Sabah al-kheyr!

Good morning!

Another gleaming sun sweeps away the fog hanging between the guava grove's rows, as it rises steadily. Today I'm not working in the office. Mr. Muhandes, who normally takes me from the farm where I'm living to the office 40mins away, got a call from... well, 'the doctor' as everyone calls him here, just as we'd reached the main road. I only heard his reproachful voice emanating from the cell phone and felt the anger rising inside Mr. Muhandes as he made every effort to stay calm. "I'm going back to the farm. The doctor doesn't want me in the office today." he said with a grim and stern expression as he pulled the car over to make a U-turn. I remembered the first time I drove to the office with him at the beginning of January - we were running late and he got a telling off over the phone (that time from Yvonne) and was in a similar rage... back then he told me of the heart-attack he had had the year before... "so I mustn't think too much about it, not to get so upset again."

I don't mind too much. For only the second time in my life I suddenly find myself in a 9-5 job and came to the sudden realisation - who would have thought?!! - that it doesn't leave an awful lot of time for other things. And if you on top of that live in a community full of wonderful people who you want to share your life with and who you want to learn from and about, that leaves almost no time - except if you say "I won't be in the office today, I'm working from home..."

Apart from giving me a few minutes to write this, it also gave me a chance to have a glance at the news again... delightful news of a magnificent new invention reached me through the megaphone that is the BBC - one that will be of immense use for the world and its future generations... alas, poor us:


The US military has given a first public demonstration what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.

The gun - called Silent Guardian - projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling, but is actually harmless.

The beam can be fired as far as 500m (500 yards), much further than existing non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets. [...] The waves can penetrate clothes but not walls, suddenly heating up the skin of anyone in its path to 50C.

Journalists who volunteered to be zapped during the demonstration on an air base in the US state of Georgia described the sensation as similar to a blast from a very hot oven - too painful to bear and forcing them to dive for cover. Military officials say the so-called "active denial system" is harmless, but could prove invaluable in the increasingly complex situations they face.
The marine colonel in charge said it was an alternative to going straight from shouting to shooting and could save lives.

Recommendation

I read a book.

Unfortunately that doesn't happen too often with me these days. [Although now that I've settled in a place of peace and calm it might well happen more often]
And it probably seems a bit audacious for someone who doesn't read a lot to recommend others to read something... but I'll do it anyway.
Read this:

my heart
two bombs just went off. my windows are shaking. stupid me, i closed them to stop the mosquitoes from coming in. thank god they didn't shatter. my heart, my heart is another story.

lebanese drivers
today I drove through downtown to visit my parents. i was driving alone and was nervous. i came across a red light and stopped. the streets were empty, and i caught myself wondering why i stopped. then i remembered my latest policy to keep me sane; that even under attack, we should not lose our manners.
i looked into my rearview mirror and saw other cars approaching. i closed my eyes and prayed that they would also stop. that if they didn't cross the light, it would indicate that somehow we are all thinking alike. most of you have heard about lebanese drivers. they never stop at red lights.
ladies and gentlemen, today, they stopped.

Zena el-Khalil, exerpts from the illustrated diary "with love from beirut"

The book is called "Lebanon, Lebanon" (Saqi Press, London, 2006) and is a collection of short stories, poems, articles, drawings, photos and other forms of visually representative art (including the excerpt above) that was drawn together in the weeks following the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. The works are either directly related to the issue or to the general theme. Although obviously tilted towards one side of events, there is a beautiful variety of works from famous and current artists, including Adonis, John le Carre, Mahmud Darwish, Yann Martel, Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, Carmen Callil, Hoda Barakat and Hanif Kureishi to name but a few.

It costs ten pounds and all profits go towards child charities in Lebanon. I carried my copy all the way from Bavaria to Syria and finally sent it to a friend in Scotland, who rejoiced at receiving it.

Good news and bad news

Bad news first:
my eMail never reached Sami.
I got the following message in an automated reply:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550
Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

...which might mean he's still in prison, or anyway hasn't accessed his eMail account in over a month - hotmail have a funny policy about that and just sort of close down your account if you don't access is regularly. I guess they don't care much about people in political custody in Syria. But then who does?

Well, I only do because I happened to meet some of them and find out about their existence, their stories and their conditions, otherwise I'd never have known they even exist. But when I did find out and when I sat with them, on the floor in their stuffy cell and talked to them, I realised that experiencing this was a kind of priviledge and - as priviledges usually do - it came with a certain responsibility or even duty: to tell others about it.
You might wonder why I haven't done so already, especially because that experience is now more than a month old, but for various reasons, mostly to do with the fact that I had to deal with the security services there, I was hesitant to publish anything on this issue while still in Syria. So now that I've left and that I find myself - against my expectations - at home in Bavaria, now is the time...

Unfortunately though, things aren't quite that easy... now that the right time to finally get it out has come, I don't have the time to fulfill that duty, because - and now we come to the good news - I'm about to leave again... tomorrow morning I'm flying to Cairo, where - with the New Year - a new chapter of my life will start, which fills me with hope, joy and anticipation. I have a 6-months intership 60km north of Cairo on a farm-community project, which is establishing a university and has kindly chosen me to be their international communication assistant in that undertaking. I guess they must have heard about the many universities I have established around the world in the course of my life, so I was of course the obvious choice for this job. Lucky them I was available, eh?!

So as I sit here in my mum's office on my last night in Europe for at least 6 months - the house is silent, everyone's asleep, not a single thing is packed into my backpack and my plane leaves in 12 hours exactly - I realise that from the minute I get off the plane in Cairo I will be flooded with new and exciting experiences - after dozens of lonely airport arrivals in the last year, tomorrow someone will be waiting for me a the airport in Cairo with a sign that might have my name on it, or just SEKEM - the project's name. I've been thinking about the drive from the airport to the Sekem village, which is at the edge of the desert somewhere, built in a style totally unusual for Egypt and for Europe, too - somehow a merger between the two but yet something entirely different, I imagine. I wonder how green it will be now, how warm and how cold at night? Where will I be living? Who will my flatmates be? what will the food be like? and all the people working and living there? How will I cope with the Egyptian Arabic dialect, which is so different from the Syrian one? How and what exactly will my job be? And what I am most curious about is the atmosphere of the place... in some way I have great expectations with regards to this, but on the other hand I am just curious - will it be a completely free and liberal place, envigourating with its unique mix of Islamic culture and European knowledge and practices? Or will it be limiting with lots and lots of rules about how to be a 'good human being' and what 'they' consider 'good' and what not? .... etc.
With all those questions awaiting answers I know that there will be no time left to reflect much on the last two weeks spent here - at home - inbetween Syria and Egypt. Time to relive the events and encounters, rethink the thoughts and relisten to the conversations or the Christmas carols. All of that will be redirected to the department of 'possible re-consideration at a later point in time', which has been storing things going back a decade and more and which is still from time to time hopeful that they will one day be re-considered, re-thought and re-used. So this means I have exactly 12 hours to make the best of all that, all those conversations about various scenarios of my own and other people's futures, all those reflections on the bygone year, all its many events and their many implementations on the year to come, all those encounters with old friends I hadn't seen in years and with locations that carry dense memories from teenage years... and last but not least, all those wonderful hours spent with my family, especially my sister's 4 children (for the elder two of which and another eight little munchkins me and two friends performed a hand-puppet theatre piece, with a crocodile, splashing water, smoke and fireworks at the devil's entrance and Grandma's pancakes for everyone in the break...).

Well, I guess I've got 12 hours... better get going.

SAMI

From: me
To: Sami
Date: 01.01.2007
Subject: from Germany
______________________________

Dear Sami,

Happy New Year!
I hope this eMail reaches you somehow and somewhere. And more than anything I hope that you are out of Syrian prison. Although I can't say that I hope for you to be back in Iraq, I presume (or fear) that might be the case.

I don't really know what to say to you. Meeting you and your fellow country-men in the prison in Damascus was a very intense and overwhelming experience and I don't think I have quite lived up to the implemenations it had on me yet. It happened just as I told you: I left the prison on that saturday night with a smile on my face because I thanked God for having given me that experience and for having met you all, especially you. Now I'm back in Germany and I meet friends, that have somehow heard about my experience in Syria and they say: "Hey, I heard they locked you up in Syria... how the hell did that happen?" ...and - like I said to you in prison - it's a good story, but I try to always end it with: "...well, it might sound like a good story with a happy ending in my case, but it certainly isn't for those I shared the cell with." Then I tell them about you, the call you got, your friends who were killed after receiving that same call, your escape to Syria etc., about 'Ali, whose two brothers were killed by the Americans... and of course about poor Kusay, whose chest they broke in prison.

Sami, please let me know where you are now, if you are back in Iraq, or somehow still in Syria. And please - if there is anything I can do for you, let me know. I really mean that.

I think of you a lot, my friend and I pray that God will help you with your start from zero and that He will make things easier for you as much as possible.

Take care and may the New Year bring you peace and safety more than anything.

Love,
Selim "al-Almani"

New Year

I sincerely wish everyone a very happy New Year with this photo from Mostar, Bosnia.