Barullo

strength in what remains

2012-01-30T22:42:00.002-05:00

Finished Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains late last week. It must have originated as an offshoot of Mountains Beyond Mountains, because he met the protagonist of the book through Partners in Health. At any rate, it is a treat to read, a harrowing but uplifting story told extremely well. Tracy Kidder is a pretty gifted journalist. But it's not deep or revealing, really. There are none of the "holy shit I never thought about it that way before" moments that McPhee manages to hit you with every three pages.

annals of the former world

2012-01-23T12:09:00.001-05:00

I'm going to try something new this year. Instead of just reading books and then moving on to the next once I'm done, I'm going to write a little bit of a reaction to each one. I hope that will help me get more out of them, especially the deeper and more complicated ones (The Myth of Sisyphus is near the top of my pile right now...hoo boy).

Anyway, I just finished John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological history of the United States, Annals of the Former World. He's a fluid writer with a near-perfect eye for the revealing anecdote or observation or metaphor. One from Annals that has stuck with me is his analogy of the history of Earth to a human wingspan. If you stretch your arms out to the sides and imagine the distance between your fingertips as the lifespan of Earth, you could wipe out human history with a single swipe from a medium-grade nail file. I got on a bit of a perspective kick last year, which Appointment in Samarra played into in a different way, and Job, and to which my every-few-monthly re-reading of "A Tranquil Star" contributes. It's humbling and challenging to be reminded of how pitifully small we are. We are conscious geologic agents, in a way that no other living creatures have ever been. But our contribution to geology is comparatively tiny -- a few million tons of sediment displaced from California mountains into a valley, a few holes dug partway into the crust -- and the consequences of our contributions will live on, as McPhee puts it, essentially forever on the human time scale.

Another great strength of the book, to me, is McPhee's ability to seamlessly weave a story about a single interesting person into a much broader narrative, best exemplified in Annals in the section on Wyoming and the geologist David Love. This is a technique I really enjoy as a reader and McPhee is a master of it.

When he's explaining the scale of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California, he first describes the event clinically -- such-and-such happened at such-and-such a depth, causing such-and-such consequences in the rock -- but then eschews metaphor for the most part. Instead he gives a stream of short anecdotes, a few sentences each, describing how the quake affected individual people. The chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, who was ON THE BRIDGE when the quake hit San Francisco. The woman living in the Marina neighborhood, whose fourth floor apartment ended up on the ground floor after the three stories below collapsed straight down. And all of that in the context of the fact that Loma Prieta was not an especially huge quake, that it was just one in a series of thousands upon thousands of quakes that are moving the Pacific Plate up toward Alaska while it pushed into the North American plate. In fact, one of the themes of the book is that geology is something that generally doesn't happen smoothly or gradually but in bursts. The creation of river canyons, for example, occurs mainly as a result of many huge floods, not of the daily trickle or rush of water.

Getting back to Loma Prieta, McPhee's love of anecdote is also one of the two main drawbacks of the book for me. Simply put, he sometimes needs an editor whose pen has a little more red ink in it. I also read The Curve of Binding Energy last year, and it had the same problem: After a while (like, three pages), those anecdotes start to lose their force and just get repetitive and irritating. Maybe that's why some of his essays are so nearly perfect: Their length just forced him to pare things down. "Irons in the Fire" comes to mind. The other main drawback was perhaps more indicative of my own ignorance of geology, but sometimes McPhee's descriptions of mechanisms or of the way things look now just didn't quite quite conjure up the images or understanding that I'd hoped for. Often, I found myself wishing for a quick illustration, but these were unfortunately few and far between. The maps and drawings, where they exist in the book, were excellent.

All in all, a book I'm very glad to have read.

running book list 2012

2012-01-23T11:33:00.000-05:00

Started Annals late last year and just finished last night (January 23).

1. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
2. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder

11/26/11

2011-11-07T15:47:00.000-05:00

crossfit

2011-11-03T17:22:00.005-05:00

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

2011-10-12T23:41:00.001-05:00

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

2011-09-23T15:36:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-04T18:26:00.002-05:00

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

2011-09-03T03:17:00.002-05:00

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

2011-09-02T04:41:00.002-05:00

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

2011-09-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

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

2011-08-31T15:33:00.004-05:00

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

2011-08-31T02:47:00.001-05:00

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

day 2, morning 2

2011-08-31T01:09:00.003-05:00

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?

2011-08-29T15:16:00.006-05:00

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

2011-08-19T10:16:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-29T13:45:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-28T12:23:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-28T07:09:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-27T09:05:00.004-05:00

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

2011-06-26T11:45:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-26T00:07:00.002-05:00

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

shave

2011-06-25T09:36:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-25T02:06:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-24T10:10:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-23T04:40:00.006-05:00

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

2011-06-22T23:00:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-21T10:55:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-20T02:14:00.004-05:00

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

2011-06-19T12:26:00.000-05:00

...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

2011-06-18T08:24:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-17T10:35:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-16T08:12:00.001-05:00

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

2011-06-15T10:24:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-14T02:04:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-13T07:34:00.004-05:00

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

2011-06-12T09:49:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-11T13:04:00.003-05:00

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

2011-04-02T01:20:00.001-05:00

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

last day in the office

2011-04-01T13:14:00.003-05:00

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

2011-04-01T04:31:00.000-05:00

No joke.

can you feel the love tonight?

2011-03-31T12:20:00.002-05:00

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.

...

2011-03-30T12:31:00.003-05:00

no chitral

2011-03-30T05:56:00.002-05:00

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

2011-03-29T10:40:00.003-05:00

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

2011-03-29T09:51:00.003-05:00

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

2011-03-26T08:44:00.005-05:00

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

2011-03-25T11:51:00.003-05:00

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.

pir sohawa

2011-03-23T07:21:00.002-05:00

Just got back from a couple of hours touring F-7 and F-6, two of the nicer (nicest?) sectors of Islamabad, and going to Margalla Hills National Park. Our final destination: a viewpoint on a high ridge over the city called Pir Sohawa. I think we climbed about 1700 or 1800 feet to get there.

The cab driver -- this was recommended to me as the best way to get around -- was a really friendly guy named Tanvir. He took me to the Super Market and Jinnah Super Market, but they were not really what I was expecting. The shops are mostly for practical things like clothes, phones, etc. But I don't need any new Nike pants. The market that we did stop at, the name of which I forget but it starts with "K," had a couple of craft stalls but there wasn't really anything interesting there. I must have gone to the wrong places because I have a hard time believing that Kabul's craft shops are so vastly superior to Islamabad's.

Make myself a little sick being SUCH a tourist, but sometimes you just have to embrace it. It's that or not go anywhere.

Then we drove up to the aforementioned Pir Sohawa. The road twists and turns very sharply as it climbs. At one point we pulled off and got out, and Tanvir pointed out to me a spot where, last summer, a plane from Karachi crashed into the side of the hill, killing all 160 people on board. You can still see the path they cut through the forest to recover the bodies; the vegetation is very thick the whole way up.

Pir Sohawa, in addition to its views, boasts an enormous restaurant called The Monal. Seats something like 1200 people. The smell of grilling meat mingled with the roses and fumes from the passing cars and trucks. Some guys were playing tablas and singing. Took some short clips and photos but it was hard to see much of the view. Islamabad is a hazy city, or at least it has been since I got here.

One highlight: There were signs periodically on the way up saying things like, "Don't tease the monkeys, they can be dangerous," and, "Approaching the monkeys can be a hazard." Monkeys? In Islamabad? Why, yes! On the way down we passed a little troupe of them. Kind of medium-sized, just chilling by the side of the road. Obviously very used to being around people. Who knew?

Towards the end Tanvir started teaching me some Urdu. I won't even begin to try to transcribe it, but I learned, "What is your name?" and, "My name is Luke," and a couple of other basics.

Kind of an underwhelming trip, to be honest, but that's okay. All two hours of it set me back about 20 bucks. If nothing else it was great to leave the hotel for a while and see something different. Tomorrow morning, early, I leave for Karachi. I'll try to do some more prep this evening before I expire. Come on, 10 PM...

pakistan day

2011-03-22T22:30:00.002-05:00

Was too busy and then too tired to post yesterday. Lasted just past 9 PM and then woke up at 5 AM. I'll get the hang of this time zone eventually.

Anyway, yesterday was productive. Did some prep work for my trip to Karachi, where I'll be meeting with three of our sister agencies: Aga Khan Planning and Building Services, AK Health Services and AK Education Services. Lunch again with Karim, Salman and Nusrat. We talked about the differences between Muslim and Christian sects, which was pretty enlightening for me and I hope for them a bit, too.

Spent a good chunk of the afternoon going over the finances for the OFDA flood response project with Nadeem, who's the grants finance officer at AKFP. It was great to just be able to sit with him and see how he's broken the budget down and how he's tracking each agency's spending. Helps that he's a really friendly guy and knows the budget backwards and forwards. Amazingly, this is the less-complicated of the two budgets that dominate his time. The other project he works on has eleven partners! I shudder just thinking about that, five is enough. More interestingly (to me, anyway), we went over how we can use some of the savings from certain parts of the project, like non-food item distribution, to cover parts of the project that need additional funding, like the mobile medical teams.

After that, Karim and I met with Mark A., the OFDA Humanitarian Program Specialist who deals with our project in-country. We talked about the lay of the land in terms of the response so far, and how USAID/OFDA was likely to move forward as the emergency part of the response comes to an end in most places. OFDA has been funding early recovery programming since the very beginning of the response, but funding for that type of work is no longer likely to come from them. However, they're trying to work with the rest of the USAID Mission to make the relief-to-early-recovery transition as coherent as possible.

We went over a couple of the issues that have come up with the project and there really is no replacement for a face-to-face meeting to get everyone on the same page. Not going to go into too much detail but the way forward is clear now. Can't ask for much more out of an hour-long meeting. Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet again next week, when I'm back in Islamabad.

Today is Pakistan Day, which means the office is closed and there's no work. I'm going to write a few emails and then venture out from the Serena for the first time. I've gotten some suggestions from Ahsan, who works on housing stuff and will be coming with us to Karachi tomorrow, about places to go and things to see. My friend from high school, Kate, who spent a chunk of her childhood in Islamabad, also gave me some recommendations. Karim said that if he was feeling up to it he'd give me a call and take me around, but his back was still hurting yesterday so we'll see. At the very least, I'll get to one or two of the big markets and a couple of the famous viewpoints in the hills just outside the city.

That's all for now, I guess. Probably more later when I get back from my excursion.

nawroz mubarak!

2011-03-21T07:51:00.003-05:00

That is, Blessed Spring Equinox to you all! Nawroz is the Persian/Ismaili celebration of the beginning of spring. Had some cake with the whole AKDN staff about an hour ago to celebrate.

Today has been a bit of a blur, thanks to the jet lag. I have not yet taken a nap (good work, Luke!). Spent most of the day with Karim Nayani, who is coordinating the AKDN response to the flooding, including my grant. He got right down to business after greetings. We talked for a couple of hours, including ironing out some details about my in-country trips. Then went around and he introduced me to a bunch of people, most of whom I can't remember. But they included Nusrat, the Deputy Executive Officer of FOCUS Pakistan, and Salman, who heads up Aga Khan Cultural Services Pakistan and knows more about American foreign policy than most Americans I know. Very engaging. I ended up having lunch with the three of them -- rice and chicken and potatoes in some kind of sauce, not very good -- then doing some work and generally trying to stay awake until cake.

The office is very spiffy and new, although oddly devoid of artwork apart from a beautiful carved wooden screen that hides the copy machine. Karim's quite a bit older than I expected, probably in his 50s. He'd thrown his back out over the weekend, poor guy, lifting flower pots. But he was in good spirits all the same, as everyone seemed to be. Holidays do that, I guess. Nawroz is a big holiday for Ismailis.

I'm barely able to keep my thoughts together, so I'm going to head to the gym, get some exercise, eat dinner, and generally push through to 9 PM. Wish me luck.

coffee

2011-03-21T02:10:00.003-05:00

The coffee in the hotel is out of this world good, I think the best coffee I've ever had, worthy of its own post. I was raptures last night drinking my little pot of decaf after dinner. I asked one of the staff: turns out they use local beans and roast them in the hotel.

Also, jet lag is pretty bad today, so coffee is pretty much what's keeping me afloat. If I can soldier through to a reasonable bed time tonight, I should be on normal footing tomorrow. My mantra for today: no naps, no naps, no naps, no naps, no naps, no naps...

serena

2011-03-20T04:54:00.003-05:00

I think I meant for my last post to be entitled, "they drive on the wrong side of the road here!" but it was 4:30 AM or some such stupid time and I forgot. At any rate, I was surprised, when I got into the car last night (the airport pickup went smoothly, name placard and all), to discover that Pakistanis have inherited British driving habits.

The flight from Doha to Islamabad was without incident; I watched something but at the moment I can't remember what it was. Maybe an episode of Family Guy, 30 Rock, Pinky and the Brain (!!!) and something else. Whatever, I was mostly zoned out and I think I fell asleep with about 30 minutes to go, because I literally have no memory between the, "Please put your seatbacks in the upright..." announcement and landing. Benazir Bhutto International Airport is small and chaotic. Immigration took 45 minutes or an hour, not too terrible, and my bag was blessedly on the carousel when I came through. The air smelled vaguely like piss as we made the quick walk to the waiting car and then we were off down the nice, smooth highway.

It was quite dark, so I didn't see a whole lot, but I did notice that big brightly-colored trucks that Pakistan is known for were pretty much the only other vehicles on the road. Can't wait to see some of those in daylight. Apparently the prime minister of Bhutan is or will soon be visiting, because there were big banners on bridges along the route that read, "The People of Pakistan Welcome Prime Minister of Bhutan" [sic], with pictures of Zardari and, I assume, Jigme Thinley (yes, I had to look that up).

The Serena is guarded pretty heavily. We went through three checkpoints, not counting the one on the highway. My suitcase was x-rayed twice and there was much weaving through concrete pylons and waving through by guards. The hotel is ridiculous, everything carved wood, inlaid marble and mosaics. As I discovered at the Kabul Serena, though, the thing that differentiates a five-star hotel from, say, a nice Marriott, is the service. As I was checking in -- note, it was 4:15 in the morning -- a man came up to me with a tray of juice in glasses and offered me one. When I asked this morning if they had any outlet adapters, I was told that one would be brought to my room. Everyone is obsequious but not obnoxiously so. It weirds me out and I don't think I could ever really be used to staying in places this nice.

Finally got to sleep around 5:30 AM after showering, taking some more Calms Forte (still not sure whether it works or not) and reading a bit more in The Master and Margarita. Woke up around ten when someone rang my doorbell and then opened the door, wondering if I would like an apple or orange, which he was holding on a tray. I said no and went immediately back to sleep. Turns out the "Do Not Disturb" sign is much more important in a hotel where they BRING FRESH FRUIT TO YOUR ROOM WITHOUT YOU ASKING. Woke up again around 12:30, stretched for half an hour or so, watched some news and went down for brunch. It was good but too expensive. I need to figure out what I'm going to do about meals cause there's no way I can afford to keep eating there. Room service might, amazingly, be cheaper. Anyway, this post has been crushingly boring, but then I haven't really done much, so a blow-by-blow of my sleeping and waking, plus "oh man this hotel is above my class," is the best I can do so far. My bad.

Better posts to come, I trust. But in the spirit of this post, I will report that the current plan is to take a nap because my body is telling me that I've been awake from 3 AM to 6:20 AM, and that does not fit our pattern.

islamabad

2011-03-19T18:34:00.002-05:00

Just checked into my room at the Serena. Fancy fancy. Tired/jet lagged/zonked out right now, so more tomorrow.

doh

2011-03-19T11:22:00.004-05:00

DOH as in Doha International Airport, that is. Some minor mishaps at Dulles but nothing too terrible and maybe a good lesson learned for future long trips. I'm sitting next to my gate, which boards in a little over an hour, for the three-hour leg to Islamabad. Mishaps in the terminal aside, the Qatar Airways plane was great. The food was ok and the entertainment center (that's right, the entertainment center) had over 100 movies and 250 TV shows. Eat your heart out, United. Fucking "Marley & Me," I still can't believe that was the only option on the way back from Dubai last year... I watched "127 Hours" and most of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and then listened to Art Blakey Live at Birdland while I...

...started The Master and Margarita. Got about 80-90 pages in. Excellent so far, reminds me a bit of Fludd or The Third Policeman. Very lively writing, I obviously don't speak Russian but I imagine that this is a pretty first-rate translation.

DOH is very different from DXB, a lot less ostentatious and more normal-looking, although the duty-free is still mostly Bulgari, Dior, Seiko and the like. And it wouldn't be a Middle-Eastern airport without a large display of gold jewelry.

Last thing to report: the Calms Forte I bought to help me sleep may or may not have done so. Certainly didn't give me the crazy dreams that it's known for. Oh well. I'll try again tomorrow, er, tonight/tomorrow morning, when I get to the hotel at it's 5:45 PM for me and 2:45 AM for Islamabad.

One more thing: It wouldn't be an international trip if I didn't forget something. So here is this trip's item: my bathing suit.

books read 2011

2011-01-11T08:04:00.018-05:00

~~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

books to be read

2010-12-06T14:23:00.017-05:00

Time to update this list. Numbers removed for future adding/rearranging ease and because it's not really in order beyond the first two.

UPDATED 1/4/11 - I should read more classics. A part of me thinks I should have gone to St. John's College, so in lieu of trying to figure out what the classics are on my own, I'm going to throw a chunk of the St. John's reading list on here.

UPDATED 1/10/11 - Added some Jung.
UPDATED 4/15/11 - Added Dostoevsky and Melville

History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
~~Agamemnon, by Aeschylus~~
Apology, by Plato
Crito, by Plato
The Tanakh plus Jonah, Isaiah and Job
The Nature of Things, by Lucretius
~~The Aeneid, by Virgil~~
Confessions, by Augustine of Hippo
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 Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Violent Bear it Away, by Flannery O'Connor
~~The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov~~
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
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
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
Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

ALSO:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebhur
The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam
The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee
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

2010-09-29T08:30:00.000-05:00

running book list 2010 - bump

2010-06-24T16:45:00.019-05:00

Bumped so I don't have to go looking for it every time it needs to be updated.

1. The Mismeasure of Man (and essays), by Stephen Jay Gould
2. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman
3. A House for Mr. Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul
4. A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton (second or third time)
5. The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason
6. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Applied Nutrition for Mixed Sports, by Lyle McDonald
8. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Haruki Murakami
9. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright
10. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories, Volume 2, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
11. Silk Parachute, by John McPhee
12. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
13. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
14. The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson
15. Encounters with the Archdruid, by John McPhee
16. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson
17. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
18. Stretch to Win, by Ann and Chris Frederick
19. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and Six More), by Roald Dahl (again)
20. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
21. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
22. An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sacks
23. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
24. Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder

Got to 2/month by the end of the year. Satisfied. Target in 2011: 30 books.

home again

2010-05-25T14:59:00.000-05:00

And back at work. Still catching up here, obviously. Some messes to clean up, I'm afraid. God, it would have been nice to have functioning email over there. Anyway, my luggage is still in Dubai but otherwise the rest of the trip back was fine. Yesterday I was jet-lagged as all get-out but I made it through to a reasonable bed time. Helped that Claire was down from Baltimore. Today I've been doing better so far but I suspect it will still be an early night.

back in dxb

2010-05-23T12:32:00.002-05:00

The last couple of days in Kabul were weekend days (well, until this morning). My first of the trip, in fact, so I took advantage by going on a little shopping excursion and just generally hanging out. The shopping was cool. We went to two stores. One was a furniture and wood carving place. I had fallen in love with a couple of pieces that Andrew had hanging on the wall of his house, smallish unvarnished wooden frames with metal honeycomb where a picture would normally go. They were really beautiful. Alas, none to be found. But the experience of shopping in a place like that was really cool, the owner had tea brought for us and chatted with us while we looked around.

The next shop was Andrew's rug shop, owned by one Wahid, who took the first shop owner's hospitality and amplified it about 90 million times. The guy just loves rugs and he's obviously doing very well. We sat and chatted for a while in the main room of the shop (the guy asked after Andrew's uncle, apparently they know each other rather well), completely surrounded on all sides by rugs hanging on the walls, stacked four feet high, layered on the ground. Some of the stuff in there was just gorgeous. Andrew told me to just tell him generally what I had in mind, so I did. Then we were off into another room and he was just tearing through a stack of rugs, throwing things on the ground and explaining what they were as he went, taking my responses and tailoring what he was looking for. The ultimate salesman, in particular because he genuinely didn't seem to care whether I bought anything or not. Naturally, I could not resist and bought two prayer rugs (small and cheaper than the really massive ones, of which Andrew bought two). Both are Baluch and about 25-30 years old.

The rest of the weekend was relaxing and pretty uninteresting. I exercised some, read some, watched a bit of TV. Spent last night in the Serena and watched the Champions League final on my king sized bed. The Serena is super nice but I'm really glad I spent the vast majority of the time in the guest house. If you're by yourself in a big fancy hotel like that, it's lonely. I guess I would have ended up making acquaintances if I'd been there for a while but, meh, not my kind of people. Plus it's freaking expensive, even with my handy-dandy AKDN-staff discount, which came to something like 35%.

Spent today in the office, chatting with Noor and Maiwand and generally getting ready to go. Oh, and I made another quick shopping trip with Aziz, one of the admin guys, to pick up a couple of extra things. Driving through Kabul at rush hour and then again in the middle of the day is quite different from doing it at night or just sticking to the little neighborhoods I did for most of the time. LOTS of traffic and not really much in the way of rules. Then it was back to the airport, where my ass was saved by a stranger named Naghida (sp?).

In short, I wasn't able to print my KBL-DXB ticket. So after going through the frisking and bag-searching between the main road and the last gate before the airport, the lone cop there wouldn't let me through. So this young woman, quite conveniently bilingual (tri, actually, as it turned out later), argued with the guy on my behalf. That didn't work, so she went inside, got the ticket agent to print my ticket and had a little kid run it back out to me so I could go through. Saved. The. Day. We chatted a bit once I got inside, after I had finished thanking her profusely. Turns out she's American but her parents are Afghan. She now works in Iraq for USIP and was just finishing up her first-ever trip to Afghanistan, which she took as R&R. Oh, and she speaks Arabic, too.

The trip to Dubai was smooth after that and now here I am, waiting to check in for the last leg. Not much looking forward to it. Next time I post it'll be from home!

my first day off!

2010-05-20T23:11:00.002-05:00

Is today! Yesterday was jammed full of meetings at AKF, just making the rounds and trying to gather as much intel as possible about what they're doing over here in natural resource management, education, civil society, etc. etc. I also had a meeting at USAID, which is on the US embassy compound and I have never seen a more heavily-fortified place in my entire life. Like whoa.

More about that another time, I have to go eat breakfast and then I'm going to take advantage of the day by going shopping with Keith, the head of monitoring and evaluation of AKF, and Andrew, the head of NRM. Andrew has been here for seven years, speaks excellent Dari and is evidently extremely knowledgeable about the shopping here. He collects rugs and is somewhat of a connoiseur of them. Should be a fun time.

hurray!

2010-05-19T01:09:00.003-05:00

THE WIZARDS WON THE DRAFT LOTTERY! THE WIZARDS WON THE DRAFT LOTTERY! HELLOOOOOO JOHN WALL!

If they pick Turner, I will be sad. But they can't, they have to pick Wall. Please, please, please let them pick Wall.

breakin' out of focus

2010-05-19T00:53:00.003-05:00

Another attack this morning, this time more coordinated, but it was against the US base in Bagram, so not even inside Kabul. Still, after a week and a half of calm visit, things have picked up a little bit. But I went out last night for the first time, with some AKF people, a couple of people from IFES, and a guy named Robert, who used to work for CHF in Sudan as a Program Manager or something and with whom I corresponded occasionally but never spoke to or met. He was very nice and quite charitably mentioned some offhanded whatever about how I'd helped them on proposals or something. I may have done so somewhat but it was nice of him to give the impression that my role was less admin/logistical at CHF than it was. And Silja, who used to run CHF's enormous Pakistan program, works for IFES so of course all those people knew her. Small freaking world. It was a really nice time, excellent to have a steak (not rice and chicken or ground beef!) and a couple of beers (alcohol!) with some native English speakers. The steak wasn't half bad, either. The place we went is less than 100m from the front door of the guest house, so I just walked home with another guy who's staying there. Kind of wish I'd gotten a lift as the street was quite muddy and now my shoes are dirty, haha. I've decided once and for all that I'm going to get a shoeshine in the Dubai airport. It will be my first ever, haha.

This morning I went over to FMFB to meet with the head of microfinance over there, Karim. We chatted for about an hour and a half, just a general overview of where they're coming from and where they're going. And then we talked a bit about Afghanistan in general, and what he thinks really needs to happen in order for security and stability to come. I won't go into too much detail here but it was a very interesting conversation. There was a story in the NYT yesterday that he took issue with in particular.

Anyway, now I'm back at the FOCUS office. Everyone is meeting about the DIPECHO project, which is also being extended but with have I have nothing to do. But Alix just forwarded me approximately 18 million emails from my work accounts, which I still can't access, so I'm just going through those bit by bit. That's enough work for now. This afternoon we'll do the programmatic work shop, insh'allah.

oh my god

2010-05-18T10:02:00.002-05:00

So there was a suicide attack in Kabul today. Bad one, too. But it was in a different part of the city from where I am so I didn't even hear the blast or find out about it until a couple of hours later. Everyone is taking it completely in stride, so I'm not particularly worried about it.

The thing that has freaked me out is, well, first read this story.

Read it? Okay, I was on that plane on Sunday, less than 24 hours before it crashed into the mountains with 43 people on board. THAT has freaked me out. The brother of the FOCUS regional program manager for Badakhshan, Safdar, with whom I had dinner in Faizabad three days ago, was on the plane.

2010-05-17T04:00:00.000-05:00

So I told Yousef last night about my cheeseburger yearning, and this morning he apparently told the admin guys here to order me one for lunch. I didn't ask for him to do that, and honestly I'd rather wait until I get home to have one. And I DEFINITELY do not want to be the only person having food brought from outside. But Aziz (one of the admin guys) came up and asked whether he should order just one or if anyone else would be eating one and I tried to tell him that I didn't want one, and that I didn't even ask for one for myself, let alone did I know whether anyone else wanted one. This feels too special or something and I hate that shit. But Aziz's English isn't great and Yousef is at prayers, so I ended up just saying, "Fuck it," (to myself) and saying, "Yes, sure go ahead and order one," (to Aziz). I'm sure Yousef thought he was doing me a nice favor and the thought counts for a lot in this context. If everyone were ordering cheeseburgers this wouldn't be a problem. Now I'm just whining and I should be happy that I'll be getting to eat something other than the Afghan staples.

UPDATE: I'm relieved to report that the burger was truly awful and barely deserved to call itself a burger. And there was no cheese. Thank god.

back in Kabul

2010-05-17T02:09:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was pretty leisurely: I just woke up, ate breakfast, packed and went to the AKF office for a bit, then headed to the airport for the trip back to Kabul. Expectedly, the flight was delayed by an hour and a half or so. Unexpectedly, there were a ton of expats waiting to fly. Apparently, starting last week, flights in and out of Faizabad have been cut dramatically and it's only by luck that I could go when I did. They're building a new, paved airstrip, which is great because the current one is just corrugated steel strips. The next flight isn't until this coming Sunday, so anyone who wanted to get back to Kabul this week had to leave yesterday. It was nice to chat with Americans. They were all very friendly and one even knew my colleague Andrea from when she worked here with Hopkins. A few of them were with an adventure travel company that's been working with the AKF-sponsored guest houses in the Wakhan that I drove past.

The flight was cloudy and uneventful and then I pretty much came right back to the office, with a quick stop at the guest house to drop off my stuff. At dinner met and chatted with a Canadian guy who's doing new product development for FMFB (First Microfinance Bank - largest microcredit operation in Afghanistan, owned by AKFED). Sida is his name, although I have no idea if I'm spelling that right. After dinner I ended up watching the last half of Frost/Nixon and some sports (cricket, soccer, Nadal-Federer). Towards the end one of the Afghan guys who's staying at the house while he takes English classes joined me and we chatted a bit. And I finished Speak, Memory. Awesome book. I've had headaches the past two evenings, incidentally. Not sure what that's about.

Today has been quite slow so far, after an infuriating while trying to have a conversation with M&D I came to the office. We didn't have internet until about 30 minutes ago; apparently the rather mild storm they had yesterday and the day before was causing all the connectivity issues. It's still coming and going now. So I did some other boring but necessary stuff. We're waiting for Maiwand to get back from Mazar-i-Sharif so we can start in on the budget and financials workshop. Hope he's back soon cause it's almost noon. But hey, that's Afghanistan, I guess. You have to assume that everything will be delayed.

Oh, and cheeseburgers have been ordered for lunch :-)

May 14 and 15

2010-05-15T23:09:00.000-05:00

NOTE: These posts were written on the day indicated but I didn’t have internet until just now. If you can make it all the way through them, enjoy.

Friday, May 14

Last night, at dinner, after about thirty minutes of being the only non-Dari speaker at a table full of 10 or 12 of them, it turned out that the guy immediately to my right and immediately across from me both spoke great English. The one across from me, Mohammed, tutors AKF staff in English and the one to my right, Abdul Nasir (who, funnily enough, had better English) teaches IT skills to AKF staff. They both grew up in Pakistan, I assume as refugees although I didn’t ask. Anyway, they were both extremely friendly and engaging. The conversation ended up running for two and a half hours; we talked about everything from the 9/11 conspiracy theory that the US government did it (apparently quite widely accepted in Pakistan) to homeopathy to health care reform. The guy to my right had studied homeopathy in Pakistan. The internet is an amazing thing. At any rate, it was a really stimulating conversation.

I slept pretty well and woke up at the entirely reasonable hour of 7 AM. Breakfast was pretty plain, even by Afghan standards: flat bread and honey and Nescafe. Then Iqbal came by and we were off to see some School Emergency Response Team (SERT) practice sessions, first at Ishkashim Girls’ School and then at a coed school at a small village about 30 minutes away. Basically, what happens in the drills is that everyone assembles as if they were at school (today is Friday, weekend here) and then a school leader calls out through a megaphone that there’s been a disaster. Everyone assembles in their various teams –information, logistics, search and rescue, first aid– and snaps into action. The search and rescue teams go into a classroom that has been upturned for the purpose and finds someone lying on the ground. Some of the members have shovels and picks in case they need to get something heavy off. They put the “victim” on a stretcher and carry them outside to the waiting first aid team, which does a quick triage and then applies disinfectant and bandages and so on. Once their done, they carry the body to the logistics team, which has arranged for a vehicle to take the victim to the clinic. The information team is running around recording everything: age of victim, types of injuries, etc.

The girls had learned much earlier, under CBDRR I and practiced a lot more, so they were quite impressively quick and well-organized. The coed school had just been trained, under the DIPECHO grant. So they were a bit more discombobulated, but had a couple of very good actors as “victims.”

We took a quick detour to a craft shop of items made by hand by materials found in the hills around here (lots of semiprecious stones) and then I got dropped back off at the guest house for lunch.

After lunch, we piled back in the Land Cruiser and drove off into the Wakhan Valley. It’s dry, dusty and rocky. Even the cultivated land is full of rocks. The people up here are subsistence farmers and shepherds for the most part; although AKF has recently started to help some people turn their houses into guest houses (basically bed and breakfasts) for adventuresome tourists. Apparently this is starting to catch on. Anyway, our ultimate destination was the first major village in the Corridor, about 60km (2 hours) from Ishkashim. There we saw a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) demonstration of a more complex emergency: earthquake plus rock fall. This team had drilled quite a lot and was very impressive and fast. We also saw a mitigation project there, a flood retention wall built entirely by hand from local materials.

After each drill and visit, Iqbal introduced me to the assembled people and we had a chance to thank each other: them to Iqbal and me basically for caring and helping them learn things that have made helped them enormously, and me to them for allowing me to visit and providing me with hope and encouragement that the work I do in an office in DC actually makes a difference somewhere. It hit home these past couple of days why field visits are so important: Our offices in the US are so far removed from the purpose of our work, and that can make it difficult to find motivation and easy to get cynical or discouraged. But coming out here, seeing everything that I’ve read and written about actually happen, is just an amazing experience. It’s also quite humbling to watch Iqbal and the other staff here. Not to take away from what I do at work, because without that the rest wouldn’t be possible, but what I got to see today was the really important part of the whole chain. Very cool.

Hopefully I’ll get to continue my conversation with Mohammed and Abdul Nasir tonight at and after dinner, and then tomorrow it’s back to Faizabad. So much time in the car for such a short trip, but it was worth every second, every jolt as we crossed a stream or shuddered across some rocks.

Oh, and rest assured: there are photos and videos of everything.

Saturday, May 15

So last night, sure enough, the conversation picked up where it had left off with my new friends. We ate dinner and then watched a bunch of TV –Korean soap operas translated into Persian and censored (women’s bare legs, arms, and anything below the collarbone), Afghan Idol (what a trip that was), Al Jazeera and BBC in English– and just kept up a patter the whole time. A bunch of the other men at the guest house joined and it was just a “nice time,” as Mohammed kept saying.

This morning, woke up, ate, packed, and then after some goodbyes to Iqbal, Mohammed and Abdul Nasir, it was off to Faizabad. Didn’t take as many pictures this time, but it was surprising just how different the view was A) from the other side of the car and B) from the other direction. Pics would generally have been the same, though. But we crossed the place where the road had been completely washed out utterly without incident or even my noticing it. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest, haha. The trip was shorter, 6.5 hours on the dot, and after a quick lunch here I am back in a bedroom at the FOCUS guest house. Gonna try to get some exercise in a little bit, the thought of how out of shape my already-out-of-shape self will be when I get home is mildly depressing. Oh, and take a shower. No running water in Ishkashim. Tomorrow it’s back to Kabul around mid-day. My flight is scheduled for noon but we’ll see…

ishkashim

2010-05-13T08:42:00.002-05:00

Iqbal, the Ishkashim CBDRR project coordinator, got to Faizabad last night. We left early this morning for the 8-hour drive to Ishkashim. What an adventure. Road was washed out, many people waiting, we crossed anyway. Drove through half a dozen flocks of sheep, with the shepherds walking alongside beating them out of the way of the car. Forded ten or more streams. All through a beautiful valley, approaching the snow-capped Hindu Kush. Now in Ishkashim, at the FOCUS office. Saw a great presentation by Iqbal and Ejaz (the DIPECHO-CBDRM program manager). Met most of the staff here. Iqbal and Ejaz both speak excellent English, too, which helps. I would have gone crazy on the drive if I hadn't had someone to talk to, especially someone who knows the area well.

Oh and we stopped at a community where FOCUS has done major work, including a canal to divert water around the village instead of allowing it to seep into the soil and foundations of the houses, where it was making everything unstable. Met the key religious guy there and the head of the CERT (community emergency response team). I'm in a daze. Also, we were as high as 10000 feet today and now around 8500, so that might have something to do with it.

Tomorrow we're going to check out some school trainings and drills and then go up into the Wakhan Corridor to see mitigation projects. For now, time to head out of here and back to the guest house.

bagh-i-babur and faizabad

2010-05-12T07:42:00.002-05:00

Well, yesterday afternoon I went to Bagh-i-Babur (Babur's Gardens) with Noor. Freaking awesome guy, that Noor. We took a long route around Kabul to get there; it was neat to see parts of the city I hadn't in the first few days. I'd been confined pretty much to Wazir Akbar Khan, the somewhat upscale neighborhood where all the AKDN offices are ("white powder money" people with armed guards live across the street from both the Guest House and the FOCUS office, which somewhat paradoxically makes the respective streets relatively safe).

The gardens are beautiful, it makes me proud to be a part of AKDN when I see the fruits of a project like the restoration that AKTC did six or seven years ago. Urban oasis, indeed, especially given that the rest of Kabul is dusty and drab. I've got pics that I'll upload as soon as I'm back in the States. Also there are restored versions of Babur's tomb (the man himself was an important king ~500 years ago, died in India but loved Kabul so much that they transporte his remains there to be buried), the marble Shah Jahan mosque and the Queen's Palace, which had an exhibit of gorgeous early-19th-century British drawings of Kabul on display. Noor and I wandered around a bit and then had some hand-made ice cream. Some students were smoking hookah on a little slope nearby and motioned me over while Noor went to pay for the ice cream (called shiriakh). Noor came back and when I told him he said, "Oh, let's go over, it would make them very happy." So we did. One of them spoke a little English but most of the time we just sat and they talked with Noor while he translated. Nice guys, engineering students.

This morning I left for Faizabad. The airport must be the safest place on Earth: my bags got searched three times and x-rayed and I got frisked five times. The flight was late but no big deal, the waiting room had plenty of good people-watching and I'm really enjoying Speak, Memory. All Afghans in the domestic room, with two or three exceptions. Very informal, too, when a flight was ready to leave a guy would just come in from the tarmac and yell, "Herat!" or something and then people would crowd into some buses and roll on out to the plane.

The flight was awesome. We went over some really high (glacier-covered) peaks. Beautiful the whole way. Faizabad itself is pretty, although nobody here speaks much English except the AKF logistics/security guy. And no internet in the guest house (I'm at the AKF office). Speaking of which, it's late and I should probably roll on out. Leaving for Ishkahsim at the crack o' dawn tomorrow. Will report more later!

cursed internet

2010-05-10T23:35:00.004-05:00

Well, yesterday was a day of mighty struggle to get and stay online. The IT guys from AKF (FOCUS doesn't have its own) were on leave yesterday or something, so one of the admin guys here, Gul, signed me on with his username. But for some unknown reason, it's on a timer and just cuts out after a while. What the fuck. And then at the guesthouse I couldn't get online at all, but it was such a tease: the wifi connection was recognized by my computer but there was something messed up with the firewall or something. Anyway, Yousef, the Canadian financial guy, showed me how to fix it this morning (I think). And the IT guys are coming today to set me up properly in the office. Oy.

Anyway, apart from that yesterday was nice. The weather is beautiful, 70s and dry, and it even rained for a few minutes yesterday, which killed the dust for an hour or two. Just like Santiago, the mountains in the distance are way more beautiful when you can actually SEE them. I've been reading the Sphere Project Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response, which Maiwand had sitting on his desk, in the down times when I can't get online. Very interesting, practical info. I'd skimmed sections of it before but never given it a good read. Currently I'm working on "Minimum Standards in Food Security, Nutrition and Food Aid" - i.e. the bit that I find most interesting. The first section was "Common Standards" (the ones that apply to all sectors), then "Hygiene Promotion and Water and Sanitation." Not a bad use of time given the options, honestly.

I've got my plane ticket to head to Faizabad tomorrow and it looks as though I'll be able to get to Ishkashim and the border after all. There was a security incident in Warduj a bit over three weeks ago, so they weren't letting cars through for a while, but things are stable enough now that even marked cars are allowed (and I'll be in an unmarked car, you can be sure). The guys here are fanatical about security and won't even go themselves if things are unsafe, so if they say it's okay, it's okay. I'm excited to see some of the program activities. Apparently I'll be mostly seeing DIPECHO-funded (i.e. EU) stuff because they're a little ahead of my grant in terms of the schedule: past the evaluation stage and into the actual work. I'll take lots of pictures.

I'm still working off the jet lag somewhat, but I think today I'll finally be on a normal-ish schedule. Napped from 6-7 last night and then had no trouble falling asleep later after a call with Nashir (CEO of FOCUS Afghanistan) at 9. That's pretty unheard of for me.

day two

2010-05-09T21:59:00.002-05:00

Got to Kabul yesterday morning. Missed my driver at the airport so I caught a ride with a couple of locals who work for IRD. After a brief adventure, they dropped me off at the AKF offices on Wazir Akbar Khan (a major street). Nice guys, especially the English-speaking one.

Met with Kevin, the CEO of AKF,A right after I got in, then went around and met everyone. The HR guys, Cipta and Donny (both Indonesian), and the admin guys, Ramin and I-forget-the-other-one's-name (both Afghan), are really friendly. Took a trip to the Ministry of the Interior to register with the government, which was interesting. The driver took a reeeally long route back -- expats have to be driven everywhere by the local drivers and the route changes every time as a precautionary measure. The streets here are unlike anything I've ever seen. Choked with dust (the air literally smells like an old bookshelf), full of cars and people moving around without much rhyme or reason, mostly unpaved and really, mostly rutted so much that even a Land Cruiser pitches and yaws like a rowboat in a hurricane. And there are AK-47s everywhere. Cops, Afghan army, private security.

Anyway, then it was back to the AKF office to get my computer fixed, and then to the guest house to put my luggage down, take a shower and have some lunch. The shower was, surprisingly, scalding. Then over to the FOCUS offices to meet everyone (except Maiwand, the program manager, who's in Islamabad waiting for a UK visa). Did some work, then back to the AKF offices to pick up my computer. One of the IT guys, whose name I also forget (I'm going to have a hard time with names...there are a lot of staff and a lot of them have longish names that I don't catch on the first go-round), came back with me to the guest house to hook me into the wifi here. He's really friendly, too, and speaks good English. He studied in India and a lot of his family lives in Toronto. We talked about a lot of things, including how Kabul has changed since he was a little kid and about differences in marriage traditions in Afghanistan and the US/Canada. Really interesting conversation.

Talked with Claire and watched some TV. Dinner was awkward as crap because it was me and eight Afghans, only one of whom speaks any English at all. It was silent. I ate as fast as possible and then absolutely passed out at like 8:50.

Woke up at 4:30 this morning, ended up Skyping with Alix from AKF USA, and Vale, of all people. She's going to get engaged. Holy crap. Then did a few exercises, ate a much friendlier breakfast with the two Afghans I spent the most time with yesterday (waiting around at the AKF office and riding from one place to another). They're HIV educators in Kandahar, but they're on their way to spend a month in Pul-i-Khumri for training. The one that speaks English (kind of) is nice and this morning I introduced him to granola. He is a big fan and ended up having two big bowls. There's no brewed coffee, just Nescafe, but whatever.

Okay, that's enough for now. The car is coming to get Yousef and I in fifteen minutes and I need to get dressed and get my stuff together for the day. More later.

dxb

2010-05-08T11:32:00.002-05:00

Hello from beautiful Dubai International Airport! Not much to report, really, except that wifi is free and a cup of decaf costs six dollars. I would almost consider getting a day room (I'm eligible for reimbursement because my layover is over 8 hours) just to have somewhere to stow my stuff, but it's not worth it. I can check in in four hours so I think I'll just wander around, check out the duty-free shops and then plant myself somewhere

I'm traveling with one of the little netbooks from work. Do not see the appeal. It's not that much lighter or smaller than my laptop and so much more awkward to type on. Oh well, shouldn't complain too much.

Oh, one last thing: running list of things I forgot to bring:
1) cell phone charge
2) rain jacket
3) any kind of jacket or warm anything except my green sweater

Oops

2010-04-16T10:59:00.001-05:00

New links on the right. Global Health Report (blog), Emergency Nutrition Network, Valid International.

running book list 2010

2010-02-18T14:29:00.010-05:00

Before it gets too late in the year to start this, here goes:

1. The Mismeasure of Man (and essays), by Stephen Jay Gould
2. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman
3. A House for Mr. Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul
4. A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton (second or third time)
5. The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason
6. Sleep, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Applied Nutrition for Mixed Sports, by Lyle McDonald
8. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Haruki Murakami

realization

2010-02-16T16:06:00.004-05:00

I have lost the ability talk about some political issues. When someone brings up health care reform, or the Christian right, or the Democrats' most-recent fuckup or chickening-out, or the Supreme Court intellectually-dishonest and hypocritical disaster du jour, I will usually have a pretty solid idea what they're talking about and the impulse to start/join the conversation. That impulse will quickly and decisively be overwhelmed by lightheadedness and a need to sit down and breathe deeply. And talk about something less nauseating, like "Love Actually." (To be clear, I find "Love Actually" nauseating and painful to watch.)

I wonder if it would be different if I didn't hang around the choir so often. There's no argument, just one-upping each other with arguments we all agree on and anecdotes we all find sickening until we're (I'm) hysterical and upset. At this rate I'm either going to mellow out completely, tune out completely, or become a conservative just to keep the conversations joinable. Of those three, I'm sad to say the second is probably the most likely. Sad because that's exactly what the people doing the things that make me upset want. They want me crushed and out of the way. A fourth option would be to find some conservative friends.

need to read

2010-02-05T08:03:00.001-05:00

Re-read 1984. "Red Riding" quartet, by David Peace.

books stacked on my floor to be read

2009-12-30T00:57:00.003-05:00

~~1. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould~~
~~2. A House for Mr. Biswas, by VS Naipaul~~
3. The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
4. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen

books i need to read now

2009-12-18T12:52:00.002-05:00

Okay, new list. I'll keep adding to the previous one, slowly. These are books that need reading (in no particular order; bold indicates priority):

1. Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
2. The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass (new translation by Breon Mitchell)
3. The Bin Ladens, by Steve Coll
4. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis
5. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
6. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
7. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
8. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
8. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
9. Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara
10. Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
11. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
12. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
13. A House for Mr. Biswas, by VS Naipaul
14. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
15. The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas
16. The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebhur
17. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould
18. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
19. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

That should be a good start.

i am going to try to list all the books i have read this year

2009-12-16T16:28:00.010-05:00

Came across something called the 50 books project. Obvious goal was for the participants to read 50 books in 2009. I didn't get close, but here's a list of what I did read. There must be more that I'm forgetting and I'll add as I remember others. In no particular order:

1. The White Man's Burden, by William Easterly
2. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
3. The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Mantle of the Prophet, by Roy Mottahedeh
5. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
6. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
7. Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee
8. Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee
9. 2666, by Roberto Bolano
10. Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt
11. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
12. The Varieties of Scientific Experience, by Carl Sagan
13. Alphabet Juice, by Roy Blount
14. Open, by Andre Agassi
15. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges (in translation)
16. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
17. Athletic Body in Balance, by Gray Cook
18. Athletic Development, by Vern Gambetta
19. Homicide, by David Simon
20. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
21. A Tranquil Star, by Primo Levi (again)
22. The Wheel on the School, by Meindert DeJong (again)
23. No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy
24. In the Land of Invented Languages, by Arika Okrent
25. A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon
26. A Wanderer in the Perfect City, by Lawrence Weschler
27. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
28. The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham (again)
29. Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow
30. The Little Prince, by Antoine du Saint-Exupery
31. Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
32. A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley

tight words/names/titles

2009-12-07T17:13:00.011-05:00

Can't be bothered to go back through all my old posts and find the original list, so I'm just going to recreate and expand. Here will be an ongoing list of words, names and titles that I think are awesome and worth noting.

D'Brickashaw Ferguson - football player
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters - by JD Salinger
Go Tell it on the Mountain - by James Baldwin
phenylalanine - amino acid
Takeo Spikes - football player
Let the Right One In - movie
International Church of the Reign of God - church
United House of Prayer for All People - church
Wide Sargasso Sea - by John Steinbeck
Malagasy - a person from Madagascar
The Curve of Binding Energy - by John McPhee

michigan - ohio state 2009

2009-11-21T15:16:00.001-05:00

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

two things

2009-11-15T12:26:00.002-05:00

First: Step Rideau! I was listening to Texas Fred yesterday and I just enjoy so much some of the music he plays. Specifically, the up-beat, party, can't-not-move zydeco. The slower, more ballad-y stuff I don't like at all. But the fun stuff rocks. So after a little research I finally went and got myself a starter album: Don't Ask Why, by Step Rideau and the Zydeco Outlaws. It's an A.

Second: Steven Pinker's review of Gladwell's new book is just spot-on. A particular gem: "In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his apercus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong." Money. Bad typo in there, though, a parenthetical remark has no close parenthesis. OOPS.

2009-11-12T10:56:00.002-05:00

Because I'll think this is funny to look back on in six months, here's my starting lineup this week for the East Silver Spring Pandas:

QB Philip Rivers
RB Michael Turner
RB Joseph Addai
RB Ricky Williams
WR Braylon Edwards
WR Devery Henderson
TE Kellen Winslow
D/ST SAINTS
K Dan Carpenter

I should win in a walk, but that might just be the three-game win streak talking.

hee hee

2009-10-16T11:53:00.000-05:00

hooks

2009-10-04T14:09:00.004-05:00

I get a lot of pleasure from finding songs that form the hooks for other songs that I like. Of course, this is not a particularly special or unique trait; lots of people are trying to make a living making new music out of the old to begin with, let alone simply enjoying what others are doing. Anyway, it's fun to hear "Eye Know" and think, "Peg." This is on my mind because I went out last night for my friend Jake's birthday and the DJ at Saint Ex was playing a fun (if not particularly original or adventurous--but hey, it was Saint Ex) mix. And he was doing the real way, with records on a pair of turntables, messing with speed and blending songs into each other. He did the Sinnerman-to-Get-By transition and at another point played the source of the hook for Common's "The Light" and then obviously played "The Light" itself. Hadn't heard that hook before so I asked him what it was. He told me, well, this:

Just for fun, here's "The Light" (beat by one of the greatest ever at making new music from old, J Dilla):

And because I feel like it, here's Sinnerman and Get By, and Peg and Eye Know.

UMG sucks and won't allow embedding, but here's Get By

Hurray for music.

reading update

2009-09-30T14:08:00.002-05:00

A few things I've been reading recently:

Finished The White Man's Burden. Interesting and the guy certainly has good points to make, but in the end way too far off in the Friedman/Gladwell end of the pool. Cutesy, lots of fluff and lots of using anecdotes or clever framing to make things appear the way the author wants. But not so clever that it's comfortable to read and accept.
Finished "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Happy Ever After" and started "The Cossacks," all by Leo Tolstoy. Happy Ever After was good and such but "TDOII" was just spectacular. Tolstoy really didn't think too much of the bourgeoisie and petty upper class. Devastatingly incisive and observant without being sarcastic. Not that I read Russian, but I think the translation could probably have been a little more elegant. Not sure what to think of "The Cossacks" yet.
Cool article about caloric restriction and longevity. Intermittent fasting is pretty interesting. Not really interested in it for myself at the moment but there seems to be a lot of anecdotal and experiential evidence that it has benefits all over the place.
Another awesome article, this one about the potential of synthetic biology, and also somewhat about the issues and pitfalls that people are worried about.

I need a new book.

fantasy football is fun

2009-09-24T09:19:00.001-05:00

The end. Time to get back to Staffing Time Allocation for Africa. Yaaayyyy.

pubmed!

2009-08-31T09:06:00.002-05:00

Well, I can't believe it's taken me this long but I finally discovered PubMed. Free online journal articles about every medical-related subject imaginable. Wheeee!!!!

Gold mine

30 days

2009-08-24T13:25:00.003-05:00

Well, it's been exactly one month since my last post. And I just got back from a week at Emerald Isle with the fam and Bill and the Herschkowitzes and (to a lesser extent than years past) the other house. We had a wonderful time (thanks again, M&D!), relaxing, swimming, playing tennis and scrabble and celebrity (an improvement on simple charades), kayaking, etc. Plus the weather was just killer until yesterday morning when we were packing and it drizzled/rained.

In other news, I finally found the takedown of Paleo lifestyle people that I've been hoping to find since I first came across Conditioning Research and Mark's Daily Apple last year. It's here (an interesting read even if you don't know what I'm talking about): Paleofantasies of the perfect diet. Basically, I've always thought that the Paleo model was, well, not as well-thought-out as its fervent adherents might like. And that's putting it gently. There's something inherently appealing about the idea that if we could only return to our pre-agricultural roots we'd be healthy and strong again. But if you think about it for more than fifteen seconds, you start to find all kinds of holes in the logic.

Also, as I delve more and more into Lyle McDonald (of BodyRecomposition) and his forums (both the nice one on his main site, and the hidden and vastly more entertaining Monkey Island forums (the "mean" forums), I've begun to realize how deeply stupid a lot of the stuff online is, even stuff that on the surface looks legit. CrossFit, Paleo, T-Nation, most products from Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson, Alwyn Cosgrove, or whoever. Garbage, or, even if not garbage, vastly inferior and often much more expensive than whatever it's derived from. I've been reading Lyle's stuff for a few months now and from his style and forums always thought of him as kind of uptight and obsessed with keeping things clean and nice. However, the mean forums are pretty much completely uncensored. Much more awesome (and geeky).

I am a dork.

newspapers and a wedding video

2009-07-24T13:56:00.003-05:00

The piece in the New York Review this issue about the rise of blogs and the decline of newspapers is really, really interesting, perhaps the most well-though-out and engaging thing I've read about how things are and they way they're going. Usually these things seem to take polemical form. Newspaper defenders say, "Blogs are parasites on all our hard work," and bloggers (at least the ones I read) go, "The MSM is out of touch and does nothing but defend the status quo," and everyone gets plugs their ears and says, "LALALALALALA," a la Stephen Colbert. Happens in many arenas, I suppose. But Michael Massing doesn't seem to have an axe to grind here, he's just curious about what's up. Very refreshing. Although I have to say, the article was ever so slightly harder to take seriously because of the inclusion of Ross "Douche Hat" Douthat. That nickname is just too funny.

On an unrelated note, awesome wedding video. These people are cool:

hum-te-tum

2009-07-22T09:12:00.004-05:00

Finished Midnight's Children a while ago now. I liked it a lot but Booker of Bookers? It wasn't THAT good. Now, I'm about 150 pages into The Mantle of the Prophet and almost done with No Country for Old Men. TMOTP is pretty academic in structure and tone but it's engaging and the subject matter (Iranian and Eastern Islamic history) is so new to me that I'm really enjoying it. The author focuses on individuals as a way to examine the larger history, which, considering the apparently huge volume of interesting characters in Iranian history, was a pretty good choice on his part. NCFOM is pretty much exactly the same as the movie version. I mean exactly. Plot, characterization, tone. If it were a graphic novel the Coen brothers would have just made a frame-for-frame recreation. Entertaining but ultimately not that interesting. One difference: The book does more overt philosophizing (think monologues) than the movie.

In other news, I interviewed for a new job at CHF but don't think I'm going to get it. That's alright, though, it was worth it just to get myself out there in a positive way as a possible candidate for other job openings. And it got me to update my resume and get some more experience interviewing. Both valuable things.

In training news, I hurt my back a little over two weeks ago but it healed in a week. I did some lower-intensity workouts last week and played in my summer league games and with Joose on Sunday and then yesterday got back onto the plan I set up last month. With frisbee 3x/week I think that big gains in the gym will have to wait until the fall. After (hopefully) Regionals in early October. We got the final tournament schedule for Joose and it is as follows:
August 1/2: Summer Daze Disc Harvest in Worton, MD
August 15/16: Summer Glazed Daze in Winston-Salem, NC (won't be at this one because of the beach)
August 29: Horsetown Throwdown in Poolesville, MD (I guess the team came together too late to get a bid to the Chesapeake Open, which is a much bigger tournament)
September 19/20: Sectionals in Upperville, VA
October 3/4: Regionals in Upperville, VA (se espera)

Hurray for frisbee tournaments! Continuing the disjointed and rambling nature of this post, I just opened the 2008 UNDP Human Development Report and haven't even started reading it yet but noticed that at least half the credited staff (some of the names are of indeterminate gender to my ignorant self) and a majority of the leadership of the report are women. Cool.

some new books

2009-07-08T12:42:00.003-05:00

I'm almost done with Midnight's Children, so I got to thinking about what I'd like to read next. Then once that ball was rolling it was hard to stop and I came up with this order from Amazon:

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, by Roy Mottahedeh
Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace - or War, by Mary Anderson
Refugee Health: An Approach to Emergency Situations, by Medecins Sans Frontieres
Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health, by Ruth Levine
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly

Looking at it now this next bout of reading is awfully subtitle-heavy. Also soul-searchy. I guess I'm trying to figure out a bit more about the big picture of actual aid work. And read Lolita, finally.

walking

2009-07-08T08:13:00.002-05:00

Via Maggie Hannapel, whom I have not seen or talked to in a long time, but whose screen name still pops up when I sign into gmail, a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

The past couple of days have been frustrating exercise-wise. I hurt my back while doing front squats on Monday. The pain isn't as bad today as yesterday, but I'm still uncomfortable and won't be lifting heavy for a while. But that quote from Jefferson reminds me of two things. First, I can still exercise, I must still exercise. It doesn't have to be intense, but the discomfort I feel while twisting or bending doesn't excuse me to just sit around and mope. Second, that there is absolutely no greater joy in life for me than to surrender myself to simple curiosity. I haven't really explored the blocks around my new neighborhood yet. I've been driving through them for one reason or another since I was little but there are one-way side-streets and little circles and alleys that I've never been on. Today will not be a day for testing my limits but rather for getting rid of the limits I've imposed on myself by my rapidly-solidifying routine.

Time for a walk.

gladwell

2009-06-30T15:16:00.002-05:00

I am not a fan of Blink or The Tipping Point, to put it mildly. I have ranted plenty about this before. But it's possible that one reason why this guy gets my dander up is that he's obviously a very smart guy (lazy word choice, I know). So why does he choose to squander his gifts writing dreck like Blink? For the money, I guess. His review in this week's New Yorker of a new book called Free, by Chris Anderson, is really, really interesting. Oh well.

micafone testing one two fee, in da pace to be

2009-06-16T11:02:00.017-05:00

UPDATE: table now displays correctly. The HTML just looks hideous.

Wassup evybody my name is Tai Mai Shu, and I am going to wapping fo you today just a wi'w fweesty'w. Fus an fomos I like to thanking wody sty'w beyond compayw fo getting my bewt back an hewping me pomotion my skiws. An in retun I wiw teach them how to make on miyon dollus.

Whew, got a little carried away there. What a great song. I wish today was Sunday...

Anyhow, the themes of this post are testing and goals. I started a thread on JP Fitness Forums for my dearest goal of dunking. Because I currently have the vertical jump of a very athletic 12-year old, this will take a quite a lot of hard work on three major things: strength, power and elasticity. And because I've been working haphazardly on these things for several months, to some but not enough success, I'm going to start with a solid month-to-month plan for the final five months of the year.

So here's a table (the stupid piece of crap won't display right, even though it's unbelievably basic...please scroll down) with my current numbers and goal numbers:

	now	goal
height	5'11"	n/a
weight	165#	165#
dead lift	335#	400#
front squat	245#	300#
vertical jump	28"	36"
overhead press	115#	165#
bench press	185#	245#
pull ups	13	20
10-yard dash	1.68s	1.55s
20-yard dash	2.56s	2.4s
40-yard dash	4.69s	4.5s
dot drill	53s	45s

two unrelated and awesome videos

2009-06-15T08:27:00.007-05:00

Saw two great videos this morning. The first is about the difference between running in shoes and running barefoot (or in this case, in socks). The girl in the video had no instructions except to run on the treadmill in shoes and then in socks. The difference is just amazing (slap slap slap...it just hurts to watch when I see people run like that) and I can tell you from personal experience that while I find it easy as pie to run on my forefoot when I'm in my Five Fingers, Vivo Barefoots or, well, just barefoot, it's nearly impossible to run that way in sneakers except at a dead sprint. And even then it just feels wrong: my feet are too heavy, I want to slap slap slap. I went to the track with Jack yesterday and ran a bunch of sprints barefoot and it just felt so good. Yet another article about the advantages of being barefoot (not just for running but for everything) are at iamgeekfit. (How did I not know about this website before!?!? I am geek fit, for crying out loud! It's in the links now, along with a couple of other geeky-ass fitness sites.) Anyhow, here's the video:

And now, for something completely different. H/t to my coworker Dan. Here's "Arlington: The Rap."

computer

2009-06-03T14:51:00.003-05:00

Well, I finally sucked it up and bought a new computer and printer. You can see it here. I'll get a rebate for the printer so that part will end up being free. I've been getting by fine with Mom's at home, but I don't really want to be constantly borrowing my new roommate's laptop once I move out. Seems like the wrong foot to get started off on.

Speaking of which, I'm planning to meet up with the guy I'm replacing tomorrow night. This will be kind of a packed weekend. Tomorrow my coworker who's going to Fletcher in the fall is having a good-bye happy hour after work. Following that, the above-mentioned meetup with Jonathan (also, by amazing coincidence, going to Fletcher...they even met at orientation there a month or so ago) and Eyal, my roommate-to-be. Friday there's some kind of post-work happy hour, the details of which I forget. Saturday morning Mom and Dad leave for SFO, I have frisbee from noon until sometime in the afternoon, who knows what Jack and I will do Saturday afternoon/night and then we head to Old Rag for a day of hiking on Sunday.

On a different note, it's been one week since I got back from Chile. I haven't really written about that trip at all, I realize. Don't really have it in me to start right now. Another time I will write about it. I wish I'd taken more pictures.

On still another note, I was having a hard time getting into Notes From Underground, so I'm switching to a book that I had a hard time getting into the first two times around, Midnight's Children. Maybe it's just getting to be hot and sticky, but I feel like Dostoevsky is a bit too old-fashioned and not zippy enough for my state of mind at the moment. I can see why people think Dostoevsky is an all-timer, but honestly I've been knee-deep in heavy stuff for a little while and it's time for a break. Rushdie is a bit better but really what I want is some Ellmore Leonard, some Peter Hoeg. Something less thoughtful, vaguely ridiculous...I don't know.

And on that note, I think I'll go to the library and get me some Ellmore Leonard.

eventful

2009-06-01T15:00:00.002-05:00

It's been a busy little while since my last post. I finished 2666 on the way to Chile and started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. I liked 2666 a lot in the end. It's pretty crazy and all over the place and I completely forgot about the third part by the time I'd finished the fifth (and final) part. The fourth part is extremely, almost soporifically repetitive but I somehow never got bogged down in it past the occasional, "Damn it, not this shit again." And the last part was pretty wonderful. In the end the book made a lot of sense, was full of some very beautiful writing (good job, translator whose name I forget). I will not forget the first and final parts, which are books unto themselves (actually, all the parts are), and the middle was good, too. How's that for repetitive?

Anyhow, a book I will most certainly NOT be forgetting any part of is Eichmann in Jerusalem. I would give just about anything for a few minutes of thinking as clear as Hannah Arendt's while she was writing this book. Who knows, maybe she could barely put her shoes on in the morning but when it came to thinking about ethics, justice and law she was operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. One of the most amazing insights she had was that there is a gigantic gap between ordinary murder and genocide not just in scale but also in kind. Eichmann was NOT a murderer. What he did, which was to participate actively and willingly in the attempted eradication of whole groups of people, was far worse than murder.

Murder is a crime against a person or small (relatively) set of people. There are laws on the books just about everywhere that say you can't just go out and kill someone. But genocide is a crime that takes place as a norm. That is, what Eichmann did was follow not only the law in the Reich, he followed the prevailing mores of his time and place. The fact of the killing is incomprehensibly horrible. But what's really, really scary about it is not that the Nazis killed so many people, it's that they managed to create an environment in which killing millions was all in a day's work for ordinary bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. A similar rule applies to the more recent genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans. Things weren't as clinically efficient in those places as in Nazi Germany, but there's no doubt that huge groups of people came to believe that killing off another group or groups wholesale was the thing to do. That conversion of murder into an acceptable act doesn't excuse the participants in the least, of course. It just makes their evilness that much more terrifying.

What a chilling and fascinating story and what a writer!