CA events: The least we can do for Pakistan
Dear friends,
Having just returned home to Seattle from an arduous but fascinating and encouraging three-week trip to Haiti, I’ll be taking part in several events over the next week-plus in California, in support of Pakistani groups and flood relief. One is a fundraiser for Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, where I’ve been asked to host a table. If you’d like to sit at my table, let me know.
The ongoing misery in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, and now the flooding in Pakistan, have me remembering the plenary talk I had the honor to give at a previous CAI fundraiser, in Chicago in April 2008. I saw parallels between Greg Mortenson and Dr. Paul Farmer and quoted from a conversation I had with Farmer in Haiti in 2004:
Ethan Casey with Greg Mortenson and Fawad Butt, Downers Grove, Illinois, April 5, 2008.
“If you’ve been working on poverty and hunger issues for twenty-something years [Farmer said], and you’re not making progress on some fronts, I think it does keep you humble. Knowing that the world is so dented and damaged must be humiliating, if not humbling – one or the other. If you cocoon yourself away from misery, then you can be delusional about how great and praiseworthy you are.”
From Farmer’s words and my own reflections, I drew this conclusion:
“One thing we all know darn well is that it’s just plain wrong for children in Baltistan or anywhere else to be without schools. Greg Mortenson allowed his experience of Baltistan, filtered through the personal character his parents had instilled in him in Tanzania and Minnesota, and refracted by human sympathy, gratitude, and friendship, to influence the choices he made about how and where to deploy his talents and effort during his time in this world. The choices he made have directly and demonstrably made the world a better place. What the rest of us are doing here tonight in support of his work is the least we can do.”
The full text of that talk is online here:
http://www.ethancasey.com/speaking/the-least-we-can-do/
See below for events details. Hope to see you there!
Best regards, Ethan
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Website: http://www.ethancasey.com
Events in California:
Inside Pakistan and Palestine: Viewpoints from Humanitarian Workers – CodePink: Women for Peace
Wed, Sept 22, 7:15-9:00 p.m., First Unitarian Universalist Society
1187 Franklin Street (at Geary), San Francisco, CA 94109
$5-10 sliding scale, contact Nancy Mancias 415-355-0300 (www.codepink.org)
Fundraising dinner with Greg Mortenson
Sat, Sept 25, 5:30 p.m., Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 95054
http://www.ikat.org/bayarea/
Zindagi Trust event feat. Shehzad Roy and Bushra Ansari
Sun, Sept. 26, 6 p.m., Doubletree Guest Suites Anaheim Resort/Convention Center
2085 South Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, CA 92802
http://zindagitrustoc10.eventbrite.com/
Walkathon for Children of the Pakistan Flood
Sat, Oct 2, 8 a.m.-noon
Central Park Amphitheater, San Ramon, CA
contact Jafar Safdar, 510-409-9758
http://www.mymashal.org
My two recent articles on the flooding in Pakistan:
Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/08/pakistan-floods-why-should-we-care/
What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/09/what-does-pakistan-have-to-do-with-haiti/
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What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?
Port-au-Prince, September 2 – Haiti is, as a friend of mine put it years ago, a place for big questions. I’ve been trying to understand it for nearly thirty years, and its politics, history and culture have many twists and turns that are still opaque to me. At the same time, it’s a place whose truths and foibles are different from those of your country or mine only in being more obvious, more in your face. Anything that’s true of Haiti is true of the world as a whole – and that’s a truth that’s not complicated at all, only hard to swallow.
Ethan Casey, Ben Owen, and Haitian friends at Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
For me personally Haiti feels like home, because I was sixteen years old the first time I set foot here. It has taught me much, if not most, of whatever I now know about the world, and my early experience of Haiti suffused my later responses to very different countries, particularly during the five years I lived in Asia in the 1990s. I saw chronically desperate Cambodia, and tortured Burma, and deforested Thailand, with the eyes of one who had seen Haiti. In a phone conversation in 2004 Tracy Kidder, author of the celebrated book Mountains Beyond Mountains, told me something I implicitly understand and relate to: “I’ve learned so much about the world from Haiti – some of which I almost wish I hadn’t learned.”
Two things have been on my mind since Ben Owen, Pete Sabo and I arrived here on August 25. One is how, not quite eight months after the January 12 earthquake that killed perhaps 300,000 people, life here seems to have returned to something like normal. I hasten to add that that doesn’t mean everything’s fine – it’s not. Normal in Haiti is far from fine.
But my friend Gerald Oriol Jr., of Fondation J’Aime Haiti, notes how the tent cities that have taken over virtually all open spaces in Port-au-Prince have settled into a version of regular neighborhood life, with cyber cafes and hair salons. “It’s funny how an abnormal situation can be normal,” says Gerald, who belongs to Haiti’s elite class. “The only people who are truly shocked right now are people like me. But for the poor, things were so hard for them already that it’s just another way to organize themselves. Maybe it’s even better for them now.”
“The other difference is that many of them lost family and friends,” I pointed out.
“Yes, of course,” agreed Gerald. “I know a guy who lost his five children and his wife. But materially they are no worse off.”
Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti. Photo by Pete Sabo.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the disturbingly weird coincidence of the two countries that are most important to me personally being struck in the same year by appalling disasters. The outpouring of generosity towards Haiti after the earthquake was extraordinary and welcome, but it will remain meaningful only if Americans continue noticing Haiti and, beyond giving money, make the effort to understand its situation. The earthquake was a natural disaster, but it didn’t happen in a geopolitical vacuum. This country, these people, that we cared so deeply about circa January and February – who are they, and what are they all about? Haitians are more and other than charity cases. They’re human beings with a culture and a politics and a national history closely intertwined with our own. We owe it to them and to ourselves to know them.
I came here because I share the human tendency to forget, and I want to do my part to work against it. But just as I was preparing for this trip in late July and early August, I was distracted by the floods in Pakistan, about which suffice it to say that they’re proving as devastating in every way as the Haitian earthquake, with the difference that Pakistan is a nation of not 8 million but 170 million people. It’s also a Muslim nation with nuclear weapons, but that’s not the point. The point – which I fear many Americans have ignored or denied – is that Pakistanis are people who are suffering and will continue to suffer, as food shortages caused by the destruction of crops ramify through Pakistani society over the coming months and beyond.
My question for Americans is: If we failed or refused to understand at the time it happened that the flooding was not some divine comeuppance safely distant from us, but an immense human tragedy, will we understand a year from now when, God forbid, the ricochets from it hit us closer to home?
On the road outside Les Cayes, Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
Many Pakistani friends of mine responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the Haitian earthquake. Todd Shea claims that, of the 200 or so physicians from North America who volunteered with him in Haiti, most were Pakistani. We have a golden opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis, now and later.
An August 23 note from Uzma Shah is typical of the many messages I’ve received since publishing my previous article “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?”: “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan, and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”
It’s dismaying to me that I’ve gotten very few such messages from non-Muslims.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in spring 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Until further notice, he is donating 20% of profits from sales of his Pakistan books to flood relief in Pakistan, and from his Haiti book to Fondation J’Aime Haiti and the Colorado Haiti Project.
