arise not from actual incompetence but rather from the belief that everyone around me knows better and that I am constantly at risk of exposing myself. In reality, when I think about it, my actual competence is probably about average -- by definition, most people are average and I don't see any reason why I should think I'm otherwise in this context. Dunning and Kruger studied discrete skills, in logic, grammar and humor, so maybe the effect doesn't apply neatly to more complex things like professional performance. But it's funny to think that maybe I'm actually competent in the areas where I think I'm weak and actually incompetent in the areas where I think I'm strong. Except verbal standardized testing. That I know I'm pretty good at.

I wonder, too, what relationship there is between self-evaluation of competence at a particular skill or skills and overall "self-confidence" as perceived by others. Take this guy Salim, who I talked about last week. In the short time I spent with him, I found him to be clearly convinced of the value of his work and of himself, a dominant personality often oblivious to social context (what I trying to say is that when he had a question, he would barge into the room and just start talking, regardless of whether the people in the room were already in the midst of something else), and very sociable and comfortable in groups and in small talk. How does he think of himself? What is his self-perception like? I've got no idea but I would love to know.

Apparently Dunning-Kruger isn't as applicable to Europeans or East Asians -- true to Dunning and Kruger's environment, the effect was tested on undergraduate psychology students at Cornell. But I'm a lot like those students, presumably, so it's still relevant to me. Part of the beauty of being in my 20's and having gotten a BA: a lot academic research actually applies to me because I'm the population they test. Hell, I participated in a lot of psych and econ research at Michigan. Makes things interesting from an omphaloskeptic point of view.

Oh, and I found out what the Ghorband unrest means for me: nothing. All that stuff was going on in a different part of the province. Whew!

pabitra

...is my Indian colleague's name. And now, a post I wrote earlier today:

On the way from Kabul to Baghlan, you drive through Parwan province. At one point, the road crosses over the Ghorband River, which bisects Ghorband district in the western part of the province before merging with the Panjshir on their way to Kabul. This morning we got an email from AKDN security saying that, due to some AOG (armed opposition group) activity in the Ghorband Valley, all AKDN staff are restricted from moving around on the roads in the area until further notice. No attacks in the province in a couple of weeks, but apparently the AOGs are just moving around freely. Nobody likes that except them.

Now, I don't have any idea what that means for me, because the Ghorband Valley is mostly west of the Kabul-to-Pul-i-Khumri road. Also, the report arrived three days late and I'm not leaving until Wednesday, so it's very possible that the situation will be completely different by the time I need to head back through there. Some folks, including Beth, Yousef and Noor N (the latter two were here to meet with Tameeza about the no-cost extension we'll propose to OFDA), left just now. So I guess everything is alright.

Beth bought everyone some pastries before she left, which was very sweet. I had a piece of a dry pound-cake-type thing and a puff pastry with lemon sugar icing in the middle and sesame seeds on top. Not bad and now, for the first time in days, I’m not craving Coke.

In other news, the internet is down again. Nasim the AKF IT guy came by and apparently Focus’s ISP is down. Seems the issue is that Focus has a shitty ISP and very little bandwidth, because they don’t want to pay for better service. At least, they haven’t wanted to. They’re finally looking into upgrading. Hopefully it’ll get resolved soon -- i.e. they’ll upgrade their damn service -- and they can go about doing work without having to deal with stupid little issues like the ISP crashing. For what it’s worth, Nasim seems to know what he’s about and his English is quite good, probably better than most or maybe all of the staff here.

Having no internet sucks because it really limits what I can get done, but at least it’s the weekend so I won’t reconnect to find that 84 billion unread emails have invaded my inbox.

In the meantime, I’ve been fiddling with the information/data flow chart I made the other day, per a suggestion from Tameeza to include the stockpiles. Kind of a brain fart that I forgot about them earlier. It’s still a work in progress and is of course not of very much use on its own. Also, I started trying to write up parts of an MIS manual, basically just cribbing from the manual developed for another project. Not a good way of going about things but A) I can’t do anything else because everyone’s gone for meetings and, as I said, no intertubes; and B) it’s probably better than nothing and when, someday, they do hire an M&E person it will be a starting place.

Tameeza, Ali and Jamshed went to meet with the provincial head of ANDMA just now, to try to make sure he’s really on board for this workshop. Although I have nothing personally or professionally riding on it, I do want the workshop to actually be helpful and useful. [REDACTED] I think it will be.

Also, I managed to talk with Claire last night and the connection via Skype was brilliant! We could see each other, movement was a bit delayed but we had nearly an hour with only the slightest hint of choppy reception. Talking to (and seeing) her was lovely, obviously. I vented a bit and dominated the first part of the conversation, then she gave me her update. Her last day at work was on Friday and she leaves for New Orleans, with her family, in a matter of hours, so it was a good time to catch up. Gonna try to call home in a few hours, when I get back to the guest house, so I can talk with Dad on Father’s Day! Dad, if for some reason we don’t connect:

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY FROM PUL-I-KHUMRI!

Two-point-five days to go.

indian soaps

We're going on three hours now of my Indian colleague watching a soap opera about a guy from Rajasthan who had a child marriage, then went off to the city to go to school, became a doctor, fell in love with another doctor, married her, then came back to his hometown to find that his family still expected him to be married to the original bride. He's actually said to me at several points that he wishes it would end. But it's a soap opera. It doesn't end. This is very funny to me, the guy is so hooked. As I mentioned previously, the show is easy for me to ignore because it's in Hindi. I can understand "acha" and "teeke," which mean, roughly, "got it" and "okay." I think.

Anyway, this morning Kelly, Beth and I went into the office. Beth had some work to do with Khan Mohammed (as did I, although less) and Kelly with Jamshed. We came back at lunchtime, though, because it's still a weekend day and the guys here have been working Saturdays for a few weeks in a row now. Got a bit more work done this afternoon after yet another silly connection issue -- they changed my username and password for the network but forgot to tell me. Ha! Nothing to do but laugh about it.

Not much else to report, I'm afraid. Took some video on our commute and a couple of photos. Had a conversation with my Indian colleague (I should just call him MIC until I get his actual name again) about the odd disconnect between the fact that:

1. Many women in Baghlan still typically wear burqas or stay at home during the day, and
2. Many Afghan families have satellite TV and can (and, I assume, do) watch Indian shows and movies, in which women are often wearing very little clothing.

Sexism in both cases, of course, but the Afghan version seems much worse. How do people hold both of those in their heads at once? Enjoying Bollywood and Indian music videos while still believing that women shouldn't leave the house with anything but their hands showing? Does not compute.

Tomorrow, we've got a 7 AM start to go over the workshop plan because Tameeza has a meeting from 8 until at least 11. At least I've been waking up early on my own.

Glad I wasn't in Kabul today, just found out they had a security lockdown because of a suicide attack on a police station. Nine people killed. Scary.

Blah, now I'm distracted, gonna stop writing. More later, I think.

gang fight, gang fight

The gang is down to fight. Have I brought this chicken for us to eat?
Gang fight, gang fight, the gang is down to fight. Have I brought this chicken for us to thaw?

Odd sort of day today. On Fridays, the power for the whole city shuts down around 5 AM and stays that way until noonish, apparently so that they can clean the dam in the middle of town. We have a generator here so the fans and lights still worked but the internet connection relies on the grid. So this morning I finished Morning and Evening Talk and also read the few prose poems after the end of Illuminations, then re-read the intro to the latter. I also did some work, drafting up an information/data management flow-chart for CBDRR.

After lunch, which was a strictly expat affair -- I guess the Afghans all go out and do stuff on Fridays -- Beth and I met for a couple of hours about the M&E tools she's been developing with the staff, the log frame overhaul they did and my draft flow chart. Very interesting and productive. She's been very busy. I had a brief chat with Claire, who I woke from her final pre-work in-car nap a little after 7 AM. It was great to talk but the connection ended up getting a bit choppy. Still, way better than last year.

After that did several more hours of work, mostly emails and a couple of Skype chats, and a couple more brief tete-a-tetes with Beth about the M&E stuff, just answering questions she had. Around 3 I got a hankering for some Coke and asked, through another guest here who's Afghan but grew up in Pakistan, for one of the staff to get some. He brought back a couple of liters of Afghan knock-off Coke, which tastes as much like Diet Coke as any sugary soda I've ever had. Oh well. Still refreshing. Tameeza and I had a few rounds of (real) Coke yesterday during our rather intense talk about

Now it's 8:15 and I've still got a bit more work to do, including an update for Jo on how things have gone since Monday. I'll also try to put this flow chart into a slightly more presentable form. It's currently pen on notebook paper with some nice scribbles here and there. A vast improvement over my first draft, though!

I've been working all afternoon in the TV room. Most of the day no one else has been in here (except Beth), but a few times people have cycled in and watched TV and/or tried to chat. I don't mind the TV because it's all in Hindi or Urdu or Dari and I can't understand it, it just raises the background noise level. People trying to chat is a little more irritating and I'm afraid I was a bit short with my Indian colleague, whose name I forget. I feel a bit bad about that but, then again, I was obviously concentrating and he jumped in asking about my family... not a good time, man. He seems really nice, though. We talked for a while last night about a bunch of random stuff, including golf and the relative talents of George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Also, on the name-forgetting, I think I'm just bad at remembering people's names. Doesn't help that with accents and people speaking softly, I often can't hear their name the first two times they say it.

Alright, guess that's enough for now. Perhaps I will have more-interesting things to report tomorrow or later.

this post was brought to you

By the lack of internet at the Focus office.

It’s hot but not unbearably so. Despite the heat, last night was my first solid night’s sleep of the trip.

Apparently they’ve never heard of flypaper in Pul-i-Khumri. Little house flies zip around everywhere in the Focus office, except in the lunch/training room, which is air conditioned so they keep the door closed.

Whine whine whine.

This morning Jamshed, Kelly, Tameeza and I went to meet with the provincial director of the Afghan National Disaster Management Authority. He was very welcoming and also on board with the work shop that’s envisioned. The problems here are really deep. I guess that ought to be pretty obvious. They became more apparent during the second meeting of the morning, with UNAMA. What’s envisioned in the proposal is quite different from what’s actually needed, which is fine. But it’ll be interesting to see how the workshop turns out next week. The turnout should be good, but if the other UN agencies can’t get down here from Kunduz (only UNAMA is present in Baghlan), then it may not be as effective or useful as it should.

Actually, Kelly just told me that if he had his druthers, he wouldn’t hold the workshop at all if the other UN agencies can’t send anyone. The problem is that if there’s a big disaster that requires a supra-provincial response, like an earthquake, the UN agencies will come in and try to set up their own system, ignorant of whatever systems and actors are already in place here. A major point of the workshop would be to get everyone on the same page with respect to planning for such an event and if the big guns aren’t there, then the whole thing is diminished.

Lunch was more chicken and rice. I went for it and ate a few slices of (peeled) cucumber, too. We’ll see how that turns out. Hoping for a good outcome because it’d be nice to be able to eat a few veggies now and then. Now I’m sitting in the office with Kelly and Jamshed (who, by the way, is the Regional Program Coordinator for Focus) typing away in Apple’s Word knockoff, Pages, because the internet won’t connect and I can’t do any work.

The connectivity thing is ridiculous. It’s not like there’s no internet access here or insufficient bandwidth. But apparently only 10 people are allowed to be on Focus’s firewall at once. That is absurd. The guest house, on the other hand, was surprisingly quick last night and this morning. That may sound like a whine but isn’t; it’s a legitimate issue. “It’s hot” and “there are flies” are whines.

Anyway I’m going to go meet with Tameeza and Beth, the M&E tools consultant, now. Hopefully that’s going a little more smoothly than Kelly’s work.

...

It’s now several hours later. Kelly and Jamshed are trying to finalize the planning for the workshop. The M&E tools meeting was constructive -- Beth isn’t set up to do everything that’s needed and the team is farther behind on M&E than I imagined (more on this in another post, or maybe not for aforementioned reasons). But she has done quite a lot and she and I will be able to sit down tomorrow and make the first baby steps toward having a working MIS manual.

Tameeza and I then sat down in her office, closed the door and had a very frank discussion about which I will give no details, again for reasons mentioned in earlier posts, but this time a lot more so. I’m not sure how much help I can really give her at the end of the day, but I can at least broach some of what she brought up back home and see if there’s really anything we can do about it.

Kelly and I are both still unable to get online. He’s still got a ton to iron out with Jamshed but I’m nearing the end of my ability to get anything done, as evidenced by the fact that I’m writing this again, so I’m thinking about going back to the guest house. He’s in his element, actually, basically training Jamshed as they try to get the agenda together for next week. It’s fun to listen to someone who’s an expert both in his subject matter and at teaching.

Changing subjects, I can’t wait to get back to Kabul and then to get to Pakistan and then to get home. I miss home like I haven’t before. This trip isn’t long but being in P-i-K (they call it PLK here for some reason) makes it feel longer. Simply put, because of security and because I don’t speak the language, there’s not much to do here other than work, watch TV, read, and chat. The TV I talked about in my last post, work is okay but you can’t do it all day, reading is lovely but if I read all weekend I’ll finish my books* and then be screwed and my chatting partners are limited. Kelly and Beth are nice but decades older than I am. Tameeza doesn’t live at the guest house, Hanif isn’t here yet and everyone else in the guest house has limited or no English. Maybe Hanif will know more to do around here. I should have brought some playing cards...note to self.

Tameeza, being a woman, is even more limited than I am. Beth, being a woman and being white, may be even more limited. All that aside, I can totally imagine living out here or someplace like it, given an interesting and challenging enough job and a few people to socialize with. It’s an adventure and a challenge and that still appeals to me in a way it probably won’t in ten years. It’s good to push myself because I think my natural tendency is to not do that. It’s the same thing with the dunking.**

I leave next Wednesday, which means five more full days here, two of which will be taken up entirely by the workshop, one of which will be entirely workshop prep and one of which will be a weekend-type day, I think. Wednesday will be 5-9 hours in the car, then a meeting at AKFA. Thursday will be probably catching up on stuff that doesn’t get done the first three days of next week. Friday will be more in-depth discussions with Tameeza. Saturday will be flying to Pakistan. Pakistan will mean a trip to the field -- fingers still crossed for the heli and Gilgit -- and the final countdown to home. Also the Serena. And then the long trip home.

That makes it all sound a lot shorter. Home two weeks from today.

On the other hand, my initial few days of existential stress, compounded by jet lag and shitty nights of sleep, has abated and I’m glad I’m here. Tameeza does needs help because she has far too much to do -- she’s doing two people’s jobs, which I didn’t realize before I got here -- and I can, if nothing else, make sure Kelly and Beth are on track with expectations. My trip report this time around is going to be a lot more substantial than the previous two. If I can actually get this stuff done with Beth, if Tameeza and I can realign the budget and the work plan and see how to line up the M&E plan with the work plan, if Nadeem and Karim and I can finish the budget realignment and possible NCE prep in Pakistan, then by golly I will have accomplished a lot.

*I already finished Illuminations. My thoughts: Beautiful but about 80% of it went over my head. Too many people are seriously, academically obsessed with Rimbaud for there not to be depth there, but I just didn’t get a lot of it. Same goes for Devils, for that matter. 300 pages in, as I’ve already told most of the readership of this blog, I simply didn’t care about any of the characters or what was going to happen to them. Maybe I’ll come back to it later in the year but god it was just a slog. Funnily enough, now that I’m thinking about it, I want to pick it up again.

The other books I brought along are the previously discussed Morning and Evening Talk, which continues to be lovely and will bear re-reading if I run out of reading material, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. Quite looking forward to that.

**Which is obviously suffering more than anything else as a result of this trip. I will come home weaker than I left and have to accept the setback. Other than bodyweight stuff, I can’t do anything out here. My diet is less than ideal. I’ll probably lose weight, i.e. muscle mass. There’s nowhere to practice jumping so whatever meager progress I’ve made at RFD and movement pattern learning will regress. All that sucks. But I am pleased with myself for not giving up, despite the excruciating slowness of progress at the best of times and the periodic extended setbacks caused by trips. Just reinforces my resolve to work even harder and better, when I get home, toward my random goal. I will fucking get there.

pul-i-khumri

This morning I woke up at 1:30 and again and 3:30, called home and talked with M, D and Linc, and talked briefly with Claire but she was doing something so had to ring off. I packed and ate breakfast and the Land Cruiser came at 6:40 to start the journey to Pul-i-Khumri. The journey is supposed to take 5 hours or so. We took 9. This was thanks to a four-hour wait beneath the Salang Pass, underneath which a tunnel connects Kabul with northern Afghanistan.

Apparently, some VIPs (the story was that they included Karzai but I kind of doubt it) were going to visit the construction that's been going on around the tunnel. Fuck if I could tell why, there wasn't much to see once we got up there. But there definitely were some VIPs: a convoy of military, police and black Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows blew past the assembled trucks (lined up neatly on the side of the road in the hundreds) and cars (arranged in a giant clusterfuck of slow motion cutting each other off) at one point. We waited at a random checkpoint for a while, then moved forward to another one about a kilometer down the road. The latter was a real checkpoint, with concertine wire and two big armored trucks with machine gun turrets blocking the road and US and Afghan troops walking around and trying to keep the road clear.

Eventually the VIPs came back down and we could climb the mountain. The tunnel itself was very dark and very dusty, with all the same typical Afghan driver behavior present, but magnified because we were IN A FUCKING TUNNEL. I've never seen headlights look creepier or stranger.

This seems like a good time to mention that the quality of the road between Kabul and Pul-i-Khumri is shockingly good. As Kelly the consultant put it, "Your tax dollars at work." Get some of those dollars up to Badakhshan! Makes a huge difference to have a real paved highway that you can do 65 mph on.

Eventually, we made it through and descended into the valley where Pul-i-Khumri is located. The drive was another 2.5 or 3 hours but didn't seem bad after the interminable wait earlier. Went straight to the Focus office once we got here so that we could all get connected to the internet and check email and such. Iqbal, my Badakhshan guide from last year and the CBDRR program manager for that province, was there. Nice to see him. Getting online took forever; the AKF IT guy was useless and Tameeza was the one who finally figured out how to make it work. Here at the guest house the connection is fine and it was much easier to connect! But my room is in a different building so I'm writing from the TV room right now.

I'm tempted to rant for a minute about Indian TV, but it would be boring and I'm too tired.

Dinner's soon and then I'll go right to bed. Insh'allah, tonight I'll be on schedule sleep-wise. Really full day of work tomorrow. Would help to be rested. But I fear the heat.

4:15 am

Was the time I woke up this morning. Hurray jet lag. I read some Mahfouz and watched a bunch of crappy TV and did some goofy moving around, like trotting in place and old-time calisthenics and stuff. Morning and Evening Talk, which I started reading last night, is beautiful so far. I would almost go so far as to say exquisite, just because of the way it's constructed and told in tiny, neat little packages that will take the whole book to add into a coherent whole. I'm looking forward to re-reading it already.

The IT guy finally came and set me up at the guest house, so now I'll be online there. But the internet is terrible so we'll see how useful it really is. Here's hoping the Pul-i-Khumri internet is better than Tameeza says it is.

After I got to the office, I had a cup of Nescafe in hot milk. A trick I learned from Noor N. last year to make the stuff potable. Then Salim and I left with Gul Ahmad, the main Focus admin guy, to register with the Ministry of the Interior. I wish so much that I could take a picture of the registration office. In the Ministry compound, off to one side of a dusty courtyard, behind a lace curtain serving as a door, an extremely tiny lady and an older man with a long beard sit at a pair of desks and fill out registration cards longhand, copying the data down into big ledgers. There's a computer but it's covered by a plastic sheet and doesn't appear to get much use. The only decoration on the wall is a calendar entirely in Dari -- I couldn't even tell whether it was for 2011 or not -- and several signs informing visitors that registration is "gratis free" and that they should not pay anyone if asked. The wizened little woman and the old man are just fascinating. Incredibly photogenic scene but I doubt they'd like for me to whip out my point-and-shoot in there. Oh well.

After we got back to the office I had tea with cardamom for the first time. It was delicious! Never tasted anything quite like that before. Oh, and the loose movements have begun. TOILETS OF AFGHANISTAN, TREMBLE AT MY APPROACH, FOR THE STRANGE BACTERIA OF THIS LAND HAVE UNLEASHED A DEEP RUMBLING WITHIN ME! YOU WILL FEEL THE WRATH OF MY BOWELS!

Excuse me, I got carried away. Actually it's not bad, just...loose.

Work has been a little better today. I was able to provide some actual guidance on something this morning and that cheered my sad, fragile little ego up a little. But really this all ties into my ongoing feelings of inadequacy with respect to my job, that I've somehow snuck in the backdoor and don't deserve to be where I am. I know that's silly but the feeling just won't go away. Dunning-Kruger effect, maybe. From Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".

That's my hope, anyway. I'm actually competent, but my competence makes me constantly second-guess myself because I perceive everyone around me to be more competent than I am. Or something. End couch session.

Not a whole lot else to report, I guess. Oh, Iforgethisname, from the other night, was much chattier and friendlier at dinner last night. Perhaps he was just stressed out or tired before. He's here doing work for the National Council, i.e. the governing body of Afghan Ismailis. I still don't remember his name, though. Also, Yousef is here, as he always seems to be on my trips (well, he's 3/3, so small sample size). Alright, I've been writing this off and on since this morning and it's time to wrap it up. More later.

oof

So I'm a bit overwhelmed. Just wrote a bunch before realizing that most of it is sensitive and critical and I'd prefer not to have certain colleagues come across it. Instead, I'll just say that today I had a lot of meetings, that some were frustrating, and that I'm being brought face to face with my own lack of experience, knowledge and capacity. I'm still trying to figure out what the heck these trips are for, other than to expose me to the projects and partner agencies. What is my value added? I don't know. I'm 24 years old, a generalist (a kind way of saying I don't know anything special), completely flying by the seat of my pants and whatever knowledge I've gathered ad hoc over the past 18 months. Sure as hell didn't learn anything useful at CHF.

I can help realign the budget and work plan, I can be an outlet and sounding board for Tameeza, who's extremely stressed out and frustrated, I'm pretty sure I can get the project a no-cost extension (there's a big one), I can take what I learn here and plug it back into the network from a different angle. Maybe I can help with some of the political stuff they're facing here by going straight to the top back home. Maybe I can help get Focus more funding when this project runs out. But my technical knowledge is useless and my management knowledge is equally useless.

Learning as I go, so this is all useful to me, but I just feel kind of inadequate to my task. Which is what again? Trying to decide how frank to be with certain people about this when I get home.

If you can believe it, I actually feel a bit better now than I did around lunch, after back to back meetings where I felt out of my depth and/or tensions were high. Rough day.

Last night, however, was lovely. I met a couple of guys at dinner at the guest house, Hanif and Iforgettheotherguy. The latter was, um, taciturn. Hanif was the opposite, a gregarious Iranian-American guy who's been with AKF Afghanistan in Baghlan for all of two months. I didn't eat too much at the guest house because Tameeza, Salim (and eventually Hanif, who's apparently good friends with Tameeza) went out to a Lebanese place for a late dinner. It was delicious. The place was nearly empty except for a couple of possibly British, possibly American ladies sitting at a table nearby. We sat on a semi-patio and ate a bunch of kebab, falafel, hummus, soup and grilled veggies, smoked a hookah and drank Tuborg from coffee mugs. Hanif and Tameeza are funny and were needling each other the whole meal. All in all a pretty great evening. It was nice just to be social with people.

This morning I woke up at 6:15 so I had a chance to work out before getting the day started. Nothing hard but it got the blood flowing and then I stretched for half an hour or so. That always feels good. So not everything's been bad so far. Just having a wee Afghanistan-specific existential crisis. You're worthless without experience, and you can't get experience unless someone gives you the chance to jump in with both feet. But it would be nice for that jump to come with a life jacket in the form of a little more guidance or training. Wishful thinking, I suppose.

Tomorrow I've got a meeting over at AKF so I'll see some of the same people from last year. Looking forward to that. Otherwise just more meetings here, maybe another meeting with UNDP in the late afternoon, and more general prep for the trip out to Baghlan. I still need to get some shampoo. Oh, and I didn't leave my iPod behind! Great news! But that does mean I have to return the pair of headphones I bought in the DXB duty-free.

Okay, gotta finish writing an update to the boss and then gonna roll on out of here. Will get connected at the guest house tomorrow morning (sometime between 8 and 9). Can't believe it's taken this long, but, to adapt a phrase, TIA - this is Afghanistan. (The A is usually for Africa.)

Bah.

kabul

Trying to get out of the FOCUS office and my computer isn't set up to be online at the guest house yet, so this will be brief:

1. Flight boring but I slept more than usual, sans benadryl. Success.
2. Layover boring.
3. Flight meh but at least it was short; the jacked marine sitting next to me was nice and told a very funny story about a middle-aged Afghan professor who sat next to him on a recent flight and asked some very uncomfortable questions.
4. Arrived at 6:45 AM, went through immigration and customs in about a half hour. GOT IN THE RIGHT CAR, NO HITCH HIKING, EVERYTHING WAS SMOOTH! Plus it was my favorite driver, Karimbaksh. He has the nicest ride by a long shot. Big new Land Cruiser (well, probably a 2009, but close enough).
5. Guest house moved and is now a straight-up poppy palace. Ugly as sin, double-decker entry way, bizarre chandeliers. Hilarious.
6. Showered. Need to buy some shampoo cause I didn't remember to bring any.
7. AKDN was on lock-down until 10:30 so I decided to take a nap. Slept for six hours, missing the call that I thought would wake me up at 10:30. Whoops! Maybe tonight will be the night for benadryl.
8. Came into the office around 4, have been talking with the project manager, Tameeza, doing email stuff and reading since then. She seems excellent so far.
9. Now I'm hungry.
10. Will probably follow Tameeza wherever she goes for dinner, because that will be more sociable and less awkward than the guest house.
11. The real fun starts tomorrow with meetings and suchlike.
12. I might be spending more time in Baghlan than I thought, which is good. But it will mean shittier internet.
13. I think that's it. End on a lucky number.

dxb, still weird

Not as many people in exotic outfits -- flowing robes and headdresses on one side, borderline-strippers on the other -- this time around. My flight over from Dulles was delayed but that's alright, just means a shorter layover here. It's just after 10PM local time and I've got a couple of hours before I can check in for my flight to Kabul. The flight over was uneventful. After flying on Qatar, United seems pretty terrible, and I guess it is. Dad and I had eaten a good dinner before we left for the airport, so I didn't even bother with the first meal offering. The second was a turkey sandwich on a white roll of some kind, with an unidentifiable cheese melted in there and nothing else. Oof. Didn't even turn the little TV on except to look at the map periodically. On the plus side, I did manage to sleep for a significant chunk of the time. Fitfully, maybe, but probably 7 or 8 hours altogether (!). Didn't even have to take my benadryl.

Anyway, DXB is really dim. I don't think I processed that last time, but the lights are very low in the main part of the terminal. The duty-free megastore is brighter but up here it's like twilight.

The national uniforms are funny. A pack of Southeast Asian guys in nearly matching skinny jeans, fashionable casual sneakers, baseball caps and tight-fitting button-down shirts just trotted by. I wonder where they're going. To my immediate right are a few young Arab guys in that not-quite-American style of dress where you can't quite put a finger on what's different and then you realize one of them isn't wearing shoes and another's shirt has a pair of words on it that make no sense. Some American guys just sat down nearby. They're wearing short-sleeved button-down plaid shirts and jeans (just like me). A woman in a Sari is being pushed down the terminal in a wheelchair.

Anyway, really not much else to report at the moment so I'm going to end it here. More once I get to Kabul.

EDIT: I always forget something when I come on trips. It's some kind of physical law. Usually it's something relatively unimportant, like sweat pants. This time, however, I left behind my iPod. Damn it.

bad news, home people

They don't sell the coffee. You will have to just take my word for it.

last day in the office

Things were pretty quiet today. REALLY glad I didn't go to Chitral. Bad weather grounded the flights so they had to travel back by road. That sucks for two reasons: (1) it's an 18-20-hour trip and (2) you have to go right by the place where there have been two suicide attacks in the past two days.

I found out a little about what's been going on back at AKF USA. Sounds like I'm going to get about 30 seconds of, "Hey how was your trip?" and then it'll be balls-to-the-wall proposal time. Apparently we have taken on 15 proposals at once. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it's what I was told this morning by my coworker Leanne. Hoo boy.

Had a debrief with Nusrat about the national disaster risk reduction strategy, on which the National Disaster Management Authority held a high-level meeting yesterday. If we can figure out a way to get NDMA's plans, FOCUS's mandate, and OFDA's funding to dovetail, that would be swell. Gonna be hard to do, though, mostly because of FOCUS's mandate, which limits them geographically.

In the afternoon I went over to First MicroFinance Bank, which is up on the 16th and 17th (!) floors of an office building about ten minutes from the Serena. It was a quick and kind of pointless meeting because we didn't have that much to offer each other, but it was good to touch base and check the little box next to their name on my list. The driver was extraordinary looking. Like a 5'2" emaciated Peter Lorre. And he walked incredibly fast, especially for his size. Drove fast, too. The streets were pretty much empty at 2:30-3:30. Part of that is surely all the road blocks, but still, I was surprised.

Toward the very end of the day Karim Alibhai, the CEO of AKFP, came in and introduced himself. He just got back from leave yesterday. His reputation for enormity was confirmed.

Oh, almost forgot: Yousef is here! My buddy from FOCUS and the AKF guest house in Kabul, long-time readers may recall a certain cheeseburger incident. He gave me a hug and we chatted for a bit. He was just in Kabul for a few weeks and is now in Pakistan for a little over a week, wrapping up his most recent tour of the finance departments. We're going to have dinner tomorrow with Nusrat and (maybe) Karim N. It was good to see him, he's a good dude.

One last thing before I pack it in for the night: no pianist tonight. But they had some VERY dramatic flute soloist playing... "Can You Feel the Love Tonight." I laughed.

joey berglund is real

No joke.

can you feel the love tonight?

Outside the main restaurant of the hotel, where the complimentary breakfast and buffet lunch/dinner are served, is a grand piano. At dinnertime, a pianist plays... "Can You Feel The Love Tonight." On an endless loop. For many, many minutes on end. Sure, he plays "Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water" and the Titanic song, too. But for some reason I got the giggles tonight when I heard the soulful Elton John melody drifting across the lobby. There's something so silly and ironic about it but I doubt the irony is intentional.

...

no chitral

Very sad news today. The government administration in Chitral has decided that security is too tense right now for American citizens to come to the district. Basically, we don't need their permission, but they told our guys up there that it would be a major headache for them to protect me while I'm there. So frustrating! But I'm not in a position to insist on going and if AKF thinks it's too unsafe, it's too unsafe. There was a brief hope that I could go to Gilgit instead, but the next flight is on April 9. Oh well.

I'm watching the Pakistan-India match right now. India got off to an incredibly fast start but Pakistan has gotten a few key wickets in the past 20 minutes and the pace has come back to Earth a bit. Watched in the hotel's little sandwich shop for the first two hours, which was fun. The staff are all glued to the TV and I think they were tickled that an American would be in there watching just as intensely.

Karim, Nusrat and I met just after noon with a woman from OFDA's regional office in Bangkok. OFDA is interested in funding disaster risk reduction in Pakistan but they basically need people to tell them how to do it. It was a little frustrating because I had to defer (obviously) to Nusrat and Karim, and they were talking past the OFDA rep a little bit. That may dominate my first couple of weeks back, though, if FOCUS decides there's an overlap with what OFDA can do.

Then, while I was eating lunch and watching the match, the OFDA rep, who's named Andrea, came in and sat and chatted for a little bit. She was in between meetings. Apparently she'd just read our proposal for Gujarat this morning! But mostly we talked about other things, including, obviously, the match. I got to show off my new knowledge a bit.

Anyway, time to turn my attention back to the match.

an observation

There is something much more dissonant and jarring about watching an actor in a commercial speak in a foreign language than listening to it spoken in normal conversation or on the news.

spotty posting

Yeesh, I haven't been very good about this posting thing. I guess there hasn't been too much worth posting about. I've been much more cloistered in Islamabad even than I was in Kabul, because the office might as well be inside the hotel. Work has been work. The last couple of days were more productive than the Sindh trip and a major concern has finally gone away, so some good news on that front.

Last night I ordered room service and it was actually cheaper than eating in the hotel restaurant. But awkward. I'd never ordered room service before. I didn't want the service part, I just wanted someone to bring me food. I'm happy to roll that cart up to myself, thank you very much. Weird. Also, yesterday I took my blazer down to the tailor on the ground floor to have the sleeves shortened a little bit and I might get a shirt made while I'm at it. It's pretty darn cheap, so why not?

I guess the one big thing to talk about is...cricket. That's right, I am completely pumped about the Cricket World Cup. Today, as I write this, Sri Lanka is crushing New Zealand in the first semifinal. Tomorrow, the reason I'm so excited: Pakistan vs. India in the second semifinal. This match has merited at least two above-the-fold stories in the newspaper every day since last week. The prime ministers of the two countries are going to watch it together in the stadium. (The match is being played in Mohali, India.) Basically, we have nothing in US sports that approaches this in terms of cultural significance or volume of fan support on either side. "Cricket diplomacy" is the topic of sober opinion pieces. No work will get done here after about 1:30 tomorrow afternoon, when they do the coin toss to determine who bats first.

God, I love sports. All sports. Even if I barely know what's going on -- and I can follow cricket pretty well now -- I get so much pleasure out of watching them.

In other news, I finished Maps and Legends. Liked very much for the most part. Chabon has interesting things to say and, when he doesn't get carried away within his sentences, he says them extremely well. Now I'm reading Chekhov's The Duel. And right now, I'm going to work out quickly and then eat dinner.

islamabad once more

Last hours in Karachi were okay. After a late-ish breakfast, Ahsan and I journeyed across the way to a historic library and museum from the 1860s. It's a wonderful building, both beautiful in its original design and construction and fascinating in its musty middle age. The library is peculiarly third-world-ish -- or maybe I just mean not-American -- in a way that reminded me of libraries in Chile. I can't quite find the words to describe it, but perhaps it's the partially-filled shelves, perhaps it's the splintered crumbly feel of the stacks, perhaps it's the fact that the entire anthology of the Dawn Newspaper is stacked in large, hand-lettered, leather-bound volumes on some seemingly-randomly-placed bookcases. I took a lot of pictures.

We left the library and kept walking around the outside of the building. At another entrance, with no apparent connection to the library, is a museum with an exhibition about the history of Pakistan. The ceiling of the main hall was spectacular with icons and script, painted by a well-known Pakistani artist whose name isn't coming to me. The exhibition itself wasn't that interesting. Point to remember: Mohammed Ali Jinnah was consumptively thin. I mean, the man was wasting away.

After that we walked back across the street to the hotel. I was feeling a headache come on and Ahsan wanted to do some work, so we went back to our rooms to wait out the rest of the time until our airport transfer came.

Ahsan is an affable and game guide and I don't know what I would have done without him. But he has an oddly limited grasp of English, which at the end of the day (literally) drove me nuts. On the one hand, his mannerisms are endearing. Sample sentence: "The departure lounge has a McDonald's outlet and several other outlets for sandwiches and things which are not very much costly." On the other hand, when asked a question he doesn't understand, he tends to zero in on the one snippet he does and to explain what that thing is. Sample exchange:

Luke: Hey, why are the license plates on those cars black?
Ahsan: I'm sorry?
Luke: Most of the cars have yellow license plates, but those are black. [Points to the cars in question.] Why is that?
Ahsan: Yes, those are the registration tags of the cars. The government has just recently started keeping electronic records of registration numbers. Previously all records were kept by hand.

That's actually a terrific example because not only did he not comprehend my question at all, he attempted to answer it and also added a little tidbit of interesting information on the end. Took a couple more rounds to learn that black license plates are purely for vanity and aren't technically legal. Our van had black plates. Also, I've finally learned, first from Yousef, then Ahsan and Youshey, never to tell a native of the country I'm visiting that I want something out of the ordinary. Whether it be a cheeseburger in Kabul or handicrafts in Karachi, the likelihood of them not understanding what the bleep I'm talking about outweighs the possibility that I'll end up getting what I'm looking for.

The flight back was utterly uneventful except that I was seated in an exit row and I made good headway into Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends (thanks Claire!), a collection of essays on literature and culture. The first essay irritated me, gave me the impression that this was a vanity project and that these would just be Chabon's masturbatory expositions of his own thoughts on things. Of course, seems to me that masturbatory exposition on one's on thoughts is the heart of all criticism (along with its positive obverse, the desire to share those thoughts with anyone who may find them worthwhile). But it can be done well and it can be done cloyingly, and the first essay fell in the cloying category. The ones that followed, however, were and are much stronger and more engaging.

While I'm on a book-related tangent, I really enjoyed The Master and Margarita, I recognize that it's a masterpiece and if nothing else it was a joy to read, but I don't think I get it. I need to read Dead Souls and Faust and Solzhenitsyn and Rabelais and so on. In other words, my theory at the beginning of the year that reading classics will enhance my understanding and enjoyment of the world is correct.

Anyway, now I'm back in the Serena. Tomorrow is Sunday but I will probably try to catch up on emails and any other work that I neglected while in Sindh, and to prepare a little bit better -- lessons learned from Karachi -- for my remaining meetings. But first, some dinner.

karachi and thatta

Man what a couple of days. In-country travel is always twice as exhausting as the rest of the trip. Yesterday I got up early and checked out of the hotel. I'd packed light for the Sindh trip and stored my suit case at the Serena. Met Ahsan, for all intents and purposes my babysitter for this trip but also a guy at AKFP who helps oversee the built environments work, including AKPBS, at the airport. The flight was delayed an hour or so, which wouldn't have been a problem except I had three meetings to get through in Karachi by the end of the work day and we were supposed to be landing at noon. The flight -- my first ever on a 747, I think -- was fine. I finished The Master and Margarita; more on that later.

Karachi airport is much bigger than Islamabad, which makes sense because Karachi is somewhere between 15-30 times bigger than Islamabad. It was hot as blazes and crowded as we walked out of the terminal and right toward a giant McDonald's, complete with Playplace. The drive from the airport to the Marriott, where we're staying, was great. Karachi is much more exotic than Islamabad, much more vibrant and alive-seeming. The buses, the rickshaws, the shops, the people walking in the road, the birds, the monuments. We didn't have any time to explore, though, as I was already well late for my first meeting.

It's past 10 and I'm tired from day two of this post, so I'm not going to get into any details now, but basically I had meetings with AKES, AKPBS and AKHS, in that order. None of them went as well as I'd hoped, but it's okay. Under the circumstances it could have been much worse.

Ahsan was with me during the last two, and afterward we took a drive around Karachi a bit. Well, the nicer parts, I guess. We drove out to the beach (didn't you know? Karachi is a major port) and walked around on the sand just after the sun had gone down. Lots of little kids running around, a camel ambled by, some couples wandering, and some older kids riding four-wheelers in circles. After that we went to Bar-B-Cue Tonight, a colossal restaurant that serves any grilled thing you can want, except, obviously, pork or anything we would call barbecue. But it was actually really delicious; we shared a couple of dishes and ended up ordering a second helping of the lamb. I also had my first-ever glass of lassi, a yogurt-based drink, which was delicious and very refreshing.

The hotel's nice but unremarkable. It's a Marriott. One thing: The bed is nicer than the bed in the Serena. Amazing.

Anyway, slept very well last night, woke up this morning a bit before 7:30, had breakfast with Ahsan and a couple of other AKF folks who are down in Karachi for various meetings and things. They all seem to be traveling all the time from one city to another. At 8:30, a big (20-seater) van picked us up in the front of the hotel, along with oh my god I need to finish this later.

Long story short: Today we went to the field. More later, I swear.

Alright, it's morning. Birds I'd never seen or heard before are trilling outside my window. To save myself and everyone from confusion, I'll keep writing as if this were yesterday. So "today" means Friday, March 25. There will be a new post for "today," Saturday, March 26.

As I was saying, the big van picked me, Ahsan and Youshey from AKPBS up in front of the hotel. Youshey was coming along to help guide us around the temporary shelters and the water and sanitation installations. The ride to Sujawal took about 2.5 hours, at least an hour of which was taken just getting out of Karachi. And it's not even like the traffic was that bad. Karachi is just enormous. I became enthralled by the brilliantly painted buses and trucks, to which I alluded in my first post from Pakistan. Hoping to get some good pictures of them today; yesterday all I could get was a bit of video. I took lots of little videos.

Sindh is flat as hell and as such you get a feeling of vastness just driving down the road. It's easy to see why it flooded so completely. But at the same time, it's hard to imagine just how much water there was, to be anywhere from three to TWELVE FEET DEEP across the plain. As everyone saw in the footage of the Japanese tsunami, the wrecking power of water is awesome, in the "scary as shit" sense of the word.

Sujawal is a town of about 15-20,000 people in the middle of Thatta District, on the other side of the Indus River from Karachi. That is, the side that flooded. There, we visited a Family Health Clinic run by AKHS, which serves as a base for one of their mobile medical teams. They have a pharmacy, do peri-natal care including deliveries, offer health consultations and provide some advanced care. For the more heavy-duty stuff, patients are referred either to government hospitals or to the AKU Hospital in Karachi, e.g. in the case of the farmer who, upon returning to his village and fields after the waters receded, tried to commit suicide by swallowing insecticide.

Dr. Bisham, who runs 22 of these clinics for AKHS, was our guide, and got in the van with us when we left. We drove a while longer on the highway and then left the paved road, ending up at a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Temporary shelters are almost complete right next to the village, along with one additional shelter that houses the mobile medical team when it makes its twice-weekly visit. Families will be able to move in in the next week or ten days. But for the time being, they're still living in what can best be called squalor, in their devastated village. They have no income because their crops were destroyed; their houses, sagging wrecks, are unsafe; the ground is unclean because their animals have nowhere to go but in amongst the houses. Nowhere I visited in Afghanistan approached this in terms of sheer vulnerability and poverty. A few of the men showed us around, including their school and mosque (we didn't go in the mosque). They rebuilt the school after returning to the village, but the government-funded teacher hasn't returned since the flooding. So their kids are either idle or begging in Sujawal.

A tour of the nearly-complete shelters led to a discussion about improvements that had been made on the fly and then about what could be done to further improve the shelters. Basically, future shelters might have a solid door, slightly more clearance between the roof at the walls, and windows cut in the plastic sheeting that seals the houses from the wind.

We left that village and drove on to visit another mobile medical team. Their temporary shelter had been cut off by water last night -- apparently the ministry in charge of irrigation had left a tap open and now there was a small lake between the shelter and the road -- so they had set up shop in an abandoned school. People were lined up outside and inside a doctor, nurse and health educator were tending to patients. A girl lay on a makeshift bed with an IV drip going, the doctor asked a young boy some questions, the health educator was counseling a newly pregnant woman about nutrition. Flies were everywhere. Outside, an older villager explained how high the water had risen (twelve feet, you could see the high-water mark on the side of the school), how it had destroyed their village and how helpful the mobile teams were.

Our final stop was a village where the people had been able to move into the temporary shelters. They had set up the typical perimeter wall of thorny brush, with a single gate. This is to keep animals in and keep thieves out. We waited outside it for a minute while the men went and told the women to go back inside. Then we walked around, guided again by one of the older villagers. We saw how they'd set up their kitchens and the insides of the houses, installing their own shelves and bed mats. Such an obvious improvement over the wrecked houses. These villagers were having trouble getting water, however, because the water tanks had run out and it's too expensive to bring in more tanks. The village is just too remote. There was a debate between Ahsan and Youshey about the viability of installing hand pumps. Bore hills drilled to 30 feet had found brackish, undrinkable water, even this many miles inland. Youshey said that the next step had to be to drill to 80 or 90 feet, but Ahsan was adamant that in this part of the country, you'd have to drill to at least 170 feet to find fresh water, and maybe more. Too deep for a hand pump; the villagers would need a motor or to use animals to get the water. That's not realistic under the circumstances. The solution was left unresolved.

A bit sadder than I'd been in the morning, we piled back into the van and began the long drive back to Karachi. After a pit stop in Sujawal to drop off Dr. Bisham and use the bathroom (hellooo, loose movements), we continued on to a highway restaurant called Cafe Imran. There we had some hot tea with milk, just as a refreshment. It was very tasty. We got back to the hotel just after dark, around 7.

Upon being asked, I'd mentioned my desire to shop for handicrafts to take home. Youshey offered to drive me in his car to a mall in Clifton, the toniest Karachi neighborhood, and show me a couple of shops. I of course said yes, because how many opportunities in my life will I have to drive around Karachi with a native. Youshey is very friendly and his English is excellent. He's also a bit closer to my age than anyone else, maybe mid to late twenties. There was nothing really worthwhile in the mall, which didn't surprise me, but I'm still glad I went.

Back in the hotel, I realized I wasn't hungry, so I read a bit, watched a bit of crappy TV, and went to sleep. And now it's past 9 AM on Saturday, March 26 and I better get a move on if I'm going to see anything before we have to leave for the airport. One last thing: a few photos. Sorry to just throw them in at the end here.