Refugee Camp Part 1

I’ve been postponing writing about my experience at the refugee camp because it was really difficult and scary for me, but I think it’s important to write about my experience and share it with others. When we checked in with Global Exchange a couple months before the trip we talked about our itinerary and I was a little worried that our itinerary wasn’t more firm. I’m a planner, and I like to learn about the organizations we are going to visit beforehand. The people at GX said that the reason why our itinerary was not more firm is because of security, that we may be visiting places like an underground school and a refugee camp and that for security reasons they had to keep our plans flexible. After our first day in Kabul I realized just how flexible our itinerary was, after getting of the plane, we visited 3 places that were slated for different days. Our tour guide asked if we wanted to go see a refugee camp; I had no interest in doing so, however my fellow travelers convinced me that this would be a singular experience and I had vowed to be more adventuresome on this trip. Our tour guide said if we go to the refugee camp that we should go on a Friday, the weekend, because on this day there would be more people to interview; the men work during the week. So we decided to go to the refugee camp that day.

In the morning we went to see Kargha Lake nearby, in the car, our tour guide Najib talked to us about his country. He explained that most Afghans don’t hate Americans they hate the Pakistani Military and the American policy. Although they felt there were improvements under Obama, they felt that there could only be progress in Afghanistan when American stops giving money to the Pakistani government which is funding the Talilban. Although he said there was not very much anti-American sentiment in Kabul, he said that we might find some in this refugee camp. He told us that the people in this camp were from Helmand province where they had been displaced due to US and Taliban bombing. Najib explained that the reason why we were able to get into this camp is because he knew one of the camp leaders whose name was Ismail. Najib had been a surgeon during the war had taken Ismail’s son to the hospital, this is how they knew each other. Najib also explained that we may have heard about this camp because the New York Times had recently written a story about it because they had a particularly difficult winter and some children had died of exposure.

This was our second day in Afghanistan. I didn’t know the tour guide well, I didn’t know my compatriots well and, although I had read about it for years, I hadn’t really experienced Afghan culture. I would later come to understand that all these people had my best interests at heart, but walking into the refugee camp was shocking and terrifying to me. It was early spring and everywhere we went the ground was partially frozen. The sidewalk in Kabul isn’t always paved and in this part of town it was not only muddy but smelled of raw sewage. When we walked into the tent city we were greeted by Ismail (Najib had called him on his cell phone), and other elders, as well as children who were curious about these strangers in their midst. As we walked in, sat down and waited for the journalist to set up her equipment, I decided to do what I normally do in situations that confuse and intimidate me, I observed carefully, took copious notes and sought to understand what was going on around me.

Part 2: Comfort Zone

In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (and other concerns), Mindy Kaling talks about how she used to get out of chores all the time by holding up a book and saying, “But I’m just enjoying Little House on the Prairie so much!” She says it’s the soft spot for her immigrant parents. I had an immigrant parent too, but I think every parent wants their kid to read, and I’ve always found great comfort behind books. So when I got home from my trip I sprinted through the last 2 hunger games books and picked up Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, which I had given to my mother for Christmas.

After my trip to Afghanistan it was good to get back in my comfort zone and it turns out, Mindy Kaling’s humor falls squarely in my wheelhouse. Kaling was, like me, a child of middle class immigrant parents (her parents were from India but met in Nigeria, my father is from Nigeria but met my mom in an Indian religious group). She is also a pop culture nerd who grew up trying to impress her older brother (or rather trying really hard not to embarrass him). She went to prep school and then Dartmouth but worked with a bunch of guys who went to Harvard and could never shake the feeling that everyone was hanging out without her.

When asked on WTF whether the title of her book is an actual fear of hers, Mindy Kaling said yes. For me, it isn’t a fear, it’s a pretty safe assumption; I don’t get out much so if anyone’s hanging out, they’re hanging out without me. But who needs friends when I have books! Seriously I don’t think I’m missing out on the drunken conversation and sad groping, but yeah I know you’re all hanging out without me.

Another thing she mentioned on that podcast is that she often forgets that she’s not a jewish boy, Mark Maron laughed, but this is something that happens to me all the time. When I went to school in Chicago I had this strange realization one night that the people I felt most comfortable with were nerdy Jewish stoners from Northern California. How often do you look at your own face? It is really easy for me to forget that I really don’t look anything like these people.

I got into the Mills Computer Science Masters program and went to a lecture from someone who works for Wikimedia. I would describe the crowd as ‘lesbian nerd,’ this is another place where I felt quite comfortable. I feel very comfortable around data (I don’t really like sports but I just read the ESPN analytics issue cover to cover). When I was in Afghanistan we met many people but the ones I felt most comfortable around were data analysts; so many of our other conversations seemed anecdotal. I’m not great at probabilities but I find comfort in spreadsheets and statistics and the people who use them.

Mindy Kaling is not the same kind of nerd I am, (she studied latin in school and became a comedy writer), but I think we’re a similar type of nerd. I am so glad that she is successful because I feel like it’s a triumph for dorky, irreverent brown girls everywhere. Mindy Kaling speaks for me.

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Dear Reader(s?);
I went back through my blog and found like a gazillion typos. Please email me about typos, it’s embarrassing.

Naqib the Guard

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.

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Visages

I’ve been reading a book about provincial life set in the mid 19th century and became curious about the descriptions of peoples’ faces. To me, Byronic locks and a noble chin don’t give me a good picture of someone at all. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a world with pictures and movies and internet and I’m not used to using my imagination. Maybe words are just not the best medium to describe the human face. Maybe it’s because there is more variation in face shape in 21st century California; in 19th century England, most people looked fairly similar, so a description could easily conjure up the type of face that this person might have. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea that description says more about the describer than the described.

To a disturbing extent we see what we want to see. In college I took a class in which we talked about the Portuguese discovery of Africa and America. The most advanced maps that the Portuguese had were based on world travelers, who were fairly accurate about the places they were familiar with, and less accurate about the communities on the periphery. The borders of these maps were full of fanciful monsters (one of whom used his extra large foot as a parasol to shade himself from the African sun). The explorers were so willing to believe that Africans and Native Americans were not human because they were expecting monsters that when they found people who didn’t look like them, they assumed that they must have found these monsters.

On this week’s Culture Gabfest, Stephen Metcalf recommends a genre of poems where the narrator is a person who sees someone else and fills in what they don’t know about them with their own imagination.

What is the best way to describe someone’s face? How do we use other peoples’ faces to project our own beliefs?

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”
Middlemarch, George Eliot

“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.”-The Breakfast Club, John Hughes

Update 1/28: a great description of a face

“To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.”
Middlemarch, George Eliot

Update 2/4

more monsters

Scattered

I try to write a new post every week, to keep me in the habit, but I don’t really like writing blogposts, what I really like writing are letters. Today, instead of writing this post (or working on my personal essay for grad school) I wrote 4 postcards using my new christmas gift from the Russian (Pantone postcards) and a letter using stationary I made in a workshop taught by Barbara.

Here is a piece from the notes for my personal statement:

I once got into a debate with a friend at the University of Chicago, he was a couple years younger than i was and deciding on a major. He said he had decided on economics because it helped ‘explain the world’, I laughed and said, George, everyone says that about their major, you talk to a French lit major and they’ll say, ‘I really think French literature is the best way to help explain my world’. My mom used to say ‘it all comes down to Geography,’ but after studying it, I disagree. You can’t tell everything about a person by where they come from (I’m not a huge believer in the idea that Californians are lazy and dumb), but it does explain a lot. Tobler’s first law of geography, that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things does still seem to have many applications.

Can someone tell me if there is a second law of geography?

There is a season

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.

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

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Then we peeled them, and diced the peel

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Leaving us with a pile of big, naked lemons

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

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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

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this is our compost

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and this is what we pulled out in the morning.

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We added sugar

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Boiled

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And canned

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And boiled

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And canned some more

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Don’t you wish you were our friend?

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