Naqib the Guard

Posted on March 5, 2012 by ofurhe

Naqibulla is the night guard at the guest house where I am staying. We hit it off initially because he was impressed that I speak some Farsi (my Persian is okay, I can have simple conversations which is fine for the night porter but not great for interviewing a member of parliament, I leave that to our tour guide and translator extraordinaire, Najib). He likes my Iranian accent because during the Taliban he moved to Iran with his family.

He is also stunned by my ‘seeah post‘ or black skin. He says he likes black people. They are good people. There are none in his country but there is a region in Iran called Bandar Abbas that has a lot of Africans. He played me a bandari music video on his phone and showed me his black friend on Facebook (who looked South Asian to me).

He says we are like brother and sister now. He gives me extra blankets and extra wood for my woodstove at night. When I woke up in the morning and my voice was hoarse he asked if I was sick and if my room was warm enough. It was just that he was the first person I’d spoken to, but it was sweet that he was concerned.

He is about my age, 22, but he says since I am a year older that in Afghan culture he should wait on me and bring me chai. He is married and only had 4 years of school because of the problems in his country. In the states when you are a student it means you are poor, here it means you are rich enough to that your family can afford to not have you working. I have gone from the 99% to the 1%, and it feels very strange to have a cook, a driver, a maid and a porter for a week.

Today he asked if i could take a picture with him before I leave. I’m sure he’ll want to show everyone his black friend.
It’s all pretty politically incorrect and frankly makes me a bit uncomfortable, but this whole trip is about stepping outside of my comfort zone a bit, and Naqib is genuine and sweet.

Gotta brush my hair and put on a hijab before the cook comes in to tell me breakfast is served. Laterz.

Framing the Conversation

Posted on March 1, 2012 by ofurhe

I arrived in Kabul this morning. Two days ago I was in New York staying with a friend from high school. He is a highly skilled craftsman who makes, among other things, gorgeous wooden frames. He recently found a rare New York apartment that let him set up a small woodworking studio downstairs and he’s saving up for a bandsaw.

Today I visited another place that makes frames; Golestan Sabak. This school, run by a wonderful widow named Fatima Akbari, teaches women and children. The students learn not just literacy but also vocations like embroidery and carpentry. In particular we visited the workshop where disabled people learn woodcarving, calligraphy and frame-making. 3 weeks ago a big snow dump caused her tent to collapse, destroying their electric saw.

Another recent New York conversation echoes in my head. My friend and I were eating lunch at Columbia where some students were protesting the settlements in Gaza. I asked my friend how he felt about the protest and he said essentially ‘Think Globally Act Locally’ that there are plenty of problems to deal with in New York. But one of the problems is misinformation. People just don’t know about the settlements or about women’s carpentry workshops in Afghanistan. Well maybe a couple people do now.

Access to Education

Posted on January 27, 2012 by ofurhe

Lately I’ve been thinking about education, the Russian and I had a heated discussion this weekend about it, she’s starting school again after winter break and I’m applying to a masters program. Also, it has been in the news because of President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech. Lack of access to education, I feel, is one of the biggest global problems. I don’t have any solutions right now, but I wanted to express my gratitude towards the people and institutions who contributed towards mine:

My mom is the one who filled out all the financial aid forms growing up, and taught me how to make the system work for me. She has worked, and continues to work tirelessly to make sure her children get the chances she didn’t get. My mom’s (now) husband started this blog for her which is probably worth checking out (if you didn’t grow up within earshot of my mother): Zen of Folding

The branch of the Oakland Public Library by my house was influenced by the Black Panther movement and the Black Muslims in the neighborhood. Without all those books about little black girls I am sure I wouldn’t have the confidence to achieve what I have so far. (Bill Cosby explains what can happen when you don’t get this kind of enforcement: A Boy Like Me)

Addendum 5-27-12: This branch was the African American Museum and Library which later moved to downtown Oakland. Explains a lot.

The Crowden School was my first summer camp. I met the Russian there and I learned that I could make music too (it wasn’t just for big kids like my brother).

A shoutout to A Better Chance (ABC), for paying for my testing, my first trip to a college campus (USC), and helping students of color get a fair shake.

The East Bay French American School
was where I learned the French language, French culture, and as my mother says, where I learned to hate French people.

Head-Royce
Middle School sucks. It sucked for me, and it sucked for a lot of others, but without it, none of us would have any soul. And if I hadn’t hated middle school so much I never would have ended up at my high school.

Interlochen Arts Camp
was awesome, my first sleep away camp. I won the ‘Honor Camper’ award and played in piano quintet, piano for 10 hands. My first experience of a humid summer where I got stung by all manner of mosquitos for the first time. My scholarship there was sponsored by Kellogs. Thanks for the corduroy knickers!

Walden
a music composition camp in New Hampshire. I got the best music theory education, made some great friends and wrote a couple pieces of music. Not bad for a 12-year-old.

Putney
little Putney, my hippie farm school. When I heard that Seventeen Magazine came to do a profile on the school and the students protested their body image perpetuation, I was sold. I couldn’t really have gone anywhere else.

Center for Talented Youth
really should been called Center for Privileged Youth, if I remember correctly you have to take a pretty expensive test to get in. But the scholarship I got there was all-inclusive, they told me if there was a pair of flip flops that everyone had, and I couldn’t afford (Havaianas anyone?), that they would help me pay for them. I had been at Putney for a few years though, so I was pretty anti-consumerist.

Summer Intensive Language Study
(SILS) at Northfield Mount Hermon; it looks like this program is now defunct, which is a bummer. By now you can probably tell that my mother believed that summers were a time for learning, not lazing. If we weren’t taking a class over the summer, we were supposed to get a job.

University of Chicago
Where fun goes to die. I was cold, miserable and well educated.

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
When I went in to interview I went on a long rant about how I didn’t believe in affirmative action and I hated teaching, how did I get this fellowship?

After finals in Chicago I began calculating how much money I had been given by these institutions over the years and it came out to over $500,000. I don’t have enough money to pay it back yet, but hopefully the things I learned will help me earn enough to pay it back soon.

There are many ways we rationalize the bounty we all receive in our lives but first and foremost I’d like to say just say “Thank You”. I feel very lucky to have had these opportunities.

That said, I hope these institutions feel lucky to have had me as well. All that money I got for being a poor black girl doesn’t negate the fact that I am a poor black girl with all that entails (though I’m working on the poor part). A friend once suggested that I’ve repaid the money I was given in unpaid diversity photo-ops and other marketing. In addition, I worked hard for my scholarships, maintaining a GPA, trying to be a model minority since I was the only black person for miles, and being the only black person for miles, these tasks aren’t easy for anyone, especially a young person.

I tend to think that someone’s sex, race, socio-economic background, religion, age, etc. is about as important as their shoe size, but I wouldn’t think this way if it weren’t for my education, which I got because people thought otherwise. We should live in a world that doesn’t need affirmative action, but we don’t.

p.s. I also like to think I got into some of these places because I’m smart, but who knows.

Sounds of ourselves

Posted on December 29, 2011 by ofurhe

I took an anatomy class in high school and was amazed by how much my body was doing without my knowledge. “Thanks body,” I found myself repeating, after learning about the workings of my heart and lungs, my toes pulling up, my esophagus pushing down, and everything in between. Like so many other things, we don’t seem to understand or appreciate them until we start to lose our faculties. The fact that our bodies seem so silent and symetrical is a testament to how cleanly our body is functioning, every day.

I talked to a neurobiologist friend today who said that brains sound like a low clicking, and that the ringing in our ears is the sound of hair cells dying and our hearing range diminishing. In quiet moments I’ve been thinking lately about how the pitch of the ringing in your ears creates the harmony that you hear throughout your life. In moments of pain, when all you can hear is your body it seems to cry and scream, like a child demanding attention. Other times it is quieter, but no less busy. The breathing, pumping, generating, destroying, reinforcing, exploring, it’s not silent, nor is it forgettable.

Does aging have a sound? Does the voice in your head grow older as you do? Who else can hear if your bones click and creak? Do men sound different from women?

There is a season

Posted on December 19, 2011 by ofurhe

The Russian and I did some canning this weekend. Why? We hate shopping for Christmas gifts, we’re poor, because it’s cool, and because this is what our lemon tree looked like AFTER making 30 jars of marmalade.

We started by harvesting a big bag of lemons, about 20 pounds worth

Then we peeled them, and diced the peel

Leaving us with a pile of big, naked lemons

Don’t be fooled by their size though, the lemons from our tree are mostly pith

Then came the hardest step, juliene-ing 40 lemons. This was also the point when we realized we wouldn’t be finishing that night. It was hard work, we were tired, and while reading the recipe we realized it had to sit overnight in order to create pectin.

This is the flesh

this is our compost

and this is what we pulled out in the morning.

We added sugar

Boiled

And canned

And boiled

And canned some more

Don’t you wish you were our friend?

This year we celebrate the Joy of Cooking, what are you celebrating this winter?

Computer appreciation

Posted on November 23, 2011 by ofurhe

Yesterday as I was opening the door front door to my house, I was reminding myself to appreciate the little things. We never seem to appreciate our computers until stuff starts to go wonky. But every day they perform miraculous feats constantly; thanks for all the emails sent, the pages saved, the photos commented, it really is magic as far as I’m concerned.

I became all the more appreciative when I realized the front door of my house was unlocked and that my computer had been stolen. So long red Lenovo U110, hello iPad. Appreciate your computers (and back them up) you never know what might happen.

Also keep an eye out for my laptop, I don’t trust the Berkeley PD when they say this is a ‘top priority’.

Ofurhe Igbinedion

Category Archives: gratitude