Often I can't explain why I feel something about certain things. But there is not doubt I felt something strongly about "Three cups of tea". Now I might know why:
Greg Mortenson, the high-profile advocate of girls' education in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been forced to defend his best-selling book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time," against charges that key stories in it are false.
Mortenson shot to international fame with the book, which describes his getting lost in an effort to climb K2, the world's second-highest peak, being rescued by Pakistani villagers in the village of Korphe and vowing to return there to build a school for local girls.
He also claims to have been captured by the Taliban and held for several days before being released. (...) however -- Jon Krakauer of "Into Thin Air" fame -- told a CBS "60 Minutes" investigation that aired Sunday that the story is not true.(..)
Mortenson's record of charity and his tales of derring-do have helped fuel the Central Asia Institute. The organization recorded income of $14 million in 2009 (...) However, in 2009, less than half of that money -- 41 percent -- actually went to building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the institute's board of directors.(...)
The institute also says $1.7 million went to promote Mortenson's books in the form of advertising, events, film and professional fees, and some travel. It said the contributions generated by Mortenson's promotional events "far exceed the travel expenses." (Source)
Over the past years, several people recommended I should read Mortenson's book, "Three cups of tea". A Friend lent me the book, saying "You might not like it". And I didn't.
I read the first twenty pages and had to put it aside. I tried to continue reading it several times, but I could not. I can't say why exactly. There was a fake ring to the whole story. There was a fake smile on the guy's face. And I surely have an issue if anyone promoting girls' education, likes to pose with his wife and kid, and a couple of AK47's... And proudly publishes the picture in one of his books.
Above all, I smelled "CIA" all over. Winning the hearts and minds of people. With loads of American dollars.
It is not often we let authors present their own book, here on The Road. This time, I make an exception. It is not often we stumble upon books with new and positive ideas, after all.
When Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort told me about his new book, "The Monfort Plan" (available on Amazon and via Wiley Finance), I asked him two things: to summarize his book, and to answer a number of questions I have in an interview. Today, we feature Jaime's book summary:
The Monfort Plan (Wiley Finance, April 2010) presents the new architecture of a redefined capitalism. This summary piece introduces the five year action plan and explains why a new architecture may be needed in today’s environment.
Today’s capitalism is based on a vintage architecture that dates back to the 1940s and the American effort to pull the world away from Nazi Germany and Soviet communism. It was then when the four institutions of this old architecture were designed: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the GATT. The old architecture designed by the Bretton Woods elites served a purpose: it contributed to the economic resurgence of Western Europe and brought peace to a continent that had fought wars for centuries.
Subsequent to the design of the new architecture the Truman Administration proposed and implemented the Marshall Plan, the plan for the economic recovery of 17 countries in Western Europe. The plan enabled the vision of Jean Monnet to come up with a European Community of Coal and Steel, the parent of the European Union. These were times of courage and vision. The great changes of the 1940s and 1950s were precipitated by the devastation of the two World Wars and the economic collapse of the Great Depression. The environment set the basis for thirty years of phenomenal economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic.
The second half of the twentieth century had two flavours that modeled the world's geo-political pattern of both Hemispheres: the cold war and the emergence of neoclassical economics fathered by Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and implemented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoclassical economics brought about an increasing mathematical sophistication where economic sub-fields such as financial economics prospered thanks to the work of gifted mathematicians such as Merton, Black or Scholes. Monodimensional utility functions prioritized profit maximization over other variables such as human dignity or environmental sustainability. Academia was captured in the allure of models. Our economic policy-makers were constrained by mathematical models that worked on paper.
We continued to live in the world of the nation-state that defends a realist foreign-policy agenda based on the welfare of its citizens and the non-cooperation of states. Priorities were national but not global. A silent cold war was fought in the Northern Hemisphere, with cruel civil wars taking place throughout the Second World War, aggravated by the supplies of either side.
Major changes have to be brought on board if the great evils of our time persist. Today’s world continues to be a world dominated by extreme poverty and inequality. Today’s world maintains a status quo where a vintage architecture works for the developed world. We are reluctant or unable to move forward because we are afraid of losing the privileges the old architecture awarded to the victors of World War II. We are unwilling to reform because our political elites are afraid to lose popular support if they remove agricultural subsidies, or give up representative power at the Bretton Woods Institutions.
When approaching the geo-political environment of a world in desperate need of creative policy-making it is easier to propose a radically different new architecture, designed to cope with the challenging and increasing problems of the planet, than it is to reform the current architecture. Today’s crisis opens up a window of opportunity where intellectual exercises that propose new ideas ought to be considered by our political elites. But this will not happen. There is a gap between the world of creative policy-making and the inability of our political elites to embrace change and reform. Our political elites continue to live in the world of the nation-state, where citizens reward myopic policy-making that prioritizes our interest over that of the vulnerable. The reality is that there is only one way out of the crisis with many possible final destinations: we have to incorporate the extremely poor countries to a new order where we undertake reform conducent to the elimination of the great evils of our time.
The Monfort Plan proposes a five year action plan to redefine capitalism and eradicate extreme poverty. The Monfort Plan also presents the team of one hundred Expert Dreamers that could be brought on board to implement the action plan. The action plan gives specific detail on how to accomplish change starting in six countries of Subsaharan Africa that have shown their determination to build up a basis upon which they can prosper.
The Monfort Plan reviews and identifies today’s vulnerabilities and explains why the current order is perpetuated. It then proposes an Axis of Feeble that has to be defeated. In order to do so reform has to be brought on board of six areas, namely agriculture, trade and labour rights, extractive industries, small arms trade, international financial architecture and brain drain.
In the book the lessons from the success of the Marshall Plan are drawn. The action plan proposes a new Marshall Plan for Africa, called the Annan Plan that would boost agricultural productivity on Subsaharan African soil. It also proposes four new organizations that would universalize microfinancial services for the extreme poor in order to deliver, through the microfinance network, global public goods including universal healthcare, education, water and sanitation.
The Monfort Plan also proposes innovative financing that could contribute to creating the Poor’s Endowment able to finance the delivery of global public goods through the microfinance network over the next forty years.
The action plan seeks to replicate the success of the European Union in the development space. By creating a supranational organization that accepts new members on an ex-ante conditionality clause, developing countries could have a phenomenal incentive to embrace reform in order to join a new architecture that will deliver global public goods for free to all the extreme poor for for the next forty years, or until the poor leave extreme poverty behind. Economic growth per se is a necessary condition to pursue global prosperity, but in itself does not suffice.
We need to become, one more time, men and women of stature and embrace the vision of the great men of the twentieth century. We need to become disciples of Marshall and Truman to defeat, once and for all, the great evils of our time. There is a window of opportunity. There is no other exit out of the crisis. Let the Glorious Forty begin.
"The Peter Principle" by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull is a humorous treatise of the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."
It was first published in 1968, but the principle still valid in many cases. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted as long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain.
"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties", they conclude, ""ork is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".
The authors illustrate the principle with a multitude of examples, the level of incompetencies demonstrated in administrations, schools, companies and councils of sorts.
While the book is depressing at best in its black humour, there is a grain of truth. In every day situations, how many times are we not faced with organisations who can only think of one way to reward performance: through promotions.
Specifically technical departments often promotes technicians to managerial positions, for which the poor people have not the skills, qualifications nor training. The person is miserably, and the organisation suffers. But demotion is often not an option.
In that way, how many times have we turned "good technicians" into "bad managers"?
My advice: The art is to stop at "climbing up the corporate ladder", at your highest level of competency. Both you and the organisation will be grateful.
In the need of a good reading book for this dark period of the year? Leo the African by Amin Maalouf is without any doubt one of the best books I have read since a long time.
Put onto a background of the 15th-16th century East-West or Christian-Muslim conflicts, the reader follows Hasan al-Wazzan, a merchant, traveller and writer on his travellers after being chased from Granada to Fez, in a caravan through North Africa and during his years in Cairo and Rome. From place to place, from woman to woman, he learns to drop and pick up his life and fortunes.
Amin Maalouf writes in a witty, eloquent style, becoming for a 15th century traveller. Through his words, one has no trouble fantasizing about the Souk in Fez or the river ports of Cairo. Here is the first page of his book.
I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.
My wrists have experienced in turn the caresses of silk, the abuses of wool, the gold of princes and the chain of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires perish.
From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the Earth, and it is to them that I will one day soon return.
But you will remain after me, my son. And you will carry the memory of me with you. And you will read my books. And this scene will come back to you: your father, dressed in the Neapolitan style, aboard this galley which is conveying him towards the African coast, scribbling to himself, like a merchant working out his accounts at the end of a long journey.
Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. Thus starts the monologue of "Changez", the principle character in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid. Seated at dusk at a Lahore cafe, Changez tells his story to a stranger, an American. A story of a Pakistani who studied in the US, found work in a prestigious company, met a girl and became singled out after 9/11. Gradually he starts question his path of life and how different he was from the people around him, in a Western country.
The story is told with a light, almost frivolous, sometimes ironical English, jumping between the subjects of love, culture, religion, prejudices and the war on terror. Despite the weight of the topics, the story remains so light it almost starts to resonate with irony or sarcasm without giving away any hint of the faith both Changez and his American acquaintance will face towards the end of the book.
Daoud Hari is a Dafur tribes man who assisted journalists travelling in his region as a translator. A translator of horror stories.
Sleepless during nights of exile in Chad, Daoud Hari stared at cracks in his room's mud walls. The lines formed random shapes that reminded him of drawings from thousands of years ago -- of horned beasts, of women, men and children. He had seen them in the cool mountain caves of Darfur, where he played as a boy. They triggered an urge to sketch scenes of the savagery and starvation he had witnessed in the once-tranquil lands of his childhood.
During those uneasy nights, he picked up pencil and paper to turn his torment into tolerable numbness.
He drew the woman who had hanged herself from a tree with her shawl because she could not feed her children. Hari had found their tiny corpses around her, their skin like "delicate brown paper, so wrinkled."
He drew the story he had heard of a militiaman lowering his bayonet into the belly of a 4-year-old girl as she ran toward him, impaling her. The gunman pranced around as her blood drained down upon him.
He remembered the girl's father, his sobbing, his horror, his shock: "What was he? A man? A devil? He was painted red with my little girl's blood and he was dancing. What was he?"
His wakeful consciousness felt the pain of these images. His drawings, he says, were "stick pictures of scenes I needed to get out of my head. History. History. History. The people. The little girl. The woman," he says in his memoir, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur." (Full)
As the definition of "slave" is still "a human being forced to work under threat of violence for no pay beyond sustenance", Skinner concluded there are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history... Even though slavery is now illegal throughout the world.
There is one difference, though: slaves got cheaper. After adjusting for inflation, Skinner found that, "A slave sold in 1850, would now roughly cost $30,000 to $40,000. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl as a sex slave for $50. The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced."
In the fall of 2005, he visited Haiti, which has one of the highest concentrations of slaves anywhere in the world. "I pulled up in a car and rolled down the window," he recalls. "Someone said, 'Do you want to get a person?'". Though the country was in a time of political chaos, the street where he met the trafficker was clean and relatively quiet. A tape of the conversation reveals a calm, concise transaction. He was initially told he could get a 9-year-old sex and house slave for $100, but he bargained it down to $50. "The thing that struck me more than anything afterwards was how incredibly banal the transaction was. As if I was negotiating on the street for a used stereo." (Full)
Update: This post was picked up in different forums. People ask 'how can we help?'.. I would suggest to check out Plan International, who allows you to 'virtually' adopt a child from a developing country. Plan International has a program in Haiti.. Try it.. Our family "adopted" a child from the rural areas in Pakistan years ago. For a modest monthly amount, we secure the child's education, clothing and basic well being.. Every year, we get a letter from her, with pictures and testimonies... Education and basic care keeps children out of harms way, and brings them a future.
Update: See also this article on modern day slavery.
Set in the American South of 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and intensifying racial unrest, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees is a story of coming-of-age, the ability of love to transform our lives and the longing for the universal feminine divine. Kidd describes the power of women coming together creating a sanctuary of true family and home where the wounds of loss and betrayal can heal.
Men play a secondary role in the story, often representing violence, aggression, and repression. If not, they are a mere ‘addendum’ to the universal feminity which represents the wit, the good, the mysterious divine warmth and comfort which one also finds back in the life of a bee hive: The queen bee, and all worker bees are female ensuring the survival of the hive. The few male drones just sit around waiting to mate with the queen.
The story is told through the eyes and heart of Lily, radiating wit, simplicity, naivety, but also a longing for warmth and love at many different levels (“Eskimos have thirty-two names for love”, Lily says), we often find back in the heart and mind of a teenager.
Isolated on a South Carolina peach farm with T.Ray, a neglectful and harsh farther, fourteen-year-old Lily Owens spent much of her life longing for her mother who died amid mysterious circumstances when Lily was four. Her father claims Lily accidentally killed her mum, instilling a deep and endless feeling of guilt. Lily is raised by Rosaleen, her proud, witty and outspoken African-American nanny. When Rosaleen attempts to exercise her newly won right to vote, she is attacked by three racists and thrown in jail. Lily helps Rosaleen to escape, and together, they run away. One runs away from jail, the other from the constant fear of T.Ray’s repressive behaviour.
Lily and Rosaleen flee to Tiburon – South Carolina, a name written on the back of a cryptic picture featuring a black Virgin Mary, one of the few belongings Lily has of her mother. Three black beekeeping sisters take the odd pair into their home, into their circle of wise and colorful women, and into their hearts.
The novel is written in a simple and plain, yet witty and funny language. The language of a teenager, featuring every day analogies and comparisons with a depth that makes you think about it all for a while:
Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head. If you lie down now and then, and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion.
and:
I hope I would get just a few minutes for a private conference with God. I wanted to say, “Look I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise?”
Several passages are poetic, idealistic. Often when it comes to the female powers:
August closed her eyes, used her fingers to smooth out the skin on her forehead. I saw a shiny film across her eyes – the beginning of tears. Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold, or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you. I felt like we were all adrift in the world, and all we had was the wet fire in August’s eyes. But it was enough.
The simple and straightforward humor is hilarious, with a cynical and sharp after-tongue:
Whenever I opened a book, T.Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival..
If you’d put her husband’s brain into a bird, the bird would fly backward.
It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities.
If you read the book like you eat a hamburger, you will miss passage like this:
The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.
I suggest you consume the book like you would eat an ice cream, the last ice cream you would ever have in this life. Little bit by little bit. Otherwise, you would not see what a powerful writer Kidd is, when she combine it all: the poetic, the humor, the feminity, the bees, the impressionistic writing style, all in one treasured passages:
The woman moved along a row of white boxes that bordered the woods beside the pink house, a house so pink it remained a scorched shock on the back of my eyelids after I looked away. She was tall, dressed in white, wearing a pith helmet with veils that floated across her face, settled around her shoulders and trailed down her back. She looked like an African bride. Lifting the tops off the boxes, she peered inside, swinging a tine bucket of smoke back and forth. Clouds of bees rose up and flew wreaths around her head. Twice, she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually re-emerged like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night. We stood across the road, Rosaleen and I, temporarily mute. Me out of the awe for the mystery playing out and Rosaleen because her lips were sealed with Red Rose snuff.
You can find this book and more of my favorites in my library.
A couple of months ago, I posted a review of the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. In 2007, he published a new novel: A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is the best book I have read since... well, since the Kite Runner... As far as I am concerned, this is "The Book of 2007".
Hosseini takes his title from a 17th century poem by Saib-e-Tabrizi, which sings the praises of the ancient and cultured city of Kabul: “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” The lines are chanted by one of Hosseini’s characters as the bombs of the mujahideen are destroying Kabul. (Does this remind you a bit of the bitter contrast between war and poetry I described in "Lost Connection"?)
The book starts in the 1970's Afghanistan, and tells a story of Mariam and Laila over a period of three decades. In the background Afghanistan struggles from the rule of King Zahir Shah, via the Sovjet invasion, the civil war during the mujahideen, the ruling of the Taliban and finally the US invasion.
Initially, both main characters start with their own individual story. The first story is about Mariam, Nana and Jalil's extramarital child (a harami). Mariam is only fifteen when her mother commits suicide. She is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, thirty years her senior, desperately hoping for her to bear him a son. The second story follows Laila, born around the time Mariam moves to Kabul. Laila grows up as a beautiful and intelligent young girl, finding love with her childhood friend, Tariq. As the Mujahideen start their battle for Kabul, tragedy strikes. Tariq flees to Pakistan and is thought to have died on the way. Laila's parents are killed in a bomb attack leaving orphaned, fifteen-year-old Laila, no other option but to marry Rasheed, as his second wife.
Here the two stories become one powerful stream of conflicts, love, violence, fear, shame and hatred. Laila and Mariam start off on the wrong foot, but slowly find consolation in each other, mainly rooted in what they have in common: their hatred and fear for their husband. With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, and with it, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. The women's endurance is tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and it is love which leads them to overcome the most daunting obstacles.
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a jewel. An absolutely wonderfully told, heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond and an indestructible love. It took me in from the first page until the last, and I just "could not put the book down". Khaled Hosseini's story-telling skills which I discovered in "The Kite Runner", blossomed and bloomed in this new book. I have lived and worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years around 2000. I could just pick up the smells and sounds as I read through the story. An example:
Mariam had never before worn a burqa. Rasheed had to help her put it on. The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen. She practiced walking around her room in it and kept stepping on the hem and stumbling. The loss of peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” Rasheed said. “With time, I bet you’ll even like it.” They took a bus to a place Rasheed called the Shar-e-Nau Park, where children pushed each other on swings and slapped volleyballs over ragged nets tied to tree trunks. They strolled together and watched boys fly kites, Mariam walking beside Rasheed, tripping now and then on the burqa’s hem. For lunch, Rasheed took her to eat in a small kebab house near a mosque he called the Haji Yaghoub. The floor was sticky and the air smoky. The walls smelled faintly of raw meat and the music, which Rasheed described to her as logari, was loud. The cooks were thin boys who fanned skewers with one hand and swatted gnats with the other. Mariam, who had never been inside a restaurant, found it odd at first to sit in a crowded room with so many strangers, to lift her burqa to put morsels of food into her mouth. A hint of the same anxiety as the day at the tandoor stirred in her stomach, but Rasheed’s presence was of some comfort, and, after a while, she did not mind so much the music, the smoke, even the people. And the burqa, she learned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past...
But it is not only in the long impressionistic descriptions that comes the full flavour of the book. It is also sometimes in passages, short and sharp as a razour:
Nana put down the bowl of chicken feed. She lifted Mariam’s chin with a finger. “Look at me, Mariam.” Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
If you are still not convinced, read chapter one and chapter 11. (courtesy Amazon.com)
As a note of interest: Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan born son of a diplomat and a teacher who now lives in the US. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. An author with a mission. Have a look at the video he made from a visit to the refugee camps in Chad.
In his book, Nasiri shares the story of his life -a life balanced precariously between the world of Islamic jihadists and the spies who pursue them. As an Arab and a Muslim, he was able to infiltrate the rigidly controlled Afghan training camps, where he encountered men who would later be known as the most-wanted terrorists on earth: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, Abu Zubayda, and Abu Khabab al-Masri. Sent back to Europe with instructions to form a sleeper cell, Nasiri became a conduit for messages going back and forth between Al Qaeda's top recruiter in Pakistan and London's radical cleric Abu Qatada.
"Inside the Jihad" is well written, reads fluently as if it were a novel, despite its gruelling contents. As almost a case study by itself, the story shows how a "up to no good", drinking, womanizing, profiteering and drug dealing Moroccon youngster comes in contact with people supplying arms to an Algerian terrorist cell. What started as a profitable adventure, little by little, he gets drawn into the intrigues, and almost haphazardly, ends up going to the Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camps, as if he had little choice. Slowly, he gets a purpose in life, finds true camaraderie and despite his criminal and no-good past, he constantly swings between sympathies for "The Al-Qaeda Cause" and his conscience.
He ends the book with a rather insightful message:
I believe there are wars worth fighting for. I believe there are countries worth fighting for. But I also believe in laws. Maybe more than any other religion, Islam has strict laws about when and how to go to war. I learned these laws myself in the Afghanistan training camps. And I learned that these laws make us superior than the Americans, French, Germans, Russians, English and no matter who. They kill where possible. They throw nuclear bombs and kill millions of people in gas chambers, extinguish millions of people to get land and property. They kill women and children, and shrug about the collateral damage.
That is right, they do such things, and have done so for centuries. But we are Muslim, and the Koran does not allow to behave like this. This is the true Islam, this is the Islam I was thought in the training camps, all be it in theory. What I learned in practice was different. This is the reason why I wrote this book. I did not tell the story to protect the West against terrorists, it never was my goal. Above all, I wish to protect Islam against the terrible excesses and new thinking.
(..) The fact that the Muslim world has become so degenerated that we were forced to fight wars with the weapons of our enemy has always bothered me. But what happens now is even worse: we fight our wars with the tactics of our enemy. Once we, fight our wars as they do, in other words as YOU do, then there is nothing left for us to fight for.
"I had met far too many people that were left alone, lonely, and bitter after years of wandering fieldwork. There were the drunks and misanthropes, people who were reduced to a husk of their former selves by cynicism and personal and professional estrangement ... This was not to even mention the crazies, of which there were more than a few," writes John Norris, senior political adviser to the U.N. Mission in Nepal, in his new book, "The Disaster Gypsies: Humanitarian Workers in the World's Deadliest Conflicts". (full post)
It relates back to 'us': relief workers and development aid workers, and our lives: I am an aid worker. Help!, I wrote in an earlier post. Even more so when you are a woman in the relief field...
I was looking forward to read Paulo Coelho's new novel, "The Witch of Portobello". I read most of his previous work, and found it passionate and inspiring. The last Coelho novel I read was "The Zahir", two years ago, while sailing the Caribbean. I remembered the setting: water, dark, starry nights, wine on the deck of our boat, anchored in the Tobago Cays (See the short story One Love). All of that made me look forward to dig into the "Witch of Portobello", hoping as with the previous Coelho novels, only to put the book down once it is finished.
Unfortunately not so... The Caribbean setting was there. The wine was there. I mean the whole setting was perfect. Unfortunately, the Coelho I hoped for was just not there. The Witch of Portobello's script is simple, the story is rather monotonous (not to use the word boring), the 'lessons in life' read superficial and smell of mock-spirituality... I put the book down and started to read something else.. After 6 weeks I still did not finish it, even though I want to. But boy, is it a struggle to reach the final page...
This sounds all harsh criticism. Not sure if the book deserves it. Maybe, just maybe, it is as my friend E. says, maybe I am just not in the mood to read Coelho, maybe I should read it another time, at another stage in life... But as it stands now: I would rather recommended other books from Coelho.
Dalia Sofer's, "Septembers of Shiraz", is a compelling debut novel, set in Tehran (Iran), in 1981. The chaos and swing-to-the-right following the ousting of the shah and the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, made everyone suspicious of everyone. Minorities like the Persian Jews were amongst the first to suffer of a psychotic cleansing and witch hunt. The story follows Isaac Amin, an Iranian-Jewish rare-gem dealer who is arrested, jailed and tortured for months, for no other reason than his religion, and on basis of a vague suspicion. What attracted me in the book is that, although it is fiction, it follows the mind twists of someone in fear of loosing everything, with such close detail you can smell the sweat, blood, tears and excrement. It kept me from sleeping at night.
Dalia was born in Tehran in 1972 and fled Iran with her family in 1982. They first went to Israel, and then to New York City. For a more updated view on Iran, remember this post.
E. gave me a novel to read this summer: “In the Country of Men” by Hisham Matar (published by Viking - Pinguin group, 2006). She thought greatly of it, and right she was. I was “sold” the moment I read the first lines:
“ I am recalling now that last summer before I was sent away. It was 1979, and the sun was everywhere. Tripoli lay brilliant and still beneath it. Every person, animal and ant went in desperate search for shade, those occasional grey patches of mercy carved into the white of everything. But true mercy only arrived at night, a breeze chilled by the vacant desert, moistened by the humming sea, a reluctant guest silently passing through the empty streets, vague about how far it was allowed to roam in this realm of the absolute star. And it was rising now, this star, as faithful as ever, chasing away the blessed breeze. It was almost morning. “
‘In the Country of Men’ tells the story of nine year old Suleiman, whose father is arrested and tortured accused of subversive activities, his mother married out when she was still a young girl, and their closest friends. It is a story about betrayal and love, anger, sadness and fear reigning a family and a society. The book is a Breughel-esc painting about friendship and love, set in a background of Libya in the late seventies. It describes many different individuals with an impressionistic sense of light and detail. It paints the different figures onto a background of a suppressed society where opinions and individuality are a no-go. And no matter how hard each individual fights this suppression, it effects- no, it DEFINES- the psyche and character of everyone in this paternal society.
Hisham Matar was born in 1970, in New York to Libyan parents, and raised in Tripoli and Cairo. This is his first novel. I hope many of this quality follow.
For those tuning into this blog for the humanitarian aid posts, I apologize. We will be back soon to the 'real world'. For the moment, let me rave and mesmerize a bit longer about the Caribbean and sailing ;-)... Life is too short not to enjoy it... ;-)
For those interested in sailing in the Caribbean: A must-have are the cruising guides by Chris Doyle (http://www.doyleguides.com/). The one we used this trip is 'The Cruising Guide to the Leeward Islands", and covers Anguila down to Guadeloupe and Dominica. 500 pages full of all what you need to know to sail in the are, with well written background info and useful tips with maps and navigational info for not even US$30.
Another tip. We always charter bareboat from a company called "The Moorings" (www.moorings.com). This was the fourth year we chartered from them. Apart from a real bad experience last year, when chartering out of their Tortola base (the boat was really poorly maintained and the service was just no good), they do everything to ensure you have a great and trouble free sailing holiday. You can charter with a skipper too. In the past, we took a skipper onboard for the first days to get the boat, but I gathered this year, I had enough experience to handle the boat from day one. But, people, if you don't sail regularly, do take a one or two day course in harbour maneuvers before you charter..! I do a refresher course every year, even though I am an RYA powerboat instructor. The horrors you see when freshmen try to moor, anchor or berth a boat are not pretty... More on that in a later post.
In the introduction to the eBook, I wrote about the decision to quit my managing job in a large corporate firm and to do something completely different with my life. Back then, in 1993, I swore NEVER to be a manager again. I wanted life to be simple. 9 to 5! Set off on a job with a clear perimeter and targets, so it was easy to measure how I performed. Being a technician (again) during my first missions to Africa, made life much simpler for me: either the installed equipment worked or it did not.. Much easier than work as a manager where deliverables are greyer and objectives more obscure..
Somewhere along the road, I must have done something wrong, as 10 years later I ended up as the director of the Dubai office... I was probably the only director running around in Tshirt, safari pants and sandals in the office. I did keep a suit in my locker, though, just in case a government official showed up for a meeting.
One day, I put my suit on for the deputy minister of Agriculture from a Western country, and his entourage. Often these meetings are pretty boring, explaining what we do, have a cup of tea, shake hands, take a picture and basta-cosi.... Half an hour, an hour max.. But this deputy minister got intrigued by our organisation and how we do our work, so the conversation was pretty lively and entertaining. At a certain point, we branched off talking about our personal experiences in 'remote places'.. We ended up talking about Afghanistan. My guest said he just finished reading a novel about Afghanistan, and how he appreciated it. He promised to send it to me.
I thought "Right, heard that before!". But, surprise surprise! A couple of weeks later, this book appeared in the mail together with a nice cover letter by 'my deputy-minister' saying "It is a compassionate read and one I thought you might appreciate as much as I did."
Well, he was right. It is the best book I read in years: 'The Kite Runner', by Khaled Hosseini.
Mr Hosseini is a Kabul born physician, currently living in California. His first novel tells the story of Amir, an Afghan boy, who is - like many Afghan boys - fascinated with kiting.. You need to know kiting is a Real Serious Thing in Central Asia. The story follows the life of Amir through the dying years of the Afghan monarchy, the Soviet invasion, the challenging years living in exile, the Taliban era. The main thread is Amir's relationship with his father, and the feeling of guilt towards his friend and servant, Hassan. It is about coming to terms with mistakes from one's youth and the feeling of guilt. The story sucked me into its intriguing plot like a detective novel does.
Very well written.. I wished I could write so well, but then 'He Does It so Much Better Than Me!".
So I guess this is at least one advantage of being a manager: you meet people who recommend you interesting books!
The World's Most Dangerous Places by Robert Young Pelton (Harper Collins) is a book I wished I could have written. All 1,022 pages of it. One of the best books, and by far the best travel book, I have ever read. My copy is the 4th edition, released in 2000, but the 5th hit the market in 2003.
It is a travel guide about 'those places no-one in his right mind' would want to travel to. It is not only a travel guide. It is a handbook for the 'extreme traveller', a 'data bible' cramped with interesting facts and background material. All about the countries considered as the "World's Most Dangerous" and about how to take precautions for about any kind of situation you could encounter.
For each of the countries listed, R.Y.Pelton gives an introduction, a travel story, maps, describes who the 'players' -those in power- are, how you get there (in and out), what the dangers are, and other factual data. Full of reference material, book titles, websites, historical facts, etc...
It is easy to make a book like this dull, but Pelton writes about them in such a witty, funny, sometimes cynical, open-hearted way, this travel guide almost reads like a novel.
I mean who could resist chapter titles like:
How to travel free, meet interesting people and then kill them
Happiness is a warm gun
Happiness is a dead Infidel
The "Men Who Would Be King"-club
The "Unemployed Warlords for Hire Department", or "It ain't over until the Fat Man swings"
Getting Arrested: "Oh Won't You Stay... Just a Little Bit Longer"
It might all sound very 'hung-ho' and 'macho', but it is not really. Well, it is a bit. But it definitively not a 'Rambo'-book. Full of excellent tips on 'how to stay out of trouble if you really have to visit these places'.
I can not stop raving about it, really. I wished I could write like this. Here is one extract, about Dostum, one of Afghanistan's famous warlords -eh I guess in the mean time National Government Ministers-..
General Rashid Dostum Roly-poly Rashid got caught up in his own web of intrigue when his second in command defected to the Taliban on May 25, 1997, and had to hightail it to Ankara. Dostum used to control eight provinces in the north and ran his little kingdom out of his hometown and western military headquarters of Shebergan, Jozjan province, 80 miles from Mazar. Detractors will tell you that Rashid is an old-time commie warlord who is propped up by Uzbekistan and drug transportation from the hash- and poppy-rich fields around Mazar-i-Sharif. He was a man with a grade school education surrounded by gangsters. He packed his bags, family and flunkies and flew out to Ankara, Turkey, where he bravely proclaimed, "The war is not over." He promised to return "when the conditions are right." The conditions were right on September 12, when Dostum blasted his way into Mazar and sent Malik packing. Then of course the Talibs blasted him out of Mazar and he had to check if he could keep his lease on his bulletproof Beemer and swank pad. Dostum, the former military commander under Najibullah, is now looking after the Uzbeki's interest in northern Afghanistan. The sight of his boss swinging in the breeze has not made him a fan of the Taliban or homesick for Afghanistan.
Connected to the book is the Come back alive website, which is just as interesting, and just as cramped with data as the book. It has a Wikipedia-based knowledge section, a forum, a place to post links and stories. A lot of the data from the book is published on this (free) website. Also here, the data is a great read, provides a unique perspective of "the world's most dangerous places", making it a "don't go without it" website. I can spend weeks reading in it, and days writing about it.
If you are one of those, like me, blessed to live in or to travel through 'The World's Most Dangerous Places", this is your book. If you are not one of those happy few, but you are interested in more eXtreme travel, this is your book too. If you want to read well written non-fiction, I guess this book is it too. OK, OK, OK, I *will* stop raving about it.
Oh, and by the way, on a detailed count, it seems I lived in, or travelled through, 26 of the 38 countries Pelton lists as 'The World's Most Dangerous'... I enjoyed every single one of them.
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
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