Wanderlustress

Temporary Repose

Having turned down an invitation to go into NYC tonight for the annual Halloween Parade, I am savoring quiet time on my own. Just me, Chinese take-out, the Da Vinci Code, Tazo Calm Herbal Infusion, and a bag of Snickers bars for the costumed revelers. Over the past week, Rich and I have been back in our routine of daily calls and nightly home cooked meals. It feels better to question all of the uncertainties together, and letting the answers surface willingly.

At least I am sleeping again. Playing catch-up has been strange. I just fall asleep all the time. A fuzzy, languid numbness envelops me and I just have to lie down and sleep. Then a few hours after waking, I’ll fall asleep again for the entire night. I can’t seem to satiate the two month deficit.

My mind has also finally turned off. I feel as if it has reached maximum capacity to consider, question, plan, or explore. The fervor of recent months has given way to preference for mindless entertainment and mundane conversations. But knowing me, it won’t be long before I’m back in the spin of preoccupation.

Happy Halloween!!!

Friends in Singapore, Halloween 2001

Peace Corps Patience

For two weeks now I have been nursing tethered nerves over my application for a Peace Corps passport. (During my term of service, I am required to use this passport in place of my normal one.) A slight SNAFU on my part two weeks ago could have resulted in an eight week delay, which would have jeopardized my departure for Uz on the 15th of January. This would have forfeited my Uz assignment, and thrown me straight back into the pool of candidates to await another country assignment and departure date. It would have meant a few more months of nervous anticipation, the likes of which I had already endured from May until October. That was way more than enough pain for the pleasure. My nails are desperately trying to grow back from the obsessive gnawing.

In the end, I found out yesterday that everything is in progress for my passport, and the path is once again cleared for me to depart as scheduled.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t post my recent frustrations here, its because this had been a relatively minor incident compared to the previous months of waiting and agonizing. I had learned to practice “Peace Corps Patience,” which I described in my PC blog a month ago:

24.09.03
So now is the time to practice "Peace Corps Patience," to throw myself to the wind of an altruistic ideal, the pursuit of which, should be my primary beacon through the application process. It is the time to relinquish any attachment to the destination of my heart's desire and give in to the vagaries of a possible sudden change in destination or departure date originally set at nomination. At this stage, I am waiting to be medically and legally cleared, but most of all, I am waiting for that precious call from my placement officer to lift me from under the weight of uncertainty and offer my assigned country of service.

Although this call might be a relief in theory, I'm bracing myself for the reality of the logistics and decisions that must follow in its wake: terminate my lease, find a tenant, pack up my furniture, store my furniture, sell my car, terminate my insurance, change my address on everything, and deliberate on hundreds of minute considerations about what to bring...Too much? Too technical? Too formal? Too casual? Too heavy? Too valuable? Can it wait to be shipped? Is it allowed to be brought into the country? Can I live without it? Will I really use it? What are appropriate gifts to bring? What can I bring to simplify my complicated family history? What can I bring to teach people about life in America? What can I bring that is funny and entertaining? What about games or songs to teach?

My head spins with all of this and more! But for now, I can only wait and quiet the chatter of my nerves by looking to the immediate, and taking things one day at a time. It is the kind of patience and mental control that must operate within the reality of what one knows for certain, and control the urge of a wondering mind to avoid ambiguous conjecture to which there are no immediate answers. I can only equate this mental discipline with nighttime SCUBA diving, where you must focus on what your flashlight reveals, and not on the vast, dark, undulating ocean around you.

I was forced to practice this once when I flew to Dar es Salaam for the first time to meet my expedition group for a Tanzania adventure. Months before arriving, I was told to find a place to sit in the airport, and wait for a man named Moses to pick me up within one to four hours after my arrival. He was to recognize me from a faxed photograph, and it didn't matter where I parked myself. He would find me. I had no other contact information otherwise. Waiting was all I could do. So I deplaned, extracted my backpack from the plane's belly, and sat down. No sooner had I pulled out my thick novel to carry me through the hours, did Moses appear and whisked me out of the airport. All that nervous anticipation about what I would do in an African country alone, if I didn't meet Moses, never had the chance to rear its head in reality. It was all just spent energy.

The Optimist In Me

All too often we are bombarded with negative headline news, playing on our culture of fear and reporting muted cynicism on the hopelessness of the world's despair. This is exactly why I don't have television. For all of its good programming, there are five times the amount of bad, misinformed, biased information. I have a hard enough time coming to terms with the world's problems without having my optimism dragged through the mud by the press.

There ARE good things happening in places where we are lead to believe would be impossible to achieve. Perhaps they are few and far in between, but if we don't focus on what we CAN do, our pessimism will paralyze us from doing anything at all.

Through the help of the UNHCR, 200 Iraqi Kurds are rebuilding their town in Dengawa Village in Northern Iraq. This town had been dynamited and bulldozed 17 years ago by Sadaam Hussein's campaign to strengthen his grip on power. Now, the reportedly ineffective Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has been able to broker a deal with the occupying Arabs to share this year's harvest of wheat and barley with the returned Kurds. Houses are being rebuilt with concrete and cement blocks, a backhoe digs a trench for a new water pipeline. Next will be the building of a school, then a medical clinic. But even now, life in Dengawa Village has hope and prospects for change. (Photo: UNHCR)

My hope and optimism often comes from the people who are on the ground, in the midst of crisis, trying to carry on their work. It is the same hope that they cling to in the field. The reports and images of their success are not illusions formulated by media moguls trying to sell multi-million dollar advertisement space. They are the real live success stories of real live people who struggle to create incremental change one optimistic step at a time.

Fortitude

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke

ICRC Photo

The International Committee of the Red Cross once again lowers its flag to half-mast in honor of the two members who died in the 27 October bombing attack outside its Baghdad office. But despite the risks, the ICRC remains committed to its mission in Iraq and will maintain its operations there.

"Our commitment is to the people of Iraq remains because they are the ones who are suffering and they have been the main victims of recent attacks, including that against our headquarters." said Pierre Krähenbühl, ICRC Director of Operations.

Sam-I-Am

What a way to start the day...

Postcard Pal

Sossusvlei Dunes, Namibia

I have recently become a postcard pal with a 16 year old girl in Qatar named Sukanya. She found me through my OneWorldJourneys photo exhibit.

Sukanya is fascinated by places such as Death Valley, Devil's Island, and the Sahara Desert, and she collects postcards from around the world.

So if you are inclined to make a teenager's day, expand her window of the world, and inspire her to explore it, then please send her a POSTCARD:

Sukanya Seshadri
C/O PS Seshadri
PO Box 22611
Doha
QATAR

In return, she will send you a postcard from Qatar if you ask her to.

Among Friends

I have had the great fortune of making some really nice friends through this blog, and I've come to appreciate all the recent enthusiasm, support and wisdom that all of you have given me. Your response to my posts give them meaning, much more so than the menacing stare of a journal full of lonely thoughts and meanderings that merely sits on my bookshelf mocking my haphazard life.

The openness of sharing your private lives with me is a generosity I never expected, nor take for granted. The humor with which you transform my perspective has lifted my spirits.

The following quotes lifted from a couple of you are true gifts.

"When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning,
by dreams that need completion,
by pure love that needs expressing,
then we truly live."
-- Greg Anderson

"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers that cannot be given,
because you would not be able to live with them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Thank you!

(I think I should have saved this for my Thanksgiving post. But I just felt compelled to give you guys a BIG hug now!)

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Central Asian History

Since 1966, UNESCO has been working on a project to present a comprehensive picture of the cultures of the Eurasian continent from the dawn of civilization to the present day. So far, the multi-volume History of Civilizations of Central Asia has produced five volumes. It’s fifth volume (of most interest to me), ”Development in Contrast: From the Sixteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century” was recently launched in Paris.

“This volume continues the history of Central Asian civilizations from c. 1500 to c. 1850, a period which saw the last medieval empires, notably the Uzbeks, Safavids, Mughals and Dzungars, and witnessed the early impact of colonialism. Like the preceding volumes, the present one also deals with all the diverse elements of culture. It describes the last phase of nomadism as a viable system of social organization; the effects on Central Asian economies of the shift of the main lines of international trade from the Great Silk Route to the oceanic routes; the various schools of art; the last great age of classical Persian literature and the growth of Turkic literatures; and, finally, in the religious sphere, the Shi`ite triumph in Persia, the conversion of the Mongol peoples to Buddhism, and the rise of Sikhism. It also analyses the problem of the lag in Central Asian scientific and technological development in relation to Europe and the nature of early colonialism – notably British and Russian – in Central Asia. The conclusion sums up the main trends in Central Asian history from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.”

I have been looking for sources that explain the cultural transformation of nomadic people into the varied modern state society that exist in the region today. What is it that forms allegiance to statehood where one did not exist before?…and I am hoping that it will not have been the coercive force of a militarized foreign imperialist regime that bludgeoned its citizens into submission and decimated their traditional culture and religion.

Am I being too hopeful here? Let’s find out after I read the 934 pages.

My Cup Runneth Over

It’s not even November yet but all my weekends are booked full for the month!…starting with this coming weekend in NYC to hang out with a girlfriend, see a photo exhibition, attend a birthday bash, and feast at a Sunday brunch. Next comes a weekend in Belleport, Long Island, with friends and their one year old baby girl. Then a trip to Newport, Rhode Island, for a special birthday treat for me ; ), followed by a weekend in Albany, New York, to see my mother’s new house. Then I think it’ll be Thanksgiving and my niece’s fifth birthday, and we’re already on the brink of December.

In between, I’m tasked with renting my apartment, selling my car, packing up my furniture and belongings, moving it all into storage and moving myself somewhere temporarily until January 15th, preparing and packing for Uz, changing my address on everything, and spending as much time with my family as I can.

Emotionally, I continue to struggle with the mental preparations of living in a new world, one where I have been advised to show up late to drinking functions, learn to throw vodka shots behind my back without getting noticed, and know how and when to give bribes to local officials, bus drivers, and to whoever can ensure my safe journey. Closer to home, I have been blessed with a marriage proposal I don’t know what to do with given the impending distance that will be placed between us. How do two people stay together in such uncertain circumstances? How do I fit another person into such an insane way of living? Yet, how can I live without the security and luxury of love along the lonely roads I take? And why is all of this happening to me NOW?!

I feel like I’m trying to swallow two life-times in one big gulp! Hopefully, I’ll be able to chase all of it down with a healthy dose of happiness.