UNBELIEVABLE

A famous US donut brand made an advertisement.
The model's stylist decided to choose for her model to wear a scarf.
Now the ad campaign is being dropped because there have been claims that the scarf resembles "Muslim terrorists".

This scarf is worn by a large number of people of all ages, genders, races and sexual orientations across the world, apart from being the traditional scarf in most Arab countries, stretching from Turkey down to the Yemen and from Morocco across to Iraq for I don't know how many million people.

It so happens that certain people who we collectively call "terrorists", the foes of US foreign policy, also wear them, because some of them have Arab roots. But so do all Saudi princes and oil magnates, who the US is doing great business with day in day out and who own increasingly large assets (for example harbours!) in the US.



So shall we now stop advertisements where models wear suits, because it reminds other people of George Bush?

Medical treatment for Gazans

Now that former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmund Tutu is speaking out so openly about the situation in Gaza, one can only hope that more attention will be focused on this atrocity that unfolds every day under the blind eye of the world... I hate to say that I'm not too hopeful, though.

The medical aspect of the disaster is only one of many aspects, of course, but it is equally shocking...
from the BBC:

"Applying for treatment in Israel from Gaza is a complicated process - a patient is first put in touch with the Palestinian Referral Abroad Department (RAD), which has to arrange an appointment with an Israeli hospital before issuing a referral abroad request; the patient must then contact the Palestinian health District Co-ordination Office (DCO), which in turn asks the Israeli health DCO for a permit to pass through Erez crossing.
From there the request is sent to the office of the Co-ordinator of Activities in the Territories (West Bank and Gaza), where Israel's domestic security service examines whether the patient poses a security risk.
If the permit is granted, the patient goes to the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing, where a Palestinian Liaison Officer co-ordinates with an Israeli Liaison Officer to get the patient across.
Even at this point, a patient might end up not crossing if delays there mean they have missed their allotted hospital appointment time, or if the Israeli side of the crossing closes for security reasons.
If a patient fails to cross, he or she must start the referral process again from the beginning.

According to the WHO, 32 Gazans died between October 2007 and March 2008 while waiting for travel permits."

And how many Israelis have died as a result of the rockets that are fired into Israeli territory from Gaza (which is the official reason for most attacks on and raids into Gaza - the cause of many medical cases in Gaza): "According to Israel there have been 13 fatalities in the last six years."

Unfortunately, one can argue that the Gazans have partly their colleagues to blame, because the flip side is this:

"In 2004, a female suicide bomber who claimed she had surgical plates in her legs blew herself up at the [Erez] crossing after bypassing the metal detector, killing four Israelis."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7375439.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7208969.stm

Summer's breeze

There is that wonderful expression: the air is pregnant with fragrance... like it's about to give birth to summer.
That's exactly what it's like these days - there are so many beautifully summery fragrances in the air.

My favourite is elderflower! The warm and humid air carries it through the streets, into the trams, past the supermarkets and sometimes even into my window. I love it. I often stop in the street, close my eyes and just inhale. Elderflower makes me think of my favourite childhood drink, when mum used to make sirup out of bags and bags of elderflower blossoms that we used to collect in the woods and fields. Then the whole house was filled with that sweet smell and there was that strange construction in the kitchen, a kind of towel full of the flowers, suspended over a large pot and the sweet sirup dripping out. Hmmm!

Fear nothing

[this is a poem I received from an Israeli friend who lives in the West Bank.
I never met her, unfortunately, though hopefully soon I can.]


fear nothing
go light
joy will find you when you seek him not
the answer is in the path
your work is undone seconds
you are a bless to not just any one

the unity is in your soul
and god knows to send you when
those you need to meet and those you need to marry

me married to universe
so i said often
god is sending me to thousand miracolous
places
where nur keeps coming back
to no family no home no partner
she shed the tears of others and put them
on a mirror that they face
but when she glows
they all run doubts down the hills
and send her away to her feels

so she laughs with god
and he smiles through her cheeks
she has no fear no doubt in nomads land.
she is patient
as a peace train
thats send her thoughts on a bike
not much space and weight to carry
them
so she has to go light
and stop the fight
stop the fight

--- BURMA CYCLONE RELIEF -- BURMA AID -- BURMA CYCLONE RELIEF ---

THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM A VERY GOOD FRIEND WHO IS IN BURMA NOW!
ANYONE WHO IS INTERESTED IN HELPING, DONATING OR JUST RELIABLE,
ON-SITE INFORMATION, PLEASE READ THIS !!!

at 10:26pm on May 12th, 2008:

Dear Friends,

Thank you for all your thoughts and well wishes – I am sorry for my inability to reply to you all properly now. Myanmar is not an easy place to write from and we are still without water and electricity in all but a few places in Yangon.

However, this is nothing compared with what is happening just 30 km away from my desk. The most recent UN estimates say that between 1.3 and 1.9 million people are affected by Cyclone Nargis. The death toll is between 60 and 100,000 with about 200,000 missing.
In truth we will never know an exact figure. You can read the stories of bodies still lying, now rotting in the rivers of the Irrawaday Delta (iht.com, alertnet.org, timesonline.com particularly good coverage).

I am not at liberty to write very much of what I am seeing and hearing here – except to urge you to read more about what is going on. It is indeed the tragedy that is being reported.

At the present time monasteries and local people are providing much of the care to the displaced and vulnerable – but towns are overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees. Villages that I have visited less than 5 hours from Yangon are drinking contaminated water and living in the wreckage of their damaged homes. In some villages no one has survived.
The second wave of deaths will occur because of lack of basic sanitation and the upcoming failure to plant next season’s rice. The children I spoke to last week already were suffering from diarrhea and the beginning of waterborne diseases. The NGO world fears a cholera epidemic could spread any day now and a lot of them are still struggling for access to the affected areas.

Here at my office we are giving blood, clothes, rice and whatever we can – but money to buy water purification tablets, rice and basic household supplies could make a massive difference. On Wednesday of this week we will be visiting a village 2 hours from Yangon. It is called Kune Nyan Kone and has 99% destruction. There are 20,000 people there. It is the worst hit area of Yangon Division.

Merlin (a British medical NGO) has some of the best access to the affected areas in the Delta region, while ActionAid, another NGO, is also doing some wonderful work here. I have spent many hours in the last few days with both of these NGO’s and can assure you that down the line these are NGO’s that are going to make a difference in Myanmar and to the people whose lives even now hang in the balance.

Thank you for anything that you give. You are all in my thoughts.
B.


at 7:19am on May 14th, 2008:

Hello people,
If anything has re-assured me not only of the good of humanity, but the usefulness of facebook it has been the last few days.

Thank you to all of you who have written and donated.

There are 100,000 refugees in the town of Boagaly- most of whom are living at the monasteries. When I was there last week it was the local people who were providing the rice and clean water for the people - however medical supplies are essential - and even last week they were worried that supplies were running out)

One person I spoke to was from a village where there are no children remaining. Only those who could swim survived. Another man showed us his scars, across his chest and arms - they are the vivid marks of a night spent hanging on to a mango tree to hold himself above the tidal surge. They were already infected. Everyone had lost someone - and most were lone survivors who had comandeered abandoned boats through rivers of corpses to arrive in Bogalay.

One man had tried to carry his 6 year old son on his back as he swam to safety. Half way through the 12 hour Cyclone he realised he could not continue with the child's frightened arms wrapped around his neck. He was forced to abandon his son. Many refugees arrived without clothes - they too were ripped off in the storm.

I now urge you to give money to organisations like ActionAid or Merlin or UNICEF. These NGO's are doing an amazing job - and will use your money to reach people directly.

Thank you again - all the best to you,
B.

http://www.merlin.org.uk
http://www.actionaid.org

--- BURMA CYCLONE RELIEF -- BURMA AID -- BURMA CYCLONE RELIEF ---

A short break...

I just took the most peculiar photo, during a lunch break on the bus journey from Tehran to Astaneh. The image itself– a simple landscape of a green valley lined by bare mountains – was not particularly peculiar. But something else was: for the first time after many years, I took a “real” photo again, analogue on 35mm film. A kind of nostalgia overcame me at the sound of the film rolling on, right after the exposure – such a short sound, but it seemed a hundred times longer than the split-second it takes for a digital camera to merely open and close the shutter.
But more than the sound, it was the feeling of holding the old Canon in my hand – so much lighter than its digital sister that it seems like a toy, with a body so thin that the muscle memory in my hand is firing alarm, as if something is wrong. It also has something incredibly simple about it – a severe lack of buttons, screens and switches if compared to even the simplest of cameras today – one automatic/manual switch, one turning wheel for the various programs, three buttons and one tiny screen announcing the shooting mode and the number of images left. The latter is of course one of the most astonishing parts: there is a limit to your trigger-happiness: 24 or 36 at a time, as opposed to hundreds or more in any little Digicam.

Strange to think that at some point in the past people used to say “Wow, that’s a fancy camera!” when they saw it, while now it looks aged, frail and outdated, if not even crippled somehow, with its many scars, dents and scratches. I must have taken a few thousand photos with that camera and it accompanied me wherever I went, from South Africa to Italy, from Alaska to India, from Norway to Bhutan and last but not least: to Iran.
And here I am with my old analogue Canon, taking a picture of an Iranian landscape on a black&white film roll that might well have been inside the camera since I was last here in 2004. I must have ‘converted’ to digital shortly after that trip; and now that some unknown thief or maybe by now a lucky eBayer owns my beloved digital camera (which I inherited from one of the UK’s upcoming star photographers), I am back to analogue and back in Iran.


I should really be studying, of course, I am doing my M.Sc. after all, but the chance to fly to Iran to attend the wedding of one of my longest and best friends, in the hills on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea… well, I just couldn’t let that pass.

The first time I came to visit Hamid in Iran was in 2002, but I can remember it as though it was the day before yesterday. I arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning and took a taxi from Mehrabad airport to his dormitory. The streets were empty as if the vast greyness of Tehran had wiped out human existence – except for a few men in orange overalls, crouching against the side of the highway, brushing the ground as the taxi whizzed past. I managed to wake up the dorm’s night guard and to convince him to let me in, but I couldn’t get him to let Hamid know that I had arrived, nor to tell me where his room was. This was not because I didn’t speak a word of Farsi, but simply because the guard was of the opinion that Hamid deserved a good measure of sleep and ought not to be woken up before 6am. He pointed me to the prayer room and signalled that I could sleep or wait there. So I took my shoes off and entered the simple room that was filled with little carpets and the concentrated smell of feet.
It turned out that Hamid didn’t expect me till the day after, so when he came down the stairs in his pyjamas, wondering why the guard had called him, he nearly slipped on the last steps when he saw me.

This time my arrival was well-announced and well-planned. Hamid had made sure that his friend would pick me up at the airport, host me for the night in Tehran and put me on the bus to Astaneh the next morning, where he was waiting for me. A lot had happened in the four years since Hamid and I last met in Iran – for one thing he wasn’t living here anymore and I had seen him twice already in his new home in Canada. Like so many young Iranians, especially those with a degree, he had made every effort to leave the country, applied for scholarships and finally got accepted both in New York and at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in a tiny town in south-eastern Canada. He couldn’t get a visa to the US, despite his 25,000 $ scholarship, so he settled for Canada. And after a few years there, he met Najme, a fellow Iranian. She was also studying at UNB… and now they’re getting married in Iran, in Najme’s hometown of Astaneh, near the Caspian Sea.
It takes only haf an hour to get there by plane, but a grand total of 6-7 hours by bus, which is fine with me, as I wanted some time to write this and to sleep a bit. The landscape is now becoming increasingly green, as we move north-west through the mountains toward the Sea. Descending into the planes, there are even rice fields, flooded with water – a strange sight for Iran, the eastern half of which is covered with a dry, salty desert. I take another photo through the bus window. Instinctively I look at the back of the camera to check the preview of the image I just took – and I have to smile – the bare, black back of my old Canon stares at me as if to say: “I’m sorry for my inadequacy.”
It’s quite allright, I reply.

Miscellaneous balcony news

A few days ago I witnessed an incident that shook my national pride in its very core. I noticed a public employee of the City of Cologne walking into the town hall – his place of work – at a few minutes to 9, punctual as is to be expected of a German employee. He swiped his employee card to register the beginning of his shift and then – instead of going up to his office – he walked out again through the rotating doors that were still rotating from his entry a minute earlier.

I always assumed that sort of thing only happened “somewhere else”.

---

My French flatmate...

...drinks only German wine since he came to Germany four months ago. He's decided he can drink enough French wine when he's in France, now he should try what the locals can do. So every Friday he goes to buy two bottles - a red wine for him and a white wine for his girlfriend - and on Saturday mornings I usually get the latest rating; and much to my surprise, he's not been disappointed so far. His special recommendation: Dornfelder Trocken.

...came into the kitchen the other day and proclaimed: "I love Germany!"
Somewhat flattered I inquired why he had suddenly discovered this love for Germany? Was it a good bottle of wine?
"No," he said. "There are separate containers for white, green and brown glass!!!"

---

As I sit here on my lovely balcony on the fourth floor, overlooking the three-storey building adjacent to mine and enjoying the wind’s clatter in the leaves of the two tall lindens growing into the blue sky, the church bells of a nearby church begin to ring –and it’s the first time since I got here that I notice them.
It dawns on me that their sound, while my mind was occupied with a million other things, has quietly replaced that of the mu’ezzin’s call to prayer, which I used to hear frequently until a few weeks ago. While the Moslems’ call to prayer might evoke ambiguous feelings and thoughts of a backward society in some people, the sound of church bells calling to evening mass evokes images of medieval Europe and small villages in my mind. In fact, it reminds me of the German villages in Romania that were built by settlers form Saxonia in the 13th century and were inhabited by them until the fall of the iron curtain, preserving a life story-book, idyllic, medieval hamlets. Built along a dusty or muddy road in the middle of a picturesque landscape of pristine agricultural land, soft hills and dense forests, the only sound one could hear after climbing up the wooden church tower located in the village centre, was that of geese, ducks and chickens roaming freely in the sun and that of an occasional horse-drawn cart in the streets below.
How did I get to Romania? Ah, yes – The apparent peace of these villages was paced by the hourly ringing of the church bell. To me, that sound seems oddly out of place, in a bustling town of one million people from all over the globe.




---

Every morning I take the tram to the “Cologne University of Applied Sciences”. It’s just a bit over 30 minutes to get there, so I have to get the train at 8:24 to be there on time for our nine o’clock lectures. Since I got here mid-March, I think I’ve hardly managed 10 times to get that train.
But this morning I did and I tell you, it felt good!

---

I discovered the most random corner of Cologne. It is quite an inconspicuous-looking section of a street, just after a railroad bridge, where the Höninger Weg turns into Eiffelstrasse. The particular location is in between two residential areas, next to the railway lines, with no kind of culinary or cultural establishment anywhere near. There’s nothing immediately odd about the place, but if you look closer you notice three extremely odd buildings. Well, no, they’re not odd in themselves – nothing about the architecture is very extra-ordinary or exciting, nor is any one of them particularly rare or strange by itself. It is the combination of these three in such a ‘non-area’, which makes it odd.
The first one says “ANGEL PLACE” in bold letters on a sign on the roof. The house lies behind a yard, which is walled off from the street. You might just think Angel has built himself a nice place… but no. If you go close to the gate you notice a little, almost cute pottery sign next to the gate reading “Motorcycle Club” – this is the Cologne home of the notorious motor cycle gang “Hell’s Angels”, those guys on Harley choppers with their long hair and their leather tassels on arms and legs swinging in the wind.
Next door is a flat, longish building with black sleet covering the outside wall. Two of the three doors in the wall (all black) have no sign or window or anything, making the place look rather sinister, or like it has something to hide. This becomes evident when you read the brightly lit sign over the middle door: “Swinger-Treff, Paare und Singles”. I don’t think I need to translate this.
Well, so that’s the two buildings on one side of the road… now to complete the odd trio: opposite of these two, next to a petrol station is in a flat-roofed, grey, one-storey building with a modest and simple sign above the door, reading: “Saif ad-Din Mosque”.

I cried today.